My New Blog Setup!

I just want to let you all know that, because I had to make a website for my electronic publishing class and have decided to try using it at my rogermarket.com domain, with my blog as a supplement instead of the sole content, I have changed the way everything works at the domain. You’ll still have access to all the same blog content, but it will be hosted on a different server, alongside my website. You won’t notice much of a visual difference, except for the most obvious change: you’ll go through the website to get to the blog. You can still access everything by going to rogermarket.com.

That said, you will still be able to access my original WordPress by going to rogermarket.wordpress.com, but for the time being, it will remain static. Stagnant. Unchanged. Everything that was there will still be there, but it will also be on my “new” blog on my new server. I just won’t be mapping my WordPress blog to the domain anymore; that’s the big difference.

With the new format, whenever you go to rogermarket.com, you’ll get my new website (which is still very much a work in progress), and one of the many links goes to my “new” blog. Like I said, all the content of the blog is the same; everything is still there, but it will look different, and any future posts will appear there but not on the old WordPress.com blog. My WordPress blog (which you can now refer to as a WordPress.org blog, since the .org version is the customizable, self-hosted one) is now being hosted on my very own website server instead of a blog-only, simplified WordPress.com server. This means I have more control, in some ways, than I had before.

This seems so redundant, but at the same time, I feel like each new way of explaining it is important. Anyway, I apologize for that, but I hope there isn’t any confusion. See you on the new site!

P.S. This is important: if you happened to subscribe to my blog before through rogermarket.com/feeds, you should switch to my Feedburner feed at feeds.feedburner.com/RogerWilliamMarket. That way, if/when I change in the future, you won’t have to do anything; you’ll still get my subscription feed in your RSS reader.

REB #21: “We’ve heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true.”

– Robert Wilensky

Okay, it isn’t exactly Shakespeare, but I think I’ve got about everything on my writer’s website that I wanted to have by the due date on Monday. Of course, I will add more in the future, but this is it for now. Here is a link to the temporary location (my free U.B. webspace); I’m going to work on transferring it to my rogermarket.com domain – and, thus, self-hosting my WordPress blog – at some point, but that’s not a priority right now. We’ll see it on class on Monday, briefly, but I wanted to post the link anyway, especially for those reading this who won’t be in class or aren’t students at U.B.

While searching for the quote for this title, I found a few more that I loved. Here they are:

“Information on the Internet is subject to the same rules and regulations as a conversation at a bar.”
– George Lundberg

“My favorite thing about the Internet is that you get to go into private world of real creeps without having to smell them.”
– Penn Jillet

“Hooked on Internet? Help is just a click away.”
– Author Unknown

“The Internet is the most powerful magnifier of slack ever invented.”
– Author Unknown

“You can’t take something off the Internet – it’s like taking pee out of a pool.”
– Author Unknown

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.

REB #17: “In this case, kill Marlon. He gets on my tits.”

– Liam Hammond, a poster on the Aaron’s Story blog

According to Urban Dictionary, the phrase “gets on my tits,” which I’d never heard until today, is (1) a “verb used to signify a singular subject that bothers you” or (2) a “verb to describe someone who pisses you off.” It can also be used in the plural (“get on my tits”). The (singular) example sentence is the following: “Senseless violence really gets on my tits.”

Aside from the fact that user “ejito” of Urban Dictionary is technically wrong – it’s a verb phrase, not a verb, and may even have other names as well – I find his/her definition rather intoxicating. It uses the word “tits” in a way that not only evokes the proper mood, tone, and branding of a website called Urban Dictionary but also reminds me that there is a big world out there, with tons and tons of languages, idioms, and slang words/phrases.

Before today, I never would have thought to say or write something like, “He really gets on my tits” – or, to push the definition to its limits, “Geez, would you get off my tits already?” Maybe that’s because I don’t have any literal tits to get on (unlike Michael Moore, apparently), but it’s also because I didn’t grow up with that particular phrase. One reason I love traveling is that I get to see how people talk in different parts of the U.S. and the world. I suppose, in this case, the Internet rendered traveling unnecessary. I was able to sit in the comfort of my own home, on my bed, and read all about how to get on someone’s tits, and then write about it, properly.

