We’ve relaunched LexBlog.com!

These are words that I’ve (and others) have said at LexBlog probably a hair over a half-dozen times in the past two years; a point that Conner alluded to when he took a look at the history of LexBlog’s many and various websites. This time, however, things feel very different. After an eight month battle with Co-Authors Plus, the WordPress REST API, caching, and a few handfuls of our own plugins the new LexBlog.com was soft-launched in August (just before my wedding!).

If you look back on some of my recent posts here (We’re Redoing LexBlog.com…… Again. and How We’re QA’ing The New Aggregation Engine of LexBlog.com) and some of Kevin and Bob’s older posts (What if LexBlog were a publication? and As We Open Our Network, Should We Reject Some Blogs?) you’ll see that this latest version was a long time in the works both technically and philosophically.

On the technical side, we had to battle (and continue to wrangle with) keeping posts and authors in synch on LexBlog.com with their original counterparts using the WordPress REST API to communicate between sites. When you’re talking about over 1000 sites, nearly 400,000 posts, and just under 20,000 authors/co-authors this is no easy task.

Philosophically, we’ve had to prepare for the shift in what LexBlog.com means to the company and the larger legal publishing community. For years, LexBlog has focused on publishing platform technology to help lawyers get online and engage in the larger discussion online. We believe, and continue to believe, that the fastest way to join this conversation is to listen, share, and add your two cents.

Blogs are our chosen vehicle for helping our clients do that. However, it’s not easy to start blogging when your digital network is one – just you. LexBlog.com is many things to many people inside and outside of LexBlog, but for me it’s a place to see the vibrant digital publishing community in the legal industry. Hopefully, it’s a spot for other authors and legal professionals to find that for themselves. Somewhere to maybe see a similar publication to the one you have, find an author that you enjoy, or follow along with an emerging topic in your industry.

There are hundreds of publications focusing on a plethora of topics, and as LexBlog grows, so will these topics and contributing publications and so will the site itself. What we currently have is a foundation to finally launch all of the things we’ve wanted for so long:

  • Enhanced search functionality
  • Better subscription options for email and RSS
  • Social integrations for sharing content and interacting with publishers
  • and the list goes on

I’ve worked full-time at LexBlog for nearly 6 years and watched as the digital hosting, development, and content production sphere have evolved and seen us adapt alongside these many changes. In that time, this version of LexBlog.com is the one that kept me moving forward toward a larger vision of how digital publishing fits into the legal industry of today and its future.

Here’s to that future 🙂