site news

This morning I launched The Writer's Technology Companion, a new blog covering the tools of the writer's trade. This is a project I've been working on for several months, now -- I wanted to make absolutely sure I could keep it up for the long haul with everything else that's on my plate. So a lot of planning went into the site, with several dozen posts written and "in the can" so I don't have to worry about running short on content anytime soon.

For some reason there's been an especially high level of spam lately. A lot of it's for ForEx (foreign exchange) schemes, which makes sense with the dollar tanking -- a small investment in Euros or Pounds a couple years ago would have made a nice return. I'm not sure teaming up with the guy that's spamming you about it is really the best way to enter the field, though.

But the spam that's really getting my attention is the stuff with totally made-up words. This morning, I submitted spams with titles like "intercalative parafloccular" and "jager nomistic fipple". I mean, how gorgeous are those phrases? A science fiction writer could name an entire galaxy of futuristic devices, new worlds, and extraterrestrial characters from what I delete from my spam queue every morning!

The old design of this site was getting a little too crowded for my taste, so I've updated the whole site to a drupal theme called Ad Agency, based on an Open Designs template by Collin Grassley.

I may futz around with the header image -- I'm not sure a hummingbird says all that much about me -- and I've done some minor changes to the stylesheet and some of the template PHP files, but overall I think it's a gorgeous design. There's certainly more room for everything to "breathe".

Hopefully you agree.

A few weeks ago, Alex Shalman, one of the guest contributors at lifehack.org, asked me to contribute to his "Happiness Project", a set of interviews with prominent bloggers about their definitions of happiness and what they're doing to increase happiness in their lives.

A while back, I mentioned that I was putting together some material on writing and technology and thinking about launching a new site around it.

I decided to go ahead with that project, and am well into getting the site up and running. The site is called The Writer's Technology Companion and will be launching sometime in March at www.writerstechnology.com. There's a launch page there now, where you can sign up for email notifications or subscribe to the RSS feed so you'll be informed when the site officially goes live.

I've scheduled a great week of posts at lifehack.org, including my podcast debut with a new project I'm calling Lifehack Live (because that's it's name). Check it out this week, in between eggnogs and rum balls.

Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War isn't out yet (coming next month, I hope!) but already it's gotten some nice press coverage!

While searching for some other files, I came across copies of two posts I made at the very beginning of my blogging career, back in November of 2000. The first post I ever did has been lost to the vagaries of history, but the second and third posts are now up here in the November, 2000 archives. I started blogging because I was upset at the way the 2000 elections were going, and these posts reflect that.

The funny thing is that there wasn't really any blogging software back then, so the pages were hand-coded. I can't imagine what I would have done once I had dozens of posts to keep up with, but I wort of fell out of blogging for a while and didn't come back until 2002, and by then there was Blogger.

I'm testing Windows Live Writer for a post I'm writing for lifehack.org. Check it out tomorrow at lifehack.org.