Sunday, March 2nd, 2008
Another month gone by all ready? Yikes!
I made it all the way through the month without missing a day of writing, which if you remember my plan from last month means I didn’t have any weeks were I wrote more than five thousand words. I did write 14,732 words this month though, which is a few hundred more than last month.
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Thursday, January 31st, 2008
I’m going to strive to be a bit more transparent about my writing this year. It’s something I have a hard time with, which might date back years to when I learned answering “What do you want to be when you grow up?” with “Be a computer programmer” seemed to be a more acceptable answer to most people than “Be a writer”. So to start I’m going to talk about the past month, and provide a bit of an info dump into what I think the future holds.
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Wednesday, January 30th, 2008
- jQuery Validation plugin overview
- Examples of how to use the jQuery Validation plugin 1.2 to provide unobtrusive Javascript validation to forms.
- The Dissing of SF
- Ever have someone ask you for a favor and simultaneously insult your career? Science Fiction author Robert J. Sawyer had this happen twice in one hour, and he posted his responses.
- JavaScript Pretty Date
- John Resig has released a prettyDate Javascript library that can take strings like “2008-01-28T20:24:17Z” and turn them into “2 hours ago”. It works standalone or as a jQuery plugin.
- JavaScript Memory Leak Detector
- Paolo Severini of Microsoft’s Global Product Development team has released a utility to help find Javascript memory leaks in IE. It can be set to detect things that would leak in IE6, things that would leak in IE7, or actual leaks.
- Getting HTML 5 styles in IE 7+
- Possibly the most interesting thing to come out of the X-UA-Compatible discussions was this method for allowing IE7+ to apply styles to elements it doesn’t support.
- Write to Done
- A friend (thanks Kate) recommended this spin off of zenhabits.net which is billed as “Unmissable articles on writing. Twice weekly.” So far it’s living up to it’s promise.
- MD044 – Stan Lee Interview
- Veronica Belmont interviews Stan Lee on Mahalo Daily. I never get tired of seeing interviews with Stan Lee. Maybe it’s his voice.
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Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008
Partly due to the strangeness that drove me to change hosting providers I found out that the previous version of ProgPress had an issue running under php4. That should now be fixed in the latest version (0.8), now available on the ProgPress plugin page
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Sunday, January 13th, 2008
I’ve never been a big fan of New Year’s resolutions. I don’t even know if anyone has ever followed through on one (aside from “quit making New Year’s resolutions”). There’s nothing wrong with turning over a new leaf when you hang up your new calendar, but it’s not usually my thing. That said, a number of people I admire and respect have decided to set goals or declare their hopes for the upcoming year. I figured I might as well join in.
I’m a bit late to the party on this, but I’m glad, because these are slightly different than what I would have said January 1. In no particular order, here are my goals for 2008. I may revisit them and adjust them as things change throughout the year.
- Take the family on more day trips, and maybe do some kid friendly hiking
- Write (or do some quantifiable writing related activity) every day. I’m not sure this is reasonable, but so far I’ve managed to pull it off. Some days I only get in ten minutes, but if I wait until I have more I might never write again.
- Finish the first draft of the novel I started in NaNoWriMo (hopefully by end of February)
- Return to and restart revisions on Miracles (I’d like to have it to first readers by April)
- Write and market some more short stories. I received an encouraging rejection in October, but stopped submitting to avoid being derailed during NaNoWriMo.
- Redesign this site. I haven’t been happy with the look of this place in years.
- Post substantial posts here more often (weekly would be nice)
- Keep learning new things. This is a constant goal, and one that I usually keep up with, but it’s worth stating.
Did you make any goals for 2008? Feel free to share them here (or if you posted them elsewhere share a link).
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Tuesday, January 8th, 2008
- An Interface of One’s Own
- Virginia Heffernan covers alternatives to Microsoft Word for writers including Scrivener (my personal favorite), Ulysses, WriteRoom, and Nisus Writer.
