Sister sites and spring cleaning

The "sister sites" to this one have been updated.

The Civil War Book News 2003 listings have been archived and the decks have been cleared for the 2004 spring list. This list will build out substantially with updates between now and this time next week.

The McClellan pages have been cleaned up graphically to remove some of the more annoying visual experiments left over from the site's glory days (1998). There's been a corresponding increase in enrollments in the McClellan Society - and there's a message in that.

Both sites are quite aged by the standards of Web history and every six months I start an ambitious rehab which suspends small updates but never gets completed. Yesterday, I was in the throes of Dreamweaver arcana when I decided to drive on for another six months with the simple HTML that has sufficed thus far. Dreamweaver can wait.

There's a third affiliated site with this one, the McClellan Roundtable discussion group. However, membership is restricted, so I don't mention it much. Fortunately it's self-sustaining, thanks to Yahoo Groups' infrastructure. It started in 1999 and Yahoo is its third host.

Here in blogland, where everything is fresh and we're all young together, I hope to do something with a new book coming out "soon" whose author and publisher have greenlighted a certain amount of excerpting. I'd like to figure out a different treatment that works in this format.

This site generally will focus more on books in the future; all new reviews that would have been posted at Civil War Book News, for instance, will appear here instead.

We'll reach a year of publishing in October - changes are overdue.