I’ve added a few new features to the blog this morning: comment subscriptions and spoiler blocks. I explain each of these briefly below.

Comment Subscriptions

As I find more and more people commenting on posts here and the threads getting longer, I thought it might be useful to provide guests with the ability to subscribe to a particular post and receive email notifications when comments are added to the thread. You can also subscribe to a post even if you don’t leave a comment. For each post you subscribe to, you will get a confirmation email making that validates that you really want to subscribe. This feature should now be available for all posts.

Spoiler Blocks

I added this feature specifically for my Vacation in the Golden Age posts. The dilemma is thus: some stories have a great twist that you really don’t want to give away; on the other hand, they are extremely hard to find these days and it is unlikely that a reader will seek them out. On the other hand, there are famous stories (like Asimov’s “Nightfall”) which are readily available and also spoiler-worthy. Rather than hold back information and not give away the ending, I will use the spoiler-blocks to hide what I think might be a spoiler. Any reader can choose to open the block and read the spoiler. Or skip it. It allows me to write what I want, but leaves you the choice of reading that part.  The spoiler blocks work like this:

[spoiler title=”You can find the spoiler in here”]If you can see this, then you’ve obviously decided to see how this thing works. Brilliant, right?[/spoiler]

Hopefully, readers of this blog will find these new features helpful. As always, I continue to look for ways of making this space more user-friendly and comfortable; a cozy little corner of the web for you to visit from time-to-time.