Today, I’m a happy writer.

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.

REB #16: “With the advent of ebook self-publishing and the democratization of distribution … the power of publishing is shifting away from publishers and into the hands of authors and readers where it belongs.”

– Mark Coker interview

Mark Coker, Founder and CEO of Smashwords

Yesterday, I found this interview with Mark Coker, Founder and CEO of the electronic publishing company Smashwords. In it, he describes the changing nature of the publishing industry, highlighting his role and understandably praising his own brand of electronic self-publishing. Thisis marketing 101 after all: you do an interview to raise awareness for your product/service, so why not “talk it up”?

Anyway, I love technology. Outside of books and real-life people, my computer and TV are my best friends. However, I’m apprehensive about this shift toward electronic reading. I already do a lot of my news reading online because of all the blogs and Twitter accounts that I follow. So will I want to sit on my futon this winter, next to a roaring fireplace, and cuddle up with a good…LCD-type screen? An iPad, for instance?

Hell no!

But while I love the tactile sensation of having a book in my hands, turning its pages, flipping quickly to a favorite passage, etc., I cannot deny the convenience that electronic publishing affords the reader (we’ll leave the writer out of the equation for now). The simple fact of the matter is that I’m running out of space for books. When I moved to Baltimore in August 2009, I brought with me a small, 3-shelf bookcase and well over 300 books; I quickly bought two 5-shelf bookcases to accomodate the books, as well as my collection of DVDs. Then in late August 2010, I moved from Bolton Hill to Downtown, where my room is actually a little smaller anyway, so it wasn’t too distressing that one of my large shelves collapsed before I even tried to move it. I’m down to a 3-shelfer and a 5-shelfer. As such, many of my books are now stored and, yes, inventoried in boxes in the downstairs closet. I hate that; my books want to be out of the closet, with me, but alas, they aren’t.

With an e-reader, I still wouldn’t be able to display my books – they’d still be in the invisible “closet” of my e-reader’s storage mechanism – but at least I would have room for them. I guess that’s the tradeoff. I can have more books with an e-reader, I can have them almost instantly, and I can have them cheaper in most instances. But they aren’t books. They’re texts, yes, but they aren’t books, per se.

So why, as a writer, would/should I consider using a service like Smashwords? For one thing, Smashwords itself is free. They only take a 15% bite out of the writer’s royalties, when he/she makes money, which is a far cry from the 50-75% that most traditional publishers take. From an economical standpoint, the advantage is clear: if you (self-)publish electronically with Smashwords, you stand to make a lot more money for your work. There’s also the fact that you don’t have to wade through a sea of rejection letters from publishers, because you, my friend, are self-publishing. For “free.” That’s unheard of, isn’t it? We’re talking about guaranteed publication, here, with 85% royalties and coverage on most of the e-book stores out there (even Apple’s iBookstore and Barnes & Noble’s e-book store are included; I don’t think Amazon is one of them, though – not yet, anyway).

That sounds like a sweet deal, and I’ll probably seriously consider it for book-length works because at least I can get my name and my writing out there. But at the end of this M.F.A. program, when I publish my book of short stories, I still want to see my awesome book cover design on a tangible, traditional book in a brick-and-mortar store. And I want the prestige that comes with having my book hand-picked for publication.

Is that so much to ask?

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.

REB #11: “A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”

– Douglas Adams

Finally, the design of my website!

Although I may be going back to the dark ages of computing by using frames on my website (because, let’s face it, not many websites seem to use frames these days), I think it’s the best possible design choice for me. Maybe I’ll change my mind, but as of right now—considering everything I want on my site, how I want it to act, and so on—frames is the way to go, and I’ll explain why.

First of all, I’ve already started playing with Dreamweaver, and from my experience so far, it is not nearly as easy to use as the rest of the Adobe Creative Suite. There are bugs and inconsistencies that don’t exist in the other applications, but I won’t go into that right now. One good thing about Dreamweaver is that it offers several nice templates to use when starting to build your website (if you can figure out how to use them). I went through a few before I decided to try the three-frame approach.

