Friday, October 28, 2005
fee fi fiddle-e-i-o
Someone sent me a really interesting email asking about websites so I spent a long time answering. To the point where I got zero done today. I believe a writer needs a website that looks professional and works. Most writers are not capable of turning out a professional looking website on their own. It's way more complicated than making some graphics and sticking up some text. Plus, it's getting even more complicated - a writer needs a website and should have a blog, too. With an RSS feed I started this blog a little over four years ago and I headlined with the phrase "Here's a grand experiment" I removed that quite a while back. It's not an experiment anymore, now, it's dumb not to have a blog.
U.S. Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert put up a
blog yesterday which got slashdotted (site seemed to hold up under the load...) but on the
slashdot thread everyone complained about the lack of RSS feed. Now, I don't think slashdot is teeming with Republicans, but most people liked the blog. I'm not a republican, but I like it too. It feels very genuine. So, don't put up a blog without a feed. You will lose readers. It's much easier to add a blog to your feed and check in one place. You'll get traffic to the interesting posts. Still no feed on the Hastert blog, bad move.
I suspect before long a podcast of that chapter one needs to go up, too. I started putting one together, but I ran out of time to play. After school is over maybe... What else? I still think a wiki area is fun, but I haven't leveraged mine at all. One of those time things. Authors podcasting excerpts is the next thing. You heard it here.
37Signals is putting up some cool free tools.
Backpackit which I've used. In fact it sent an important reminder to my cell phone just today.
Writeboard looks pretty neat. That might have been cool for Crimson City collaboration. Probably Google or Yahoo will buy them out.
I have finished reading through A Darker Crimson and found more stuff that didn't get changed. Most of it's little-ish, but it's kind of disappointing. So, I really don't know what to think. On the one hand, I kept not going to sleep last night which is typically a sign that the story is solid enough, but I could see all these places were I could have done better. Shoot. The stuff I wrote the fastest seemed the best to me.
Sigh.
In other news, I'm getting an increase in sign ups for my newsletter. Not that I have a huge list of people, I because I don't, but it's now less not-huge than it used to be. At the moment the number is pathetic, honestly. I'm also getting a lot of requests for bookmarks. Big spike in website hits starting the 26th.
So, turned off the light last night at about 1:30 or so and got up at 5am. Yes, I'm very tired. I need to go to bed.
