Spontaneous ∂erivation

Photography: Mshades

Entrecard is one of the most unusual ideas in site promotion around. A kind of free advertising, you gain credits to advertise by visiting sites and dropping your card on their Entrecard widget, as well as from other people’s drops on your own widget.

But after a while, for some the Entrecard experience becomes hollow. Some see visiting sites as a chore, while others see Entrecard as advertising that doesn’t pay them hard cash.

I used to feel that way, until I realized that there was another way to look at Entrecard. For me, that made all the difference in the world.

So here’s my Entrecard journey and five benefits I continue to reap from it—and which you can, too.

Click here to read more »

Photography: Hryckowian

A post of mine about synopses was Stumbled by a popular user this week. The impact was the largest my site has seen since its makeover three months ago: 86 hits in a single hour, over 60 of them in that hour from StumbleUpon alone. I’ve got some new subscribers to my site feed as well.

And that’s nowhere near the largest Stumble effects other sites have seen.

How did it happen?

I sat back and scratched my head for a bit, and came up with the following four principles. They all come back to the theory of unique content, but that’s not quite all there is to it.

And for those of you who don’t know what social bookmarking is, I’ve included an introduction to this phenom of phenomenon.

Click here to read more »

Tiny cute sugar glider.
Does it taste good with sugar?
Photography by Brent and MariLynn

Originally I wrote an additional flash fiction story for the March 2008 AbsoluteWrite blog chain, but it really belongs elsewhere, not here. Sorry about that, folks. Sometimes things just don’t work.

Getting on with the blog chain:

The previous posts in this chain are apparently about dogs and other pets. And also children (do they count?). And Gillian Pollack before me also wrote about eating your pets.

I don’t have any pets, thus can’t eat them, and I didn’t want to go into Paper Dragon territory again, so I wrote a bit of Japanese lore flash fiction.

By the way, I love eating animals. Whenever I see a cute widdle animal, like a bunny or a bird (except for crows or pigeons or rats or goldfish, ugh), I wonder: what would that taste like roasted or baked? I’d love to eat some endangered species, except that, you know, they’re endangered. I hear puffin and buffalo are nice to eat. Also ostrich and snake. I really like to eat hearts and, if they’re present, gizzards; just the thickness of muscles, I guess. Fish eyes are yum to me. Although I could never get used to chicken feet.

Now go visit the other participants!

Secret Government EGGO Project
Fantastical Imagination
For the First Time
Virtual Wordsmith
Polyspace
My Life, You’re Welcome to It
Polenth’s Quill
Food History
Spontaneous Derivation
Spittin’ (out words) Like a Llama
Fresh Hell
SLAKE
Forbidden Snowflake
Virginia Lee’s Vagaries

Technorati tag of wonder: awchain

Photography: neotint

Some of you may be wondering why updates to my various blogs stopped cold the first couple weeks this March (or even earlier). That’s because I participated in an SFF Online Writing Workshop Synopsis Focus Group, wonderfully administrated by Pen Hardy. Let me tell you: it was an intense 2-week experience, despite just being online.

And although I’m an unpublished peanut gallery idiot, I learned a ton of things and then some, mostly about what a synopsis is and what it isn’t.

And then the Internet Zeitgeist struck, and now synopses are a hot topic in the writing blogosphere. And I thought: ah well, might as well join in on the fun.

So here’s what I learned from OWW….

Click here to read more »

Photography: iowa_spirit_walker

When the CSS revolution came, it was declared: no more tables! Use divs with style!

Well, that’s nice and all, since tables lead so often to nesting tag hell, but few of the revolutionists left behind explicit instructions to normal folks as to how to do this.

Most of us are only concerned with having borders, so we clubbed content over the head with the overkill table because there was no other way. Thankfully, CSS has made our lives easier in this respect. So we’ll cover borders and padding, and how to use them for:

• Simple quote boxes
• Image photo edges
• Images side by side

And of course we’ll also cover the more advanced topic of completely replacing tables with divs.

Click here to read more »

i can haz caption?
Photography: eva101

Does CSS frighten you?

You’re in good company. There are plenty of tech-savy people who are also frightened of CSS. And thus it is up to web designers to save the world.

Or is it?

Let’s face it—blogging platforms take care of the CSS plumbing for us. We casual users just want to pick the shower curtains. So here’s a cookbook to applying some basic attributes to text: color, font size, and margins. We’ll have a few more for next time.

And today’s extra special recipe is making captions that stay with images aligned to the left or right, like the pic to the right.

Click here to read more »

Photography: Martin Kingsley

Are you fed up with the stupid WYSIWYDon’tG visual editor in Wordpress and Blogger?

Trying to just line the f*cking image to the right and have text lined up with its top?

Suffering from drifting image woes?

Welcome to my world. For years, I’ve spent hours wending my way through HTML 3.0 and 4.0, and CSS 1.0 and 2.0. Now I’m paying it forward.

“HTML For Dummies” is a series about working with raw HTML, aimed at people who don’t know very much about it. In fact, this series will work best within the context of a blog, because blogs take care of many things already for you, the least of which is sidebars and basic styling.

Each week we’ll look at a couple very basic tips and a few recipes based on a theme.

This week: why visual editors suck; accessing the HTML editor in Wordpress, Blogger, and LiveJournal; and three recipes for aligning simple images with text.

Click here to read more »

I admit, I suck at titles sometimes.

I also suck at melodrama, which is why I’ve turned to humor, which can be a bit dangerous, I know.

So far: 861 words on the first chapter, which is called in Scrivener, unimaginatively, Act I scene I.

I have a lot of favorite lines, but I think this one is the best, and the most relevant with the primaries going on:

I had no idea at the time that the Great Old Ones were so keen on politics, but I suppose that venue fits into their general theme of mind-induced obsession, horror, and insanity.

I don’t know why my muse gets active at midnight. But I guess getting in 45 minutes every night is a good thing.

I don’t know if this chapter works. First person POV, I suppose the main character is irreverent enough to be amusing and chow through forwards action lined with back story. I hate doing the back story thing. I’ve been taught to see it as Wrong Wrong Wrong.

Club 100: Day 1
Mood: Sleepy

Photography: Elaine Vigneault

Every day, 120,000 new blogs are created—a new blog every second.

There are obviously not 120,000 new hard-core bloggers every day.

And if you’re looking to make gobs of money or wield large audiences in the span of a few years, you’re looking at hard-core blogging—not something you want to do if you have a writing career that isn’t blogging.

So why blog for no money, no profit, no promotional benefits—not for another decade, if ever?

It’s as simple as John Scalzi put it a week ago:

The reason to do a blog is because you want to.

Some writers may wonder: well, what is the source of this want? The desire to create fans who to buy my books? Or perhaps swaying the kindness of an editor or agent? Sell people as yet not my agent on my writing? Or do you mean something else?

In answer, here is my small ode:

If you’re fishing for agents, editors, or consumers, you will probably fail.

But if you’re blogging because you simply want to reach out to people, I think you’ll do alright.