Welcome, beta testers and early birds!

Yep, it's a new blog. A very bloggy blog. Yeah—I know. Sigh.

A quick explanation of how I intend the site to be structured: First, I'm splitting the whole site into 'Featured' posts, which are longer or more important posts that should go out in newsletters, and 'Quick Reads,' which are the usual day-by-day posts linking to recent news events, good reads from elsewhere, or anything else that isn't a "featured" bit of writing.

My intent is that Quick Reads would not go out in emails newsletters, or maybe would only go out as a daily aggregation of links. Still contemplating whether there might be exceptions to that rule ... not sure.

Featured posts would go out as their own emails, and you could either read them there or come to the site to read them and comment. But maybe that's wrong too, and only a short excerpt should go out in emails? Hmm.

I've also put a 'Classics' section on the homepage to highlight archival posts that have held up particularly well.

I'm personally a still bit skeptical of the Ghost login flow, where you don't need a password but do need to be able to authenticate yourself through email. There's a lot of good reasons to do it that way, but it still feels clunky. At the moment, they don't offer any alternative.

The name Uncharted Blue is intentional. Yes, it's a bit strange. But it both has multiple useful connotations and is surprisingly hard to get out of your head when it gets in there, so we're going to give it a try. There's also a longer "formal" title which ... hmm. We'll see.

The quirky images associated with each post are another feature test: Would readers prefer to have pages in which images only play a small role on the site, rather than taking up most of the screen? Something that suggests a certain mood, rather than specific content? Hmm. Or perhaps readers would prefer no images at all, if "quirky" is their only other choice? (IT IS THEIR ONLY OTHER CHOICE SO FAR I KINDA LIKE THESE LITTLE GUYS.)

Use the comments to test formatting and features, report bugs, offer suggestions, or whatever else you'd like to do.