For those of you who don’t already know, frames is basically a way of embedding more than one web page into a single window. In my case, I would have three frames (i.e., web pages) that would make up any given page of my website. The frame at the top will just be the header; there won’t be a scrollbar, nor will there be any division lines between the header frame and the frame for the main text. It will be fluid. The viewer will only see a difference when he or she scrolls through the text of the main frame (which, obviously, will have a scroll bar, assuming the content is long enough to need one), because the header will always be visible. That’s a boon, actually, because it means the viewer will always be able to click the header to return to the main page, without having to scroll back to the top. This is the equivalent of using freeze panes in Microsoft Excel, if that helps you any.

The bottom frame will contain the menu, the navigation for the site. This will be a simple row of mostly text-based “icons,” created in PhotoShop, that will take the viewer from page to page. The potential hyptertext story, for example, would be one menu choice. The story would appear as its own page, in the main frame of the site. Again, the only scrollbar would be for this middle/main frame, where the content is. So, when the content gets long enough to need a scrollbar, one will appear; otherwise, the interface will be very simple.

This is probably really confusing for people who have never built a website before and/or who don’t know what frames looks like. So, I’ll end this post with a screenshot from a design I’ve been working on. Click on it to make it bigger.

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.

REB #10: “Navigation is power of a limited sort – it enables us to manage the immensity of the media torrent.”

– Todd Gitlin

Next up, if you haven’t already guessed: the navigation of my website.

As Vinny mentions on his navigation post, simplicity is key. I’ve thought a lot about different navigation methods, and I keep coming back to two time-tested ideas: (1) a horizontal header with a horizontal navigation bar underneath it, right along the top of the page or (2) a horizontal header at the top and a vertical navigation bar on the left. Some web designers choose to put the navigation bar on the right (or they utilize a left and right design). I’m not considering that at this point because I prefer the left side. Perhaps that decision is subconsciously linked to politics; more likely, it’s because I was raised in a country that reads from left to right.

However, as I was brainstorming, I decided to go out on a limb: I want to try putting my navigation bar on the bottom of the site. It’s a risky move, in a way, but it’s also a very familiar paradigm for the average computer user, who has to use a “start” menu or a dock of icons (both of which are at the bottom of the screen, by default) to launch his or her applications. I want my website to be easy to use, and I think that having the navigation bar on the bottom is just as easy as having it on the top—but it’s just different enough to be mildly refreshing and interesting, while still providing that sense of familiarity we’ve been discussing. If I do end up deciding on this design, I’ll want my navigation bar to look similar to a computer dock, so I’ll be creating buttons that remind the user of icons. In fact, I’ve already made a few in PhotoShop. In any case, these buttons will allow the user to move comfortably from page to page.

The biggest departure from this will/would be the hypertext story that I may or may not create (I just need time), because the links to navigate the story would be in the story itself, not on a menu. Seemingly random words would take the reader to a new experience, a new definition, a new page. The choices the reader makes would affect the story’s message, perhaps its actual outcome. Of course, this is all assuming I can come up with the right story concept.

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.

REB #9: “Once you know what the story is and get it right—as right as you can, anyway—it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it.”

– On Writing by Stephen King

This week, we’re writing about our author/artist websites, which we will be designing and potentially publishing over the course of the next month. First up: the content of my site.

I’ve had a blog for almost a year now, one that I’ve actually managed to update on a fairly regular basis. I’ve tried to start blogs before but have never stuck with them. That said, since I’ve already got a blog started, I would like to try to incorporate it in some way. But that topic is better suited for my forthcoming posts on navigation and design, so I’ll go into more detail in the next two posts.

On this blog, I do have an “about me” page, a résumé page, a favorites page (favorite books, movies, and TV shows), and even a page to post completed/published stories, books, videos, and other projects (which I’ve done nothing with, as of yet). I’m trying to think of the best way to integrate all this information into the new website or if I even want to; I’m not sure just yet. My best bet may be to keep it on the blog and use the website for something else.

