But here I am, with a great new re-design and motivation to post again. Thanks to Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios for helping with the migration of the site, and for making it look so good.  As any righteous book acknowledgment would tell you: where it looks good it’s to his credit, where it looks bad, the fault lies with me.

So welcome to my introductory (re-introductory?) post to let you know a little of the boring meta stuff.  With any luck, this will be three posts down by the time the site goes live, thus recording the changes for posterity but without requiring anyone to read through them.

• I broke down and got the annaschwind.com domain name.  That’s an acknowledgement that I’ve not buried the hatchet so far as writing is concerned and am engaged in brand building and marketing. Or something.
• I switched from Nucleus to WordPress.  I liked Nucleus fine, mind you, it just had the ability for (and sometimes required) way more customization than I was ready to put into it.  So far the switch is a little bit like moving from PC to Mac land.  Stuff just works, without wrangling and curses.  Also, it’s aesthetically pleasing and intuitive. Yeah. That’s a lot like moving from PC to Mac. Part of the ease with which the move happened was the assistance I had in migration (which was a headache I knew I had coming, and part of what made the old site languish) so I’m just talking about using one versus using the other here, not about transitioning.
• I can now tag stuff! As if categories weren’t enough. Ha!
• I’m no longer posting as Anarkey. I am not disavowing my online persona (you can still find me under that name in many a corner of the internet), I’m just linking it to my real life name now, because obscurity and anonymity are my enemies.

• It’s still me writing, with all the notorious irregularity that implies. I’m not going to make any vows to post frequently, but neither will I vanish for six months at a go.
• I still want to hear from you. Comment away.
• We’re still playing the lyrics game! I’ll tote up the totals and see if I can’t place them in the sidebar.
• I also owe some folks some crafty stuff from my crafty meme, which was one of the last things I posted. I am definitely not promising it by year’s end, but I’m promising I haven’t forgotten.

It’s good to be back. Enjoy the site!

So if you wanted to tell me the results of your political compass test, say, you could now do so on the entry where I asked about it. Or on this one. Or anywhere really!

Now to go to bed. My hand hurts. Tomorrow I vote in Missouri’s open primaries. Yay open primaries. If you are in the U.S. and a citizen, don’t forget to vote!

I’ll fix when I can, not right this minute, unfortunately.

Alright, admit it, you didn’t think I could do a whole week of posting daily. We’ll see if I can make it two.

So, the snow didn’t come last week, and we are actually supposed to hit mid-sixties this week. Thus the thing that had become a trend to me, snow before Thanksgiving two years in a row, seems to have ended. However, there was frost everywhere this morning, sub 30 degree temps, and the windshield had to be scraped.

Today I went into a (small, very organized) used book shop I’d never been in before and found Elizabeth Bear’s new book Blood and Iron. I snapped it up with great eagerness, unable to believe my luck. In the last two months I’ve almost bought it like four different times, but the price tag is just a little too steep for me. To be fair, I did buy the whole Jenny series out and out, so I’m not totally stealing food out of the author’s mouth. I also referred to my experience of salivating over Blood and Iron as “almost buying it at the unused books store” which my husband thought hilarious. I’m not sure why. I checked for Dhalgren and Little, Big while I was there, but no dice.

So even with my reading holiday coming up (I mentally think of my visits to my in-laws’ gorgeous lakeside home as reading holidays. They don’t care at all if I just hole up and read all day, only communicating at meal times. Their house is a reader’s heaven of comfy chairs and huge windows with tons of natural light.), I think I may have more books that I want to read next! now! today! than I can realistically take care of over this anticipated vacation. So, I’m thinking about posting a list of a dozen and picking the top five recommended ones to bring with me. Stay tuned. There’s always at least one book foisted onto me while I’m there (last year it was The Kite-Runner. Visit before that it was The Da Vinci Code) so I have to leave some space for that.

I keep hearing about the imminent collapse of the world’s fisheries. I’m starting to feel guilty about eating sushi.

I need to buy seville oranges, but all the local grocery stores only seem to carry navel. Ideas?

P.S. Deirdra I fixed your comment by dropping one of the URL’s and reposting it. Thanks, that studio is just down the street and I’m going to check it out as soon as I can and maybe take a class or two with different folks to see if any suits me.

iTunes says I was listening to Sleeping in the Flowers from the album John Henry by They Might Be Giants when I posted this. I have it rated 4 stars.

