a little house keeping at the six month mark

At the beginning of this year, I made some pretty audacious plans to write more and publish to this site as well as two others — 500wds and aquariumdrinker. I was going to put out 500 words of fiction every day on Posterous and publish web links and detrius to aquariumdrinker on Tumblr and put formal stuff on this blog. I was going to be a one-man media machine. Oh, and I was going to completely excel at my job — you know, the one that actually pays the bills.

It was all so exciting and it was sheer lunacy. Trying to keep up that many sites and  produce that much content was simply unworkable.

Over the last six months I’ve shuffled things around, moving from platform to platform and trying to make it work until I finally realized it couldn’t. Instead, I essentially shuttered aquariumdrinker (which broke my heart a little) and 500wds, redirected their RSS feeds to davidconnell.net and started publishing everything here. And this is where I’ll stay. Here you can find everything I write and find interesting on the web, from fiction to technology, to Lego machine guns. As the tagline says, “What interests me might interest you.”

That’s why I decided to stay with davidconnell.net, because this blog is about me and my interests. The name of the blog shout set up that expectation. As much as I loved aquariumdrinker it was never really able to fulfill those needs for me.

And it will always be a WordPress blog. No more multiple sites, no more fooling with other platforms. Over the years I’ve blogged on every major platform and I’ve always come back to WordPress for its ease of use, flexibility and insane developer network. For those of us who want to write on our blogs, there’s nothing better.

So if my grand strategy hasn’t panned out over the last six months, what has worked? Well, for one I am writing more now than I have since graduate school. I get up every morning at 5:00 AM, walk the dog and then write. More often than not, it shows up here. Sometimes it doesn’t. But the point is I am writing, and that was always the goal of the December 31 declaration.

So I’m happy with the progress so far. My writing is improving, I’ve had a couple posts that sparked some genuine conversation on the web, the people I care about seem to be interested in the blog and — most importantly — it is an accurate reflection of who I am and what I love. For a personal blog, that’s about all you can ask for.

Notes:
There are a couple of ideas I have for the blog that I am going to be rolling out soon. One is more links — blogging is about sharing and there are tons of things I find that I would love to share but don’t. I do “hot friday link action” but that only covers a bit of what I find. So look for more link-style posts to appear on the blog starting today. I haven’t exactly figured out the format, so there will be some experimentation.

I’ve recently moved the blog from GoDaddy to LaughingSquid for hosting. I might have more on this later, but for now know that I was ashamed to be associated with a company like GoDaddy and am more than proud to be with LaughingSquid. Also, LaughingSquid has great customer service.

hot friday link action: crooks and liars edition

John Edwards NYC

Just in case you’d forgotten what a d-bag John Edwards is, he’s back in the news! Edwards has a federal indictment looming over his head and could be facing jail time. The Edwards camp, and what a sorted camp that must be, is debating whether they should go for a plea deal or risk a trial. The U.S. attorney in Raleigh is looking to indict Edwards on felony campaign finance charges, which Edwards’ lawyers consider new, unproven territory. One lawyers calls them “theories.” (Guess what buddy, gravity is a theory, too.) Politico has all the sorted details, including a 100 year-old heiress named Bunny who provided some of the cash to keep the Edwards affair on the down-low. Stay classy, Washington!

—

Speaking of classy, Urban Outfitters, purveyor of hipster knock-offs for the suburban set, has been caught ripping off the designs of an independent jeweler selling her stuff on Etsy, purveyor of genuine hipster everything. IMakeShinyThings creates silver state and country shapes with hearts punched into them and sells them under the World of Love line for $55. Urban Outfitters must have thougth this was a pretty slick idea, because they’re now selling their own silver state necklaces with hearts punched in them for $19. On trying to click through to the purchase page at Urban Outfitters, I’m getting a blank screen, so maybe they bought a clue last night.

—

Gillian Welch is neither a crook, nor a liar, but she does have a new album coming out, which I bet is going to be pretty awesome. The Harrow & the Harvest, a 10-track album of Welch’s usual country fare, comes out on June 28 and she and David Rawlings are currently on tour. If you haven’t seen Welch and Rawlings perform together, be sure to check them out — you won’t be disappointed.

—

Speaking of not being disappointed, Stereogum has Radiohead’s 20 Best Cover Songs available for download now. It includes four Neil Young songs. Go grab it!

—

Every year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, takes on a personal challenge. Last year, he wore a tie everyday. Bully for him! This year, he’s killing goats, pigs and chickens. What the WHA?!?! Yeah, so apparently Zuck has pledged to only eat meat he kills personally. Now that doesn’t mean going out and hunting a dear or a badger, it means going to a farm and cutting the throat of a goat with a knife. I shit you not…

Now, this sounds batshit — I mean completely batshit — crazy, but there is a reason for this madness. Zuckerberg wants to know where his food comes from and thinks people should be more mindful that the food they eat comes from a living being. It’s actually kind of fascinating stuff…

—

Ben Huh, the mastermind behind I Can Has Cheezburger and the colossal media juggernaut that is the Cheezburger network is looking to do for the news industry what he has done for funny cat photos, fails and memes. In a blog post on his personal site and a follow-up on interview with ReadWriteWeb, Huh talks about the Moby Dick Project which aims to collaborate with people in the new industry to bring breaking news dissemination and news collection more in line with how we consume content on the web. Huh’s gripes include news front home pages that try to cater to everyone visiting the site and don’t satisfy anyone, wire stories that include one paragraph of updated news and then several paragraphs of old stuff and a total lack of social media awareness to help curate news based on what friends or influencers are reading. Moby Dick is a side project and Huh has no plans to leave the awesomeness of the Cheezburger.

—

Finally, the hype around HTML 5 is about to get realz y’all with the introduction of Hype for Mac. Hype is a WYSIWYG editor for HTML5 that allows users to create animation and interactive content in HTML5. Anyone who’s used Adobe products will get this pretty much straight away. The software runs $29 and is available in the Mac App Store. The startup foundry has a nice interview with the dudes who started Hype. They come from Apple…