A quick site note: I've neglected to update the Fiction page on the blog here for some time, so I just did so. It now contains not just links to stories originally published online, but information about all the fiction I can remember publishing over the last 10 years or so.
A couple old links were dead, and I found two stories completely available via Google Books ("The Lake" and "In Exile"), which made me very happy, because those are two of my personal favorites (which is to hint that reader reaction to them has been decidedly ... mixed...), and I had thought they were inaccessible and obscure. But no! (Well, their content may be inaccessible and obscure — or, as some have maintained, pretentious, arrogant, presumptuous, artsyfartsy, and — or maybe that was somebody describing my cats...) You can even still buy the whole zine or book in which they appeared, which you should, indeed, do, because you are a supporter of small presses! (Though you should really buy that issue of Lady Churchill's from the publisher's own ebook site, which offers it in many formats, all DRM-free. In fact, you should probably buy all of their ebooks. High quality, handmade. Artisanal, we might say.)
Meanwhile, the Selections page here remains out of date and a bit of a mess, but that's a much bigger project for a later time...
Showing posts with label site update. Show all posts
Showing posts with label site update. Show all posts
05 May 2012
14 December 2011
Site Note
I was bored with the old look of this site, so decided to change things around a bit. (If you're reading this via RSS or a mobile device or something, check out the actual website to see.) There may be some adjustments as I try it out on other computers and browsers, but for now this will do.
Until I decide to go all neon green.
Because clearly the internet needs more neon green.
Until I decide to go all neon green.
Because clearly the internet needs more neon green.
Labels:
Announcements,
colors,
neon green,
site update
06 November 2011
Fresh Links
Just an addendum to my previous post, in which I lamented the breaking of Google Reader's share function, which enabled the "Fresh Links" widget over on the sidebar—
I have created a near fix, as you'll see if you look over on the side. I'm using the RSS feed from my Delicious account for this, since it was sitting dormant. (Thus some of those links are very much not fresh right now!)
I have created a near fix, as you'll see if you look over on the side. I'm using the RSS feed from my Delicious account for this, since it was sitting dormant. (Thus some of those links are very much not fresh right now!)
Labels:
Linkdump,
site update
25 November 2010
New Site Design
It's long been time for this site to get a facelift. Well, now it has one. I've not only changed some of the formatting and colors (yes, I'm fond of purples; it's my site, it will have lots of purple!), but also taken advantage of Blogger's new Pages feature, familiar to anybody who's used Wordpress. The pages are listed up there beneath the site header.
The About and Fiction pages are self-explanatory, but the Selections page probably needs a few words of introduction.
For a couple years now, I've wanted to put together a collection of the nonfiction I've written over the last seven years or so (since a piece of mine about George Saunders appeared in English Journal in May 2003), but I've struggled to come up with a book-length manuscript that is more than just a collection of miscellanea. I could easily put together a collection just of my writings on science fiction, or on film, or general book reviews, or extended essays on writers such as J.M. Coetzee ... but what most excites me is the idea of mixing all of those together and finding some of the connections, echoes, and reverberations.
Thus, the Selections page, which I'm giving the title I've always had for the nonfiction manuscript: Other Choices. One way to read this blog is chronologically. Another way is thematically. Another way is randomly. Each will produce a somewhat different experience, especially if the reader only encounters a few of the hundreds of thousands of words that have been posted here. If I believe in anything it is the power of a reader's creative choice, a reader's freedom and agency, and I try to exercise that in my readings of other people's texts, so I hope to encourage it in the readers of my own. What is invisible, what is unsaid may be as important as what is visible and enunciated. Choices, by definition, imply other choices.
The Selections page is not complete, and will probably never been finished, because I'm not sure what "finished" would be. I'm going to keep playing with what is there, creating various groups of my writings, editing the ones that are there. I hope eventually to put some of the posts together as a single page to encourage folks to read a few at once and find connections that way (and also to give myself some ability to edit and clarify the texts), but for now they're just links to the original posts.
I expect to continue fiddling not only with the Selections page, but also the colors and fonts for the whole site over the next few weeks as I try it out on different computers to see how it all looks. Please don't be alarmed...
The About and Fiction pages are self-explanatory, but the Selections page probably needs a few words of introduction.
