Salon.com > Karen Templer

Salon stories, tailored for Flipboard

Sun, 01 May 2011 17:02:00 +0000

If you're an iPad owner, you're almost certainly a Flipboard user as well. And if so, I have good news for you. The lovely and talented people behind the free app have created a custom page design for displaying Salon stories within Flipboard. If you already follow @Salon on Twitter and use Flipboard to read your tweets, you'll see these new pages any time you encounter a link to a Salon story. Even better: To specifically browse Salon within Flipboard, tap "Add a Section" at the top level of the app, then search for "@Salon" and tap to add. And voilà.

We're in great company as a Flipboard Pages partner (joining Rolling Stone, Forbes, The Guardian and more) and are thankful to the Flipboard team for making this happen.

It's just one more way for you to get Salon where you want it. Let us know what you think --

Send me no roses

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 19:01:00 +0000

Here's how my starter marriage ended: After four years of structuring a life around everything my husband wanted and nothing that I did, I finally worked up the courage to move out. I was 24, and I wanted my interests and dreams and feelings to matter to someone, even if only to myself. Having no property, no children and no money to pay the legal fees, neither of us filed for divorce right away. Over the course of several months, as my absence piqued his interest, he would make the occasional overture -- as if there were still hope. I knew it had to end the day a box arrived on my doorstep, containing multiple layers of perfectly formed, long-stemmed red roses, along with a note that read, "I know you hate red roses, but ..." Society deems them romantic; why should my likes matter?

I'll spare you the details of what I did to those roses before calling to assure him we were through.

The Salon Grid: Expanding the experiment

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 00:55:00 +0000

As promised when we announced "Salon for Chrome," we are making it available for more browsers. Renamed simply "The Grid," it is now available to Firefox for Mac* and all Safari users, including Safari for iPad, as well as Chrome. Anyone using these "modern" (HTML5-capable) browsers can find it at http://www.salon.com/grid. (As well as in the Chrome Web Store.)

Note that the code behind all of this is "bleeding edge," as they say, and making it work in the iPad browser is a huge (if exciting) challenge. So far we don't have performance on the iPad at the same level as in the standard, scroll-based browsers, but we're eager to get people using it. So particularly on the iPad, keep in mind this is beta-ware! If it works for you, have at it.

For those just hearing about The Grid for the first time, I'll quote myself from the original announcement:

My top 5 Web picks of 2010

Sat, 01 Jan 2011 17:01:00 +0000

As a person whose job it is to develop digital products, I'm online nearly every moment I'm awake (whether I'm looking at my phone, my iPad or a laptop), and I'm often asked for recommendations. Frankly, every year it gets tougher to be in-the-know. Just like there's more and more content published on the Web every year, there are new technologies, sites, apps and devices rolling out at a breathless pace. But you don't need me to tell you this; it's a problem we all face on some level.

Given that, I tend to gravitate toward things that are either curatorial in nature -- offering me new ways to skip past the chaff (of whatever variety) and get straight to the wheat -- or that make it easier for me to do things I've always done. So while this is by no means a definitive list, what follows are the five things that elbowed their way out of the crowd and onto my pinned tabs or my home screen in the past year.

Announcing Salon for Chrome

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 23:01:00 +0000

As you’ve probably heard, Google announced its long anticipated Chrome Web Store this week. We were honored to be included in the event, where we demoed an alternate version of the site: Salon for Chrome. This is Salon for those who want the fastest possible access to everything we publish.

In Salon for Chrome, all of our stories are laid out in a neat grid that conforms to the height of your screen, in reverse-chronological order. You can swipe, scroll or arrow-key your way across days of content very quickly, or jump back day by day with the buttons in the upper right. Click on any story (or hit "enter") and it opens right there in the grid. Scroll or tap the spacebar to read it; swipe or use the arrow keys to keep browsing, or just hit the "n" key and the next story will instantly open. (For a full list of tips and shortcuts, click Help in the footer of the app.) It’s as fast as it is fluid.

All-new Salon for smart phones

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 23:10:00 +0000

I'm very pleased to call your attention to the all-new version of mobile Salon, which has a bit more of an app-like appearance and feature set than our previous mobile site. As in the prior version, the main screen is a chronological list of all the latest stories, but this new version also allows you to slice and dice the content by section, blog or topic, as well as seeing what stories are most popular at the moment. On each story you'll also find access to the comments and share tools, along with pointers to additional stories you might be interested in. We think you'll find it a superior experience to our former offering, and of course we intend to continue making improvements and we welcome your feedback.

Nick Carr inspires new Readability feature

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 00:07:00 +0000

Nick Carr may be right or wrong about whether the Internet is making us stupid*, but one thing's for sure -- he knows how to get the whole web talking. Carr has published a new book, The Shallows, in which he apparently argues (and, to be fair, cites supporting research) that hyperlinks inhibit reading comprehension. In her review, our critic Laura Miller focused a bit on that aspect, excluded the usual links from the review, grouped them in a very clear and organized fashion at the end of the review, and asked readers to weigh in. Since the book's release and that action by Laura, the staff email here at Salon has been buzzing with debate about the pros (reader service, great for SEO, good way to make a sly joke ...) and cons (distracting, opaque, crutches for lazy writers ...) of embedded links. And we're far from alone. Carr himself has used Laura's review to bolster his argument, and countless others have weighed in.

