Server status: upgrade complete

ST LOUIS MISSOURI USA. 2009 MAY 9 (CINEMA MINIMA) — The upgrade to Cinema Minima’s Web server has been completed successfully. The posting of new stories will resume shortly. The most-recent stories have been put online. Older archives will be put online over the course of the coming months.

Benefits for readers

• Speed and reliability: The publication’s Web pages will be delivered rapidly to browsers, all day, every day.
• Syndicated (RSS) feeds will be delivered timely to feed readers.
• Web pages will accomodate “widescreen” movies in large size.

Benefits for Correspondents

• The online newsroom will be available all day, every day, without interruption.
• The interface is easier to use than previously.
• Changes — revisions — to drafts of stories are saved as separate versions which may be compared and retrieved by their authors as required.
• Tags are available to help readers to find stories.
• The publication of stories can be scheduled in advance.

Improvements in performance. In the interest of security, no details of the improvements will be offered here. What can be said is that speed, stability, security, and reliability are paramount. Features — such as widgets which hot-link to social-networking sites — will be evaluated in terms of their effects on performance.

Cinema Minima’s Web servers are hosted by Slicehost, which is located in St. Louis, Missouri USA. We recommend it.

Cinema Minima’s online newsroom

Cinema Minima is a news service. Although its Correspondents’ stories are published on its Web site, they should be designed to be syndicated — distributed — in many media. A Correspondent’s story may be seen in a Web browser on a computer; it may be read aloud — by a machine — over a telephone; summarized as a 140-character “tweet” on Twitter; rendered into braille; or “mashed” by an automated news summarizer — It may even be printed on paper as a story in a newspaper.

The Online Newsroom

Whether coming from the worlds of journalism or filmmaking, when a reporter files a story for Cinema Minima, she should take care to follow online newsroom practice. The online newsroom differs in some important respects from print and broadcast media newsrooms — even though most print and broadcast operations have online presences. A reporter working in an online newsroom ought to —

• Understand that what she writes must be written to work well in any medium in which it might appear.
• Know how to write search-friendly headlines.
• Know how to write summary-ready lead paragraphs.
• Do her own copy-editing.
• Do her own proofreading.
• Understand — since her stories may be retrieved at any time in the future, and from any place — the importance of using full dates and place names, e.g., “2009 May 5,” not “today”; and “the American TV network ABC,” not “ABC-TV” (which could be either in America, or in Australia).

Migration to new Web server

Cinema Minima News for Movie Makers Worldwide — <cinemaminima.com> — is moving to a new Web server.

• Readers will enjoy faster and more reliable performance.
• Reporters will appreciate an easy-to-understand interface, and more reliable performance.

The migration is in progress. It will be completed during the first week of May 2009.

In the meantime, please visit <twitter.com/cinemaminima> for the latest news for movie makers.