For a couple years now, I've wanted to put together a collection of the nonfiction I've written over the last seven years or so (since a piece of mine about George Saunders appeared in English Journal in May 2003), but I've struggled to come up with a book-length manuscript that is more than just a collection of miscellanea. I could easily put together a collection just of my writings on science fiction, or on film, or general book reviews, or extended essays on writers such as J.M. Coetzee ... but what most excites me is the idea of mixing all of those together and finding some of the connections, echoes, and reverberations.
Thus, the Selections page, which I'm giving the title I've always had for the nonfiction manuscript: Other Choices. One way to read this blog is chronologically. Another way is thematically. Another way is randomly. Each will produce a somewhat different experience, especially if the reader only encounters a few of the hundreds of thousands of words that have been posted here. If I believe in anything it is the power of a reader's creative choice, a reader's freedom and agency, and I try to exercise that in my readings of other people's texts, so I hope to encourage it in the readers of my own. What is invisible, what is unsaid may be as important as what is visible and enunciated. Choices, by definition, imply other choices.
The Selections page is not complete, and will probably never been finished, because I'm not sure what "finished" would be. I'm going to keep playing with what is there, creating various groups of my writings, editing the ones that are there. I hope eventually to put some of the posts together as a single page to encourage folks to read a few at once and find connections that way (and also to give myself some ability to edit and clarify the texts), but for now they're just links to the original posts.
I expect to continue fiddling not only with the Selections page, but also the colors and fonts for the whole site over the next few weeks as I try it out on different computers to see how it all looks. Please don't be alarmed...
Labels:
Announcements,
Other Choices,
site update
20 October 2007
New Blogroll
I'm experimenting with a new version of the blogroll in the sidebar. The hack to create it comes from Google Operating System and utilizes Google Reader. (Yes, we've pretty much become All Google All The Time here at Mumpsimus Central.) I do wish there were a way to ignore the first articles "A" and "The" when alphabetizing, but I haven't figured it out yet; also, people are alphabetized by their first names.
When I was writing in every link separately myself, I alphabetized the blogroll by ignoring initial articles and sorting by people's last names, but I also stopped updating the blogroll because it was absurdly time-consuming to keep doing this in Blogger's template editor, which has some nice features, but which, when it comes to revising long lists of links, is awful. So the compromise I've made is to have an easy-to-update blogroll that is not alphabetized perfectly. (See what sacrifices I make for you?!)
I thought about creating subcategories for the blogroll to better identify blogs that are associated with particular things -- books, movies, ducks -- but decided against it, partly out of laziness (well, mostly out of laziness) and partly because to do so would in some ways violate the basic philosophy of this site -- that categories and labels should be viewed with great skepticism. (I did consider randomly assigning categories to blogs -- categories like sulfur, mercury, and salt, for example -- but though the thought still amuses me, I thought it would be more perverse than helpful.)
There's also an option to view the blogroll as a webpage, or you can read all the blogs there as one big RSS feed. I doubt these are particularly useful options, but they're kind of fun nonetheless.
I've put blogs on the blogroll that I regularly read. This means some are not there that used to be there, because, for whatever reason, I don't read them all that often anymore. I expect now that I can easily add and subtract blogs from the list, it will be far more dynamic than it has been in the past. I'll still use the "fresh links" section to point to individual items I've found of particular interest (this, too, is from Google Reader, so it can be viewed as its own page, and it also has an RSS feed), and these will continue to come from a wide variety of sources.
The other sections of the sidebar remain at best dusty, and shall remain so for a little while yet, because really I'd rather be writing about books and movies and people and stuff. Especially stuff.
In other site changes, some of you might have noticed that I've started moderating comments. This is not out of a desire to become a dictator of the comments section of posts, but out of a desire to cut down on spam. Tons was getting through the word verification, and so now I'm moderating. I will try to only reject comments that seem like spam to me, or comments that seem utterly and completely obnoxious and offensive. I realize this is a subjective judgment.
When I was writing in every link separately myself, I alphabetized the blogroll by ignoring initial articles and sorting by people's last names, but I also stopped updating the blogroll because it was absurdly time-consuming to keep doing this in Blogger's template editor, which has some nice features, but which, when it comes to revising long lists of links, is awful. So the compromise I've made is to have an easy-to-update blogroll that is not alphabetized perfectly. (See what sacrifices I make for you?!)