Welcome to the all-new Salon

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:02:00 +0000

Hi, everyone. I want to introduce myself and also give you the latest update on the redesign.

My name is Karen Templer, and two or three of you may remember me as a Salon art director and later Table Talk manager from back in the late '90s. I rejoined the Salon staff about two months ago as product manager, and I'm one of the people you'll be hearing from here in Inside Salon -- along with CEO Richard Gingras who's been posting here so far, Joan Walsh, Kerry Lauerman, and any number of our other colleagues, depending on the subject at hand. So with that --

To those of you just seeing the redesigned Salon for the first time, welcome. To the rest of you, you may have noticed the link to go back to the old Salon is gone. We are now in the process of moving all traffic into the new site.

“African Ceremonies”

Sat, 22 Apr 2000 16:00:00 +0000

When Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher began work on their monolithic new book, "African Ceremonies," it's hard to believe that even they could have envisioned the end product that would eventually come of their prodigious efforts. It is a photojournalism masterwork, the result of a partnership between two talented photographers with an incredible dedication to a project that took them a decade to complete.

The pair met in Africa in 1978, each working on her first book, and developed a friendship. Years (and another joint project) later, they got the idea to document the traditions and ceremonies of tribes across the African continent, many of which are dying out, some of which were secret and had never been photographed before. A Wodaabe nomad taking the women across Niger on camelback at one point described their project as "maagani yegitata," which translates as "medicine not to forget." What they ultimately created is a lasting record of a fading culture as well as a heartfelt tribute to a world that many of us will never have the opportunity to witness for ourselves.

Frank Gehry

Tue, 05 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

"When everybody else is ready for the ending, I'm just ready to begin," Frank Gehry once wrote. "It's been the story of my life." And so it would seem.

The Pritzker Prize -- commonly referred to as "the Nobel of architecture" -- is the industry's loftiest recognition. It's a lifetime achievement award, granted to a living architect whose body of work represents a superlative contribution to the field. Gehry received it in 1989, two years before the release of the frenzy-inducing Gehry Collection, an innovative line of furniture, and nearly a decade before the unveiling of his titanium masterpiece, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Basque capital of Spain.

There's really only one architect -- Frank Lloyd Wright -- who qualifies for household-name status in America, but with the onslaught of attention following Bilbao, Gehry may yet get there. For now, he is "the other Frank" with "the other Guggenheim," and his Spanish Guggenheim is nearly as controversial as was Wright's Manhattan original. The press coverage of Bilbao has been legion. Art and architecture critics have described it as everything from "an architectural epiphany" to "a lunar lander in search of its moon." Pop culture is equally split on the issue: The TV character Frasier has expressed his distaste for the design while Mariah Carey is dancing around on its lawn in her latest video. But the tourists and architecture buffs of the world have fallen under its spell.

Frankly, it's a bore

Tue, 05 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Ten inches wide, 11 and a half inches long, more than 2 inches thick and heavier than some coffee tables, "Frank O. Gehry: The Complete Works" is quite literally a huge disappointment. Written and compiled by Francesco Dal Co and Kurt W. Forster, the book is the only comprehensive volume of the master architect's work to date. That fact alone makes it well worth owning (assuming you can swing the $85 list price). But don't expect it to be fun.

Gehry is the class clown of architects, solving every problem with light and whimsy. He is known for his wildly imaginative scribbles and his use of humor in an otherwise humorless medium. Too bad the same can't be said about Forster, Dal Co or even the book's designer. The tome's design makes it immediately apparent that this is a serious book about a serious architect, and its tag-team introductions -- "Architectural Choreography" by art and architecture historian Forster and "The World Turned Upside-Down: The Tortoise Flies and the Hare Threatens the Lion" by architecture historian and critic Dal Co -- drive the point home.

Time for One Thing: Daytime TV

Thu, 02 Jul 1998 19:00:00 +0000

We moved out of the red house when I was 4 and a half, yet I have
technicolor memories from that time. Most vivid are the backyard (complete
with apple tree), breakfasts (my dad and I once woke up hours before
everyone else and he filled little drinking cups with Hershey's syrup, Karo
syrup and crushed nuts of some sort and we dipped bananas into them and
called it breakfast) and TV. My mom was a full-time mom and every day at
exactly 12 noon we had nap time. There was no flexibility about the hour and
I don't think she really cared whether we slept, so long as she was
left alone in the living room for an hour to watch "her show" in peace.

Her show was, is, "Days of Our Lives." I think she saw the first episode and
I'm reasonably certain she saw it yesterday. She's devoted; and it wasn't
until recently that I realized her devotion to the show was probably more about the ritual of it
than the events on the screen. She had that hour of complete reign over the
one television in the house and a block of pure solitude. Soon we had all
chosen an hour of television as "ours" -- an hour when no one else could
change the channel and we would be left alone with our self-selected TV
friends. My show was "Bewitched." That beautiful, conflicted Samantha.
Dutiful Darren. And, oh, Tabitha! If only I could have been Tabitha. The world was hers with a twitch of her nose!