What are we doing here?

The headline is not an existentialist question way beyond our pet chimp, but a very practical one. We received this by e-mail: "I think probably you’ve not received many comments because we’re all a bit confused and waiting to see what’s going on! I’ve got both ‘The Pulse’ and ‘Jimena Pulse’ in my favourites list and have been flicking between them to see which you are posting on. I like the look of The Pulse and thought maybe you had launched it to widen your net – both of articles and advertising income? Are you planning on running two sites or is one of them going to be shut down? I’ve had problems navigating the new Jimena Pulse site – it was impossible to go back for a while - but it seems to work now. I guess that’s all part of your ongoing tweaking. Will we be able to access all the information and articles from the old Jimena Pulse eventually? Good luck with the site / sites and thanks very much for all your hard work." We answered as follows:>

Thank you very much for your excellent questions. We would like to use them to explain what's going, but need to ask: when you say 'thePulse', you mean the 'intermediate' site (http://jimenapulse.wordpress.com), right? Actually, if you look at the URL (above your toolbar) for either site you'll see that both are 'jimenapulse', one on Wordpress, this one on Blogspot. We call those our 'servers', though they have another more jargony word. In other words, both are JimenaPulse no matter what the heading says - it's just a matter of design.

We liked the design, too, up to a point, but our monkey lost track of his objective: we want this to be more like a magazine rather than a newspaper - and we had several readers saying they were having trouble reading it as the font ('print') size was too small. Our aim, then, was to open the design up, which we believe has been achieved. There are several more things to go on the sidebar, but we have to re-size everything that was on the earlier version and that takes time.

You're quite right that we intend to expand, particularly commercially, and have therefore created yet another site, also called thePulse but on a different server, which is under heavy tweaking right now and is as yet unlaunched. More about that in due course, however.

As to running two sites simultaneously: No, we have stopped new posts on the above ('intermediate') site. Ideally, we'd like to transfer most of what has been published there onto this new one, but it is unbelievably time consuming as it has to be done via Copy&Paste, article by article. You might imagine that doing that for almost 5,000 articles is, well, impossible. Still, it's a chance to do a lot of culling. In the meantime, yes, you can access everything on the 'intermediate' site, which will be staying up for a long while yet. We've brought over some articles already, which you can access via the Older posts link at the bottom of the page.

We think the navigation problems you mention are solved - we hope so, anyway. Also, we will soon be back to normal on most of our popular features, such as Readers' Choice, Sunday Laughs, The Jobs Board, etc. We lost some of the pages on which some had been published previously. Something always gets lost in a move, doesn't it?

Thanks, too, for your kind words and we apologise for any confusion, frustration or inconvenience. We hope this may have cleared things up a lñittle. If not, please use the comments feature at the bottom of this item.

Prospero and the monkey