Well the momentous day

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Well, the momentous day of the TPM relaunch has finally arrived. As you can see, we’ve made a great effort to keep the design of the site simple (and hopefully elegant) and more or less what regular readers are used to.

The big change is the new web address. If you’re reading this you no doubt made it here successfully. But let’s say it anyway. You can now find TPM at http://talkingpointsmemo.com at a web browser near you.

This will involve some temporary inconvenience. And the new domain is admittedly on the long side. But after much consideration it became clear that if the website is known as Talking Points Memo then j-marshall/talk is at least not the most intuitively obvious place to try to find it. The old domain also proved quite a pain to give out over the radio.

Radio Guy/Gal: And what’s the web site people can find you at, Josh?

Josh: Okay, it’s ‘J’ and then a hyphen — you know, not an underline but a dash — and then ‘Marshall,’ that’s with two ‘L’s by the way, and then dot com. Then forward-slash. Then ‘talk’.

Well, you get the idea. Anyway, from now on it’s talkingpointsmemo.com. If you have old links to specific posts under the old address, they’ll still work. Or you can just find them substituting the new domain.

It will also make possible future Talking Points mugs and shirts look more aesthetically pleasing.

What else? There’s also a handy new search function, which will help you find all the goodies from Talking Points past. There were a lot of gizmos we considered adding. And this was the one that really seemed useful and didn’t busy things up too much.

We’re also helpfully provided still more ways that you can contribute to TPM, which you can see here.

We’re also introducing the new TPM Book List. TPM reads quite a lot of books, many of them obscure but many of them interesting. Every week or two we’ll be posting a short review. The review will explain some of why I found it interesting and hopefully give you a sense of whether you’d like to read it too. Many will be new or at least recent. But certainly not all. The first, for instance, Winston Churchill’s My Early Life was first published in 1930.

These won’t be formal books reviews. They’ll be shorter and less formal than a regular book review but longer and, hopefully, more thoughtful than a blurb.

Talking Points Memo has about sixty- or seventy-thousand individual readers a month (unique IP addresses, to use the technical jargon) so hopefully we’ll be able to send a few readers to some worthy books.

The reviews will be posted as normal posts. But then they’ll be separately linked down there on the left hand side of the site beneath the pitch for contributions. After we’re up and running for a few weeks, at any one time there should be about a half dozen books listed with links to the review and where they can purchased. (Full Disclosure: We include links to the books on Amazon.com. If you go to Amazon and purchase the book, we get a 15% cut.)

Well, with all the web-designing and hassling with the gizmocrats who run our web provider, I’m pretty much too worn out to write any commentary. But this is TPM after all. Some I’m bound to be back with a few more posts by the end of the day.

P.S. By the way, some friends of TPM (FoTPM) have been kind enough to blurb the site for the relaunch. Not to worry, though, these blurbs are just for relaunch week. They won’t be a regular part of the site. Even TPM is only so shameless.

P.P.S. The Talking Points Memo relaunch also coincides with the birthday of TPM Editor, Writer, and CEO Josh Marshall, who turns 33 today.

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