Testing … testing … and we’re back!

You may have noticed that www.iain-banks.net has been offline for the past few days. That’s because we’ve been re-decorating and have given the place a bit of a brush-up and dusting-down, courtesy of the fine folks at Kino Creative, who’ve I’m sure you’ll agree have done a marvellous job.

The site is back in action now, as you’ll have noticed if you’re reading this article on the Latest News page. On the other hand, if you’re reading on RSS, do click on over to the website, take a quick look around, maybe let us know what you think of the new look.

We’ve added a bit more functionality to the news items. If you regulalry use one of the major bookmark and / or link-sharing apps or online services then you’ll hopefully find an appropriate shortcut button at the end of each item to help you post and share a link. There’s also a link on each news item to a suitable section of the Iain Banks Forum, to make it quicker and easier for you to talk things over with your fellow Banks fans and readers (although you’ll still need to register as a forum member before you’ll be able to join or start a conversation thread).

Alternatively, if you have something useful and relevant to add to a news item, then you can do so via the Comments form on the article in question. We are going to be quite strict with the comments submitted to the site to make sure that irritations from spammers (zero-tolerance there) and time-wasters are kept to an absolute minimum. So: all comments will be moderated (for the time being, anyhow) and anything non-relevant will be politely declined.

We’ve also improved the main bibliography section, merging Iain’s SF and non-SF titles into a single list and then providing chronological listings of his SF, non-sf and Culture books, as well as his entire output to-date.

Anyhow, do have a look around, and if you feel like letting us know what you think of the new site, please do so over on the Forum or via the contact page.

Hopefully everything will be working smoothly, although it’s fairly inevitable that gremlins will have messed with something during the switch-over. If you spot a problem, please do let us know and we’ll fix it as soon as we can. One thing we do already know about is that the extracts are temporarily missing from the site. That’s because we had a bit of an issue with a database backup a while ago and some of the content was unfortunately truncated. We’ll get the extracts back up and properly linked in before too long, all being well.

Cheers!

Darren Turpin, Site Admin
pp the Iain Banks website team