A couple of quick updates since it’s been a week…
Beck-umentary momentarily (I hope)
I still haven’t gotten the footage back from Beck’s people. While I’m waiting by my inbox hoping for the email to come, I realize that Beck and Co. are busy doing a major multi-month tour and these things take time. Still, here’s to hoping for sooner rather than later. I’m going to send an email to them in the next couple of days because I certainly don’t want this to get lost (or deleted) in the shuffle of their tour.
Another contest/Writing progress
Got another story submitted to a writing contest last week. Now that I’ve got a stable of pieces that I’ve fine tuned enough to send off, this is getting easier to do. This was a large part of the plan for the summer, along with a few other writing (short story) projects.
I’d hoped to have the short story collection done by Sept. 1, but underestimated how long it would take to get everything done. A programmer once told me that software developers always assume things will take 1 month when they will take 2 months and assume 2 months when that feature you wanted will end up being sentenced to “development hell” a month later and you’ll never see it again. Writing can be that way, especially when guessing how long rewrite is going to take.
Anyway, I’ve got a few more stories I want to get finished before starting on the novel (which I’ve actually been compiling notes on the last couple weeks), but think I can get my short story plate cleared by the 15th of the month.
Visual improvements
Over the past couple of months, I’ve been tweaking the theme of this weblog, having started initially with a template called “Snowy Morning” by Ashkan. Slowly, it’s transformed in a variety of ways, from minor font changes and a new logo to a thinner sidebar and support for both Amazon ads/search as Google Adsense.
I’m happy to announce I’m mostly done tweaking (for now). At some point I’d like to take the time to design a WordPress theme from the ground up, but it was certainly helpful to have a starting place and then being able to make CSS adjustments from there.
All the feedback I’ve gotten from friends and visitors about the design has been quite positive, feel free to leave a comment with suggestions, or email me if something’s broken or whatever.
WordPress update
On a back-end thing, I’ve upgraded this weblog to WordPress 2.6.1. From a reader standpoint, this isn’t much to holler about, although images can now have captions, which is pretty cool. From a writing place though, among the new features of Worpress 2.6 is the ability to track revisions to a document, much the way a wiki works. As a wiki and collaborative enthusiast, this is simply awesome and I can’t wait to see this in action. I’d wish the ability to see revisions was available to readers as well (maybe via a toggle setting in the weblog administration), to make it that much more like the familiar “history” tab in MediaWiki installations like Wikipedia and AboutUs.
Again, WordPress 2.6.1 seems pretty stable and has been out for a couple of weeks before I upgraded, but if you notice anything weird, let me know.
I like the new look!