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OK, not really related to technology for writing, but it can be kind of fun to have a website that has your own name. My mom is technologically adept (she was writing on a laptop computer in 1988...) and she turned me on to bluehost.com. It has great features and a low per-month cost (<$5, as I recall). The drawback is that you have to shell out for two years in one lump. But you can set up e-mail accounts (like webmaster@megstout.com) so if you have a neat world it can be a really cool thing.
She had some place she browsed to that had a consumer reports type of grid comparing different web hosting services. There are others that let you pay a nominal amount each month, but they are usually 25-200% more than blue host costwise with fewer features.
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I've thought about it...but haven't done anything about it. The logic of it goes (a) every business today needs a website, (b) writing is a business, therefore (c) as a writer, I need a website.
Posts: 8809 | Registered: Aug 2005
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That's cool to know about, but until the day that I'm selling novels like hotcakes, I won't be wanting to spend on a host like that. Until that day, I'd probably go with the low-cost option; something like Blogger. Not as fancy, but you can still get information across.
Posts: 201 | Registered: May 2007
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www.lehollis.com will be my URL once I get around to building my site, which will take some work. For my internship, I spent 120 hours building an author website for another writer here in town.
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I believe it was Miss Snark that said something like no blog is better than a bad blog, or a blog that never gets updated. You have to keep it going, or you might as well not do it. And if you spend to much time on a blog/website and you aren't writing, then that's not good either. Posts: 657 | Registered: Jan 2007
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So, does anyone know of a really cool author site? (Other that the one we're sitting on now - Orson Scott Card isn't merely an author, he's creator of worlds.)
I agree that a crappy, buggy site can be a turn off. Mine right now is just super simple (created the pages in Word and saved as htm). I can do all the hyperlinking in Word as well.
Word creates really messy source code, but most people that I know don't routinely view source code to see if the webmaster has elegant html skills. On the other hand, many people can create a nice page layout in Word.
I do like blogspot.com for blog pages. Xanga is good too. I know Xanga lets me get e-mail updates when my Xanga blog buddies put up new content, which I like. Blogspot has now changed so that whenever someone responds to one of my posts, I get e-mail notification.
So - not something one needs to do. But as we move more into the blogosphere and web-based society, it is something to be aware of.
Oh, I like Xanga because I can make posts private - like if I don't want proles wandering around in personal postings. Or if I want to stash a longer story fragment somewhere when I'm using a public computer and don't have a stick with me. Or research or what have you.
I have paid my $25 and set up an life account with LibraryThing, proceeding to catalog one shelf of books in merely the time it took to type in key words from titles and hit select.
Sweet!
To understand, OSC referred to LeGuin's "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" during 2007 BootCamp. I come home, resolved to check it out of a library and can't find it. And to buy it is $41 on Amazon (gulp). Then I mention it to my husband.
"I have that. In fact I have the original pamphlet and another book of collected essays by LeGuin that contains "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie." Why?"
We have boxes of books in addition to dozens of shelves laden wtih books. I have long wanted to catalog the mass. And here is LibraryThing, which can do what I've attempted to do manually with mere keystrokes (with a click of a cat-shaped scanner if I cough up the $15 for the USB barcode scanner).
CueCat even has its own wikipedia article (fascinating) which leads me to think either you have one hanging around your house already (if you're a packrat/techie like me) or you could get one dirt cheap off eBay.
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I was just trying to sort out my blog mess this morning (If you aren't interested in the gory details, I have 8 blogs not including my geocities page):
quote:E-mails: Hotmail Yahoo G-Mail I don't really see getting rid of any of each of these anytime soon.
Individual Blogs: Blogspot Freewebs 1 Myspace (?)
Alias Blogs: LiveJournal 1 LiveJournal 2 Freewebs 2 Xanga Myspace
I think that's it for the blogs. You can see why I am trying to sort this out.
Well, I have a couple of options. I can stick with Freewebs as a separate entity for a home base. I could set up a new Yahoo and use Geocities/360. But I'm not sure how that's an improvement over Freewebs. I dislike my Yahoo moniker, is the thing. The problem with the G-Mail/Blogspot is that it doesn't seem to have the flexibility and ease of use that Freewebs does. I worry that if I ally my home page with my e-mail, I will wind up neglecting my other e-mails. It would be a particular tragedy to lose the hotmail after all these years. I just lost an alias hotmail this spring.
It's basically my intent to kill the myspace accounts, after checking to see if I have anything of value stored on them.
So basically I've decided to go ahead and write under my real name. I even changed my registration here, though it has to be approved by KDW first. This summer I decided I don't have to hate my first name anymore
Her beautiful name as a child was Patricia, which us sibs shortened to Tisha, which the school brats transmogrified into 'tissue paper.'
At least I think that is the reason Tricia doesn't like the name, rather than subliminal hatred/fear/loathing for the other family members who share the name.
By the way, going to dictionary.com (how did I ever live before I was able to validate at whim the actual meaning of all those words my mother stuffed into my brain?) to validate that transmogrify was a) a word and b) the right word, I followed a link to http://www.visualthesaurus.com
How completely cool! To see the dozen or so 'synonyms' and a key antonym floating around the word you've got stuck in your head, like little living entities vying for attention. They ask for payment ($20/year for online access or $3/month). But even if you don't think it's a useful tool for your craft, it is just fun to wawtch it working.
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