Securing the Future of Shenandoah

Shenandoah literary magazine

As discussed in my last post, I’ve been working on getting all the sites I run secured.  An immediate candidate was the Shenandoah literary magazine. In 2010 I worked with Martha Burtis to design the site and have been hosting and maintaining it ever since. I have really enjoyed working with the editor R.T. Smith these last seven years, but he has announced his retirement this coming Spring. Well deserved. He took on the Herculean and unpopular task of moving a well respected physical publication entirely online. He weathered it beautifully, and with over a million views last year and half a million visitors the site has 25x the amount of exposure it did seven years ago. 

Traffic from August 1, 2011 – August 1, 2012

Traffic from August 1, 2016 – August 1, 2017

This is a very solid base to build on for whomever comes next, and I imagine the new editor will have some ideas of how to keep broadening access. What I loved about Rod’s vision is that it was open and accessible to everyone online: no logins, no paywalls, no nothing. Bringing culture to the interwebs is never a bad thing. That said, at the very least the site is due for a more responsive redesign. It will be interesting to see what the future has in store for Shenandoah, and I plan on making the transition to the new editor as seamless as possible. I will probably bow out as the “webmaster” once Rod leaves given my other commitments, but I plan on staying around long enough to make sure all is well. One of the things that has been on my list is securing Shenandoah to make sure the main site, the Snopes blog, and all 11 (soon to be 12) issues load over https.

To that end I issued a free Let’s Encrypt certificate yesterday, and ran the SSL Insecure Content Fixer plugin across the entire network. That worked seamlessly. It is worth noting that Shenandoah is a WordPress Multisite instance in which the blog and all 11 (soon to be 12) issues are their own site within the multisite. It is a subdirectory setup, so all the sites can be secured by one Let’s Encrypt certificate, which is nice. Once I forced SSL the two errors I got were caused by a network activated plugin that was outdated (pictured below) and an insecure image on the front page of several issues (the image was embedded from another site that did not have SSL). 

I deactivated the offending plugin, and I am looking for an alternative presently. I also replaced the embedded image with a local, secure alternative and all is well. The site is now running securely over https, and I will need to make sure there are no broken media links as a result. So if you see something, say something in the comments of this post.

There is a certain amount of satisfaction in having Shenandoah run securely over https. I admittedly waited too long, but better late than never.  It is also provides a long overdue push to start getting some other things shored up as we prepare for the future.


Shenandoah Abides

The other day Shenandoah‘s editor, the great R.T. Smith (Rod), reached out to me about preparations for the Spring issue. It struck me then that we have been doing this since the Spring of 2011. Oh how six years flies by.  I track it time-wise in my mind right alongside the semester ds106 went open and online. Martha Burtis helped me code the design for the site, and while it might be high-time for a redesign, I think it’s held up quite well.* It was built on WordPress Multi-Site, and each issue has its own WordPress instance defined by issue issue and number, such as issue 65, volume 2issue 66, volume 1, etc. The architecture was pretty simple. 

They also got rolling with a blog that has seen, on average, more than 5 posts a month for the last 6 years. Rod has become quite a blogger himself, and the move from print to digital for Shenandoah was quiet and consistent. They regularly produced new issues, blogged about the work, and made the literary offerings from the last 12 issues free and open to anyone with a browser. What’s more, every time I work on Shenandoah it makes me think of Claudia Emerson, the late poet and friend, who got me the gig thanks to the work I did with her literary journals class. Can’t think of too many better people or teachers I have ever met. The recent issue features a powerful reminder how many hearts Claudia lives in.

BEYOND AUTOBIOGRAPHY: Claudia Emerson Through Three Poems on Race

So my work for the Shenandoah gladly continues.  There will be a day when Rod retires and a new crew comes in and rethinks the site, but until then this is one of the projects I’ve been a part of over the last 6 years that has been truly grounding. I am no literary expert, but I like doing my small part to get a little more imaginative thinking and writing out on the web.

Anyway, after Rod reached out about the upcoming issue I realized this was the sixth year we’ve been doing this, so I got curious about the numbers. I’ve been tracking the site in Google Analytics since the beginning, and just two weeks ago the site hit the 1 million page view mark, with almost half a million visitors, and 600,000 sessions. What’s been most interesting to me about these numbers is the growth over the last two years to get almost 20,000 hits a month during the semester. That is 4x as many as in 2013, and twice as many during 2014. The last half of 2015, all of 2016, and the first few months of 2017 have suggested the journal has grown a pretty significant readership. That said, numbers on the web can be meaningless when you look at how many times Gangham Style was been viewed any given week. But Shenandoah abides, and twice a year you’ll get an outpouring of new literary work to the web, and that’s what I like about it.


  • She was also kind enough to let me pay her in erratic installments given those were the very lean years for the bavas. 

5 Years of Shenandoah Online

Screenshot 2016-04-07 23.37.58

Shenandoah

One of the projects I started working on more than five years ago was bringing the Shenandoah Literary Magazine online. I got the gig thanks to the late and very great Claudia Emerson, who I had been working with on a literary journals class at UMW. Many smarter than me can speak to Claudia’s legacy as a poet, but I can and will testify to what an awesome teacher and person she was. I miss her regularly.