I thought about creating subcategories for the blogroll to better identify blogs that are associated with particular things -- books, movies, ducks -- but decided against it, partly out of laziness (well, mostly out of laziness) and partly because to do so would in some ways violate the basic philosophy of this site -- that categories and labels should be viewed with great skepticism. (I did consider randomly assigning categories to blogs -- categories like sulfur, mercury, and salt, for example -- but though the thought still amuses me, I thought it would be more perverse than helpful.)
There's also an option to view the blogroll as a webpage, or you can read all the blogs there as one big RSS feed. I doubt these are particularly useful options, but they're kind of fun nonetheless.
I've put blogs on the blogroll that I regularly read. This means some are not there that used to be there, because, for whatever reason, I don't read them all that often anymore. I expect now that I can easily add and subtract blogs from the list, it will be far more dynamic than it has been in the past. I'll still use the "fresh links" section to point to individual items I've found of particular interest (this, too, is from Google Reader, so it can be viewed as its own page, and it also has an RSS feed), and these will continue to come from a wide variety of sources.
The other sections of the sidebar remain at best dusty, and shall remain so for a little while yet, because really I'd rather be writing about books and movies and people and stuff. Especially stuff.
In other site changes, some of you might have noticed that I've started moderating comments. This is not out of a desire to become a dictator of the comments section of posts, but out of a desire to cut down on spam. Tons was getting through the word verification, and so now I'm moderating. I will try to only reject comments that seem like spam to me, or comments that seem utterly and completely obnoxious and offensive. I realize this is a subjective judgment.
Labels:
site update
01 January 2007
New Layout for the New Year
I've been working with the template manager for the new version of Blogger, so the layout here is now new -- not unfamiliar, I hope, but there are some changes to colors and shapes and content.
There are limits to what I can do without going in and editing the HTML code itself, which I'll probably do eventually, because there are some things from the previous layout that I like but that the template manager doesn't allow me to fiddle with (such as the sidebar font size differentiated from the post text size). The greatest benefit so far is that the three-and-a-half-year-old code, a Frankenstein monster built from an old template and adjusted by me using an ancient edition of Dreamweaver, is now gone and replaced with something much cleaner, which will make future edits easier and should make the page load more quickly and coherently. We'll see. A work in progress...
Happy new year everybody!
There are limits to what I can do without going in and editing the HTML code itself, which I'll probably do eventually, because there are some things from the previous layout that I like but that the template manager doesn't allow me to fiddle with (such as the sidebar font size differentiated from the post text size). The greatest benefit so far is that the three-and-a-half-year-old code, a Frankenstein monster built from an old template and adjusted by me using an ancient edition of Dreamweaver, is now gone and replaced with something much cleaner, which will make future edits easier and should make the page load more quickly and coherently. We'll see. A work in progress...
Happy new year everybody!
Labels:
site update
02 November 2006
Fresh Links
I rely on NetNewsWire for RSS feed reading, but have begun to experiment with Google Reader as an online alternative. As part of that experiment, I'm trying out the sharing capabilities, so you will now see (I hope...) a "Fresh Links" section of the sidebar. This offers some recent links to weblog posts that I've found in some way or another interesting. You can connect from there to my public page, which also has its own feed if you want to receive it all in your own reader*. I'll keep playing with it see how it works out. Ideally, it could be an easy way to keep some fresh content going, and reduce some of the need for big linkdump posts.
Note: If the "Fresh Links" section has disappeared, that means I'm fighting with it or am abandoning it. If it looks funny, that means I haven't gotten the code to integrate well with this site's template. In other words, this is all a test.
*I've only been able to get the feed to work in Google Reader, which may be the only place it will work, I don't know. With more time, I'll figure it out.
Note: If the "Fresh Links" section has disappeared, that means I'm fighting with it or am abandoning it. If it looks funny, that means I haven't gotten the code to integrate well with this site's template. In other words, this is all a test.
*I've only been able to get the feed to work in Google Reader, which may be the only place it will work, I don't know. With more time, I'll figure it out.
Labels:
site update
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