Most magazines on the Internet seem to be locked into an issue format like a print magazine, and if they have a blog it is an entirely separate feature. This strikes us as counter-intuitive. The blog format has become popular because it is accessible and up-to-the-minute, but it is still, after all, simply a publishing format; it can be filtered through categories or tags and have longer posts available after clicking past a description, much like the New York Times does with its news articles. In fact, the only difference in terms of format between the New York Times' website and a blog is that the Times updates all at once, once a day, whereas a blog is updated article-by-article on an irregular basis. People may have grown used to the idea of the "weblog" format being used for personal narrative, but one must separate form from content.
Therefore, Wet Asphalt can be thought of as a magazine published like a blog. That is, we will have items posted on a daily or semi-daily basis; sometimes these items will be short and may refer you to something else, sometimes these items will be quite long, constituting complete essays, articles, short stories or poetry. More often they will be something in between. On our front page you will find a list made up of either complete items (if they are short) or descriptions of items that you can then read more of by clicking "Read more" or the title of the item. Items can be sorted by using the Technorati tag cloud—that is, the list of subjects—in the upper right hand corner. Significant long items will be posted with the tag "Feature" and the most recent of them will be kept in a list on the right side of the website (there, under where it says "Recent Features").
Some of these things may be self-explanatory to people who read blogs regularly, but this document is aimed at your senile old grandmother who thinks Flickr is the way someone with a speech impediment pronounces the name of that friendly dolphin that was on TV back in the Fifties, so bear with us.
Anonymous comments go into a moderation queue for approval, while registered users can post comments directly. This is because we've had problems with vandals and spam bots in past projects. Sorry. If you register, we will not mass email you anything, ever. We do not consider registration to give us license to spam. You do not need to log in in order to submit items to us, however if you do submit to us without logging in, please be sure to put your name and email address somewhere in the body, title or description of the item, otherwise we won't know who you are or how to contact you.
Check back every day or every week or simply add our RSS feed to an RSS reader such as BlogLines or Google Reader and have the website syndicated with whatever other websites you read. You can also add Wet Asphalt to your LiveJournal "Friends" page. If you scroll down on this page, you'll see on the right under "Syndicate" a number of buttons to make it easier for you to add Wet Asphalt to your RSS reader. If you are registered, you also have the option of being notified via email when new content is added or simply have the new content emailed to you. You can do this by clicking on "my account" under your user name on the right, then clicking on the "my notification settings" tab and adjusting the settings to your liking. Note that this is entirely optional and no one will have anything emailed to them unless they personally turn on this feature.