Claudia Emerson

Claudia Emerson

In the Summer of 2010 I started working with Rod Smith, the editor of Shenandoah, and he agreed to move the journal to a WordPress multisite instance that Martha Burtis and I designed. Screenshot 2016-04-07 23.15.43

Five years later it’s still going strong, in fact it has steadily been picking up traffic since 2011 when it first took the plunge online. What’s more, I have a very agreeable relationship with Rod. We work pretty well together, and I think we’ve made a fairly good team. I enjoy managing the site so that he can introduce a new cadre of Washington & Lee University students to the journal each semester. These students help bring some excellent writers  to the open web gratis. It also keeps me connected to the work I did with Claudia for the literary journals course. That was the most praxis-oriented course I’d ever been a part of, and I loved it. We had four or five groups of students per class that were tasked with both conceptualizing and creating a full blown literary journal in less than 15 weeks.

My own teaching was greatly influenced by Claudia’s willingness to experiment and explore, and after we ran the Literary Journals course together for a couple of semesters I got the offer to teach CPSC 106 (what would soon after forever be known as ds106!). In a strange convergence, at the same time I was working on Shenandoah’s first online issue, a bunch of us got the idea to bring ds106 to the open web as well. And while my work with ds106 and Shenandoah has been very different, in my mind they are deeply connected. So early this week we pulled the trigger on the tenth online issue signaling the fifth year of Shenandoah online. Time flies when you are populating the internet with both high (Shenandoah) and low (ds106) CULTURE!!!


Shenandoah’s Noir Issue Logo

SHENANDOAH_NOIRI’ve been working with the Shenandoah literary magazine for a while now, and next week they launch their noir issue. The editor, Rod Smith, asked me to try and come up with a logo/ad for Poetry Daily, and given it’s design week in ds106 I figured I would share what I did here.

If I were to be counting stars, this would be a one, maybe 2, star design assignment. Rather than creating my own logo, I went to The Noun Project and found this “Smoking” icon by Martin Vanco. It oozes noir, so I simply paid $1.99 for the rights to use it without attribution. After that, I grabbed the free Pulp Fiction font from dafont.com and combined the two in GIMP. In just a few quick steps,  I had myself a quick and easy logo that looks fairly professional. All I had to do is arrange the pieces.

I think this is valuable lesson you might take from ds106: part of being to be an artist of and on the web is knowing where to find and how to recombine things. Making art isn’t only about creating, it’s also about knowing, connecting, and recombining what’s already out there. I should get at least 2 stars for knowing, right? And so should you if you now know :)


Shenandoah Three Years On

Shenandoah Literary ReviewWashington and Lee’s Literary Review Shenandoah started making its transition from a print to an entirely online publication almost three years ago. I know this because I helped the editor, Rod T. Smith, imagine what it would mean to move into the online world. I’ve blogged about this a few times before. Three years later I’m still working on Shenandoah, although its pretty much run itself for the last two years. I remain involved because it’s one of those compelling testaments to the awesome contemporary culture you can access freely on the web. The latest issue is just the most recent example of what’s been freely published online since Fall 2011 (five issues in all, and the sixth comes out this Spring).

Screen Shot 2013-12-11 at 4.55.13 PMBut what I wanted to mention here quickly is that this semester the site, issue, and blog had a different vibe than I’ve seen so far. The student interns who helped run the journal as part of a course started to really take over the site. They pushed the various weekly and daily features hard on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. The “Poem of the Week” became a staple on Facebook, and drove regular traffic to the site that led to more people discovering the most recent issue. They also did an amazing job taking turns to make sure Shenandoah‘s blog was regularly updated with their thoughts and insights about the state of literature.

They also did an excellent job populating the “Words of Wisdom” quote generator on the frontpage with some awesome quotes.

Words of Wisdom 4Screen Shot 2013-12-11 at 5.36.03 PM

Words of Wisdom 1 Screen Shot 2013-12-11 at 5.36.33 PM

Screen Shot 2013-12-11 at 4.54.38 PMThe site has started to take on a sense of vibrancy that seems directly related to the students’ engagement and excitement. The way they used Facebook, for example, was awesome. The did Halloween “unmasking” posts that featured each of the student interns process while preparing for the launch of the latest issue. They were compelling because they framed a person’s experience bringing this issue to life. What’s more, it highlights how a digital literary journal like Shenandoah can be effectively promoted through social media. These students literally doubled the traffic to Shenandoah over the coruse of the semester, and they seemed to have a lot of fun doing it while gaining invaluable experience for publishing in the new world. We can talk all day about the technology and platforms (which I understand the importance of given my own purview as a technologist), but nothing can replace the excitement and passion of a group of students to make something feel special and relevant. Their takeover of the site this semester gave the online features soul, and kudos to Rod for letting it flourish.

Turns out Shenandoah is not only a gem for the contemporary literary world, it’s also a gem for teaching and learning in our digital moment. I’m really enjoying this because what could have (and for many was) been seen as a loss might now be understood as a rebirth of open access literature, enagagement for the publication, and  empowerment for the students running it. Very cool.