- Future of Ajax.NET Professional
- With the release of VS2008 and .NET 3.5 Michael Schwarz is ending development on Ajax.NET Professional (an alternate Ajax toolkit for ASP.NET that predates Microsoft’s own).
- The Secret Lair
- An all new podcast hosted by Chris Miller and Kris Johnson.
- The transformation of a writer with Mur Lafferty
- Wayne Sutton interviews Mur Lafferty about social media (video).
- IE7.js version 2.0 (beta)
- Dean Edwards IE7.js has been updated after a long period of inactivity. The new version is split in two files IE7.js brings IE5+ into the same level of compliance as IE7, while IE8.js contains further standards compliance fixes beyond what IE7 currently
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Thursday, January 3rd, 2008
- How to rewrite
- A detailed post on rewriting, and how to do it.
- Podiobooks.com Community
- Online community based around Podiobooks.com. A place for listeners, authors, producers, etc. to communicate and help improve Podiobooks.com
- Issue #1 of Sci Phi is available
- The first issue of Sci Phi (The Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy) is now available. The download version ($7) contains all stories and articles in various ebook formats as well as MP3.
- GTD: Free Bundle of GTD Articles Written By David Allen
- Lifehacker has a link to a collection of 17 articles available for free download from the David Allen Company.
- Infamous IE hasLayout is toast
- This “feature” of the IE rendering engine has caused me more headaches than I care to remember. I’m not at all sorry to see it go.
- Kindles in libraries – the importance of ebook standards
- DRM, lack of e-book standards, and related issues are even bigger issues for libraries.
- AICN: 12th Episode will air!
- SaveJourneman.net brings word that episode 12 of Journeyman will air. Journeyman is my favorite show of the new season, and I hope it comes back, but at least it will get to finish it’s run.
- Doug Morris, Old Person
- Jonathan Coulton posted this summary of the New York Magazine blog’s summary or Wired’s profile of Doug Morris, CEO of Universal Music Group. I’m not going to further summarize, just read and be enlightened.
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Sunday, December 9th, 2007
I’ve finally gotten around to wrapping up the CSS based progress meters I’ve been using on this site into a WordPress Plugin. This is my first plugin for WordPress, and it’s in it’s initial release. If you try it out let me know. I’m open to feature suggestions, etc.
More on the ProgPress page.
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Friday, November 30th, 2007
Yesterday I passed the 50,000 word goal necessary to succeed at NaNoWriMo. I didn’t do quite as good as
last year, which probably stems from the state of the outline going into November. It still has some holes, but it’s in better shape now then when I started.
I don’t think I learned anything new from the process, but it was great to get back into serious a daily writing ritual (a process I started before November to be sure I was prepared). It’s also great to have 55% of a new novel down in first draft form. The trick will be keeping at it for the next 40,000 words. I can’t keep up this pace, but I plan to not drop below 1,000 words a day. I didn’t intend to take today off from writing, but life had other plans.
I want to thank the folks who cheered me on via
twitter. It really was a great motivator (and one I hope to keep using now that NaNoWriMo is over). I’d also like to thank the folks behind
The NanoMonkeys podcast, both for the daily advice, and for giving me a chance to
try my hand at podcasting and risking the reputation of their
Parsec Award nominated podcast in the process. I hope other writers who listened found my advice useful. And of course, thanks to my family for putting up with the hectic schedule that allowed me to succeed.
Congratulations to everyone else who reached their goal this month. I hope everyone who tried, whether they succeeded or not, came out of the experience with something positive.
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Wednesday, November 21st, 2007
I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, but Holly Lisle has released her first audio course (MP3 and PDF): How to Beat Writers’ Block (and Have FUN Writing From Now On) (which includes a copy of 21 Ways to Get Yourself Writing When Your Life Has Just Exploded).
Hopefully when things quite down for me I’ll post a review.
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RT @meyerweb: There should be a reality show where the Improv Everywhere people go around disrupting the filming of other reality shows.