By Don White.

Readers of items in Visioning Nanaimo’s Viewpoints section will notice a few changes in format when they read today’s post.

Off the top: the name of this area of the website has changed from “Other Viewpoints” to simply “Viewpoints.” This change acknowledges that two main components comprise each post. The initial component is a short, personal perspective as to why I believe the article cited in the post might to be of interest to us living here, in Nanaimo. The second component is the perspective expressed by the author in the linked article.

In keeping with these separate components, the title of each post in Viewpoints is no longer simply the title of the cited article. Instead, it alludes to what I see as the linked item’s relevance. In this way, it should better reflects the entire post, not just the outside article or column.

The two components are now separated on the page so to make each more distinct. The contextual introduction comes first, and a block containing the title-link for the cited article, accompanying image, and a brief description comes second.

There were several reasons for my making these changes. Originally, I used the article’s title because I wanted to acknowledge the source item (and, I’ll admit, to save me a bit of work coming up with an alternative). However, on occasion the title used by the publication’s editor didn’t always reflect what I thought made the item relevant to Nanaimo readers. In fact, sometimes it seemed actually to be off-putting. In one recent post, “Don’t say ‘privilege’: can the left find better words for talking with people on the right?”, the title suggested a bias that discouraged some readers from even reading why the article might apply equally to everyone, not just to people on the left talking to the right.

Another reason for the changes had to do with clarifying an item’s relevance. When I originally created the Viewpoints section, it was meant only to provide a continually accessible “library” of articles published elsewhere on topics that might also be of interest to readers living in our city. From sharing these posts on social media, I subsequently realized that a contextual paragraph preceding the item would, like an original title, help place the focus on how the article might relate locally, not just give the author’s elsewhere view.

The new page layout is also meant to contribute to that flow. Having an interpretation precede the article’s link could help some readers decide whether to read the posted item and provide another way to gauge its usefulness if they do decide to read it. Together with the other changes, It might clarify how a column on a large European or US city’s approach to bike lanes, energy consumption, or homelessness could generalize to Nanaimo if factors like the size, location, and culture of the foreign cities are set aside.

Hopefully, these changes will combine to make posts in Viewpoints more useful, their contents more informative, and the possibility of whether they might have local applications more readily apparent. There are a lot of great ideas and much experience out there along with thought-provoking views and good analysis published by authors living elsewhere than in Nanaimo. The goal is to make at least some of those ideas and experiences also available to us.