Category Archives: site business

September 20, 2014 · 11:19 am

Untappd and “The Beer Fridge” feature on my blog

Thanks to the miracles of modern blogging, I can see that “The Beer Fridge” tab here on the blog still gets some traffic. That’s wonderful in that the Venn diagram of SF/F fans and beer lovers has good overlap, but less wonderful given that I’ve not updated the Beer Fridge since…January.

A lot of this has to do with my adoption of the Untappd app, which is pretty much everything I could hope for in a beer aficionado app. I can log, rate and track the beers I’ve had, as well as see what my friends on Untappd are drinking and enjoying. (You should totally hook this app up and friend me.)

Meanwhile, the more free-form (and logistically more difficult) Beer Fridge has languished. Yes, I could log in from anywhere and create a short blog post about whatever I’m having, but Untappd is several orders of magnitude easier. So I’m going to start parsing my posts from The Beer Fridge and creating Untappd entries for each of them — and then I’m going to shut down The Beer Fridge.

Well, the separate blog about beer, at any rate. I still have the real beer fridge down in my basement. I may yet keep the tab on this blog so I can keep a running list of what I have on hand and perhaps find an Untappd widget as well. As for beer-related musings, I’ll pepper them in this blog every so often.

Continue reading →

The recent lack of updates on the blog

It’s been a while since I updated the blog here, and my Twitter feed likewise has been unremarkable of late. I feel like I should give folks a heads-up, especially since I’ll likely not be as frequently seen online for a few more weeks yet.

I strive very hard to keep the personal and the professional separate on here, but I’ve had a personal issue over the past few weeks, and will have more stuff to do over the next several before all is calm once more. I’m fine, as are my wife and kid — healthy, solvent, loving, etc. I appreciate any concern, but I’m simply going to choose to leave it at that. Personal stuff is, well, personal, and I’ve never been an Internet over-sharer. My focus and attention are simply needed elsewhere.

Meantime, and most unfortunately, I will not be appearing at the Science Fiction Association of Bergen County meeting on Saturday, August 9 at the Barnes & Noble in Paramus. The association’s been very understanding, and we’ll work on a rescheduled event as soon as possible.

As far as DragonCon goes, I still plan on attending and participating. I have my plane ticket in hand, and I should have enough cleared off my plate to not only make it happen, but to thoroughly enjoy it.

When I’ve had a bit more time to sort through stuff, I’m going to give this site a thorough update and catch people up on the various reviews, articles and podcasts that have come out over the past few weeks. Until then, Google is your friend.

Finally, thank you to all the folks who have still been reading and enjoying The Daedalus Incident and The Enceladus Crisis. And a double thank-you to those who have taken the time to review them on Amazon, Goodreads and other sites, and have been telling folks about them. It means a lot.

#SFWApro

Hello, new blog followers! Here’s what you got yourself into.

Last week, I got an e-mail from one of the editors at WordPress saying that a recent post about publishing was selected to be “Freshly Pressed.” Nice to be recognized for producing any sort of quasi-useful writing, though I had to actually look up what Freshly Pressed was, since I don’t really explore my WordPress Reader as much as I could. But hey, it seemed like a nice thing.

Then boom. Hello, several hundred visitors. And a heap of new blog followers. So that‘s what Freshly Pressed is and does. All right then.

I’m very happy that this particular post was well received, and doubly so that the comments have been respectful and encouraging, no matter where you fall on the self-publish/traditional publishing argument. Civility on the Internet…who knew?

Anyway, I thought I’d take a moment to say hi to the new followers and introduce myself. Continue reading →