In any case, I’ve already started playing with Dreamweaver—and even tried out a couple of designs—but right now, my favorite design uses the controversial frames method, with a header on the top, a menu on the bottom, and the content in the middle (again, more to come on design and navigation in a future post). If that’s confusing, I’ll try to explain: these are all in the same browser window but are in separate “frames” (kind of like picture-in-picture for the Internet).

The content that appears in the middle frame, so far, consists of a page on which I can list my published works, an about me page, and even my entire blog (with the header and menu intact, in their respective frames, which doesn’t look great with the blog design but could be worse). I’m struggling to come up with more content for the middle frame of the home page, though, the one the reader sees first. As I said in a comment on Mike’s blog, I would also like to include a hypertext narrative of some kind (and maybe some other stories that I’ve written), but that will take a lot of time and effort to (1) write and (2) implement correctly; I suppose it’s something that will evolve over time, even if I have to work on it beyond the deadline for class.

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.

REB #7: “I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire.”

– The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman by Angela Carter

This kid is nuts, not just because he went from an iPhone on AT&T to a highly unattractive Samsung candy bar on the Cricket network, but also because he gives his phone number out for the world to call/text him. It got so bad that he had to go to an unlimited plan, hence the switch to Cricket.

I suppose, in a way, it’s awesome that we live in a world where this kind of thing is possible. Where we can display our phone numbers for all to see and have a cell phone plan that allows for this without breaking the bank. In the grand scheme of things, $45 a month is a small price to pay for unlimited conversation. In a world where we can communicate via Internet with anyone—from any soil-covered and Internet-equipped corner of Earth—we can also speak directly to them on what is now becoming an old but trusty piece of technology: the phone. Specifically, the cellular/mobile phone.

On the other hand, it takes a lot of guts to put oneself out there like that because…this is a scary world we live in, and ironically, part of the scariness isthe technology itself and what it might mean in the future. Minority Report(which was first the title story in a book of science fiction stories by Phillip K. Dick) is not that far off. Of course, the other scary part is that some people are just plain crazy. Just read anything by Angela Carter, and you may think she was crazy—but really, she was just brilliant—and that was decades ago! Just imagine who’s out there now! On the streets of Baltimore, or Los Angeles, or London. Waiting to pounce on unsuspecting prey. And mug, rob, threaten. Hurt.

Me, I keep my “purse” close and my cell phone even closer. And it doesn’t hurt to have a bit of pepper spray. Where’s the techno pepper spray, Cricket? You’re certainly no Google Voice.

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.

REB #6: “There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don’t.”

– Unknown author/coiner, but I found it at Board of Wisdom

I’ve been making websites since I was about 12 or 13, when I taught myself HTML (HyperText Markup Language) from a book. Yes, I was a geek—am a geek. That said, I’ve worked with HTML (and the newer CSS) off and on for over a decade.

In 7th grade, I redesigned my school corporation’s website, and the director of my jr./sr. high school’s computer club (called Buddy Step-Up, which is since defunct) liked it enough to ask if we could take over the corporation’s web design. We got it approved, and my design went live. It went through a couple of different iterations after that; it’s now unrecognizable, and frankly, I’m not a huge fan of the latest design, which uses Javascript and is rather slow (sorry Ben, if you’re the designer; it’s nothing personal!).

In any case, I’m not yet up-to-date on the newest version of HTML (which is 5.0), not that it’s officially “released” yet, but it is available for people to use while the bigwigs work out the bugs. So, I guess I would like to learn some of the new tags added in version 5.0. I know about the video tag, and it’s very easy to use. What I don’t know, however, is how to make something like this nifty little page that lets the user drag the text boxes to the trash can. While this looks very simple and, at first glance, not very useful, I think there could be some interesting applications for it. One thing I could do is make a website with short stories on it, and then use this code in order to provide the reader with a way to track what he/she has already read. The reader would drag a story to a trash can, or something else, and it would disappear. He or she could then go through the rest of the stories (or other website elements), out of order, until there is nothing left to read. Then it’s time to