Dear friends,

This morning you might have noticed that there are a few changes on the blog’s layout.  Let me explain what we have done so far.

First, to make it easier for visitors to get to what I personally wrote, we have re-designed the former “Analyses” section into “Saker Analyses”.  From now on, everything I write will be posted in this section which will only include my own analyses.  The purpose here is to make it easier for visitors to immediately see what I wrote.

Second, we have doubled the size of the “Guest Posts” section.  There are a few reasons for that.  First, I was getting so many submissions that I often had to tell authors “okay, I would like to post your article, my next opening is Tuesday next week” or something to that effect.  Now I can post up to TWO guest contributions each day.  Furthermore, on the right hand side of the two latest guest posts we will now have seven smaller boxes which will make it possible to keep guest contributions visible for much longer (before that, some guest posts “disappeared” in just a couple of days “pushed back” by newer articles).  The purpose here is to give a much longer (and better) exposure to the many world-class article written by guest posters.

Third, we have now given an extra visibility (special background) to the “Saker Analyses” and “Guest Posts” section.  Here, again, the reason is straightforward: these two section represent the ‘core’ of the blog as they are constituted exclusively of original materials.  This is one of the biggest difference between the Saker Blog and most other blogs/websites dealing with Russia or resistance to empire: they are mostly news aggregators who either simply reprint stuff written elsewhere or, alternatively, they translate articles written in Russian.  We also do that, of course, but such news aggregation functions are labeled as “War News” or “Watch list” or “Speeches and Statements”.  There is nothing wrong with that and news aggregation is important.  But the core of the Saker blog is original analytical material.  And that is what we wanted to show.

These are minor changes, and we are still working on the reorganization of some sections of the blog (really a rationalization) but we won’t be making any massive changes.  We feel that even though the blog has grown in a rather chaotic and unplanned way, it became what it is today in a natural, organic, way and that we should not mess too much with what works (if it ain’t broke – don’t fix it!).

Please let us know what you think of these changes.

Hugs and cheers,

The Saker