* Ancient Podcasts 10/02/11

Some items I came across … hopefully this will be a regular feature:

* Book Review Catchup 10/02/11

From BMCR:

From the Review of Biblical Literature:

From the American Journal of Archaeology:

From the popular press (via our #classicalbook tag on Twitter)

* Nuntii Latini and Akropolis World News 10/02/11

The last couple of weeks of Nuntii Latini from YLE and Radio Bremen:

… and we’ll throw some Akropolis World News into the mix too:

* Classical Words of the Day ~ 10/02/11

  • obsequious October 1, 2011 (Merriam Webster)
  • votary September 30, 2011 (Dictionary.com)
  • mendacity  October 2, 2011 (Dictionary.com)
  • obnunciate September 28, 2011 (WWFtD)
  • tensity September 28, 2011 (WWFtD)
  • augean September 29, 2011 (Wordsmith)
  • moiety September 28, 2011 (Merriam-Webster)

* Our New Look

I’ve been waiting for WordPress to come out with a new theme to change the look of rogueclassicism a bit; hope you like it (or at least can get used to it). Along with the cosmetic changes you will notice (maybe) that most of the widgets from the sidebar and bottom of the page have disappeared. The reason for this is because I honestly don’t think the content there was getting noticed (I certainly don’t pay attention to sidebars when I visit other blogs; there are also a pile of folks coming to this blog directly via Facebook or Twitter who never even were exposed to same). As such, most (if not all) of those items will be returning as ‘main posts’, to supplement the Circumundique feature which also was a sidebar item (and kind of redundant).

Another important reason, however, that I am incoporating all those feeds and the like back into the main page — besides the increased visibility — is to get much of that content seen by search engines and, more importantly, to have that content on the actual page when you do find it via a search engine. One of the weaknesses of feeds in sidebars and the like (and blogrolls in general) is that a search engine might take a snapshot of a page on a particular date with whatever keyword/blog you’re looking for, and when you get to the page, time has passed and the word ain’t there no more! I’m sure many of you have found this phenomenon as (frequently) frustrating as I have.

In any event, I hope you like the changes and find them useful. You might also notice that I’m going to put an asterisk in front of the title of each post … this is solely to make the ‘Recent Posts’ thing that survives in the sidebar a bit more navigable visually.