It bugs me right now that geourl is down, so I can’t tell it I don’t live in Jackson anymore. It bugs me because I want to see who has blogs geographically close to mine, and geourl is the best way I know of to do that, and because I want to be accurate as to my physical location.

I’ve added Creative Commons licensing information, which I should have done ages ago. And I changed the NucleusCMS, Valid CSS and HTML4.01 validation buttons to be smaller and more pleasing to my eyes. I also added a button pimping Firefox because I think everyone should give it a try. You may be hesitant, but I thought I’d never stop using Galeon either and now I couldn’t be happier with Firefox. I also cleaned up a number of the RSS feed options. They’re still there and your aggregator should be able to find them but I took away the links because there was just too much clutter in the Navigation menu.

I’m thinking about the fact that I seem to be composing longer entries, but ecto doesn’t let me post anything into the extended entry field. Anything over 1500 words is probably too much on the front page, without a cut. I’m not sure what to do about that, except resolve to make shorter entries. Again. One of ecto’s good points is the ease with which I can link to things. You’ve probably noticed how much more I’m linking to these days.

I added some blogosphere stuff, like Technorati and TTLB ecosystem links. Talk about gaining perspective on the size and readership of one’s blog.

I added Orcinus to the list of blogs I read regularly.

My allconsuming.net project seems to be proceeding well, you can see the books I’ve mentioned lately here.

I’ve been completely overwhelmed by the number of spam comments the Pivot BlackList has caught. I went in to look at the plugin settings and realized that it had silently blocked hundreds of comment spam attempts since I installed it. What a wonderful thing! So wonderful, in fact, that I added a button pimping it to my left column.

I futzed around with the CSS, and I have no way of testing it on IE for windows. I’ve always wanted to float the right column instead of positioning it absolutely, and it’s now like that. I’m not sure I’m happy with the results. More futzing may ensue at some later time.

iTunes says I was listening to Slow Like Honey from the album “Tidal” by Fiona Apple when I posted this. I have it rated 4 stars.

Now I’m going to plug several products that I think are just wonderful. First of all, I’ve officially switched to Firefox as my browser and it’s incredible. Secondly, a while back I was listening to Last.fm, a really cool (but not as cool as the defunct Shasradio) online radio station. The folks at Last.fm are the same folks as the ones at AudioScrobbler, which is another nifty cool thing I highly recommend to anyone who has a large and oft-listened to music collection on their computer. Since moving I had been so avidly following my local public radio station – KWMU – (which completely rocks, by the way!) that my music listening habits had fallen by the wayside, but I’m trying to get back into that and you can see what I’ve been listening to lately by visiting Anarkey’s AudioScrobbler page. Hang in there, folks, I’ve just got a couple more things to rave about and then I’ll be done. Earlier, I mentioned RSS feeds and Firefox. If you use Firefox, then you should also be using the Sage extension. It’s an RSS aggregator that works with your browser. It has a clean display, is easy to use, and – best of all – tells you when pages you follow have been updated. This works best for pages that update erratically or infrequently, pages that annoy you to check daily because about 70 % of the time they haven’t changed, allowing you to forget about them until there’s something new there. If you’re like me, you have a number of cool links that are forgotten as soon as you bookmark them. In fact, if you’re like me, you’ve bookmarked a number of different things on about seven browsers on about four different machines and end up rediscovering things all the time, things that you needed but forgot where you had bookmarked and so had to search for again. Enter del.icio.us, a web-based bookmark station. As with all things web, this adds the dimension of community, by telling you what other people have bookmarked the same things you have and allowing you to browse their bookmarks. You can see mine at del.icio.us / Anarkey. Bookmark submission is easily accomplished through a toolbar javascript applet. Easy, convenient, always there. A different sort of bookmarking community can be seen at StumbleUpon which is a way to rate pages and find pages of cool things. It uses a set of interests that you set up when you create an account to decide what pages to show you, and whenever you are browsing and hit something extra cool you can click the thumbs up icon on your toolbar and add it to the pool of things for people to stumble upon.

And that is what I’ve been up to on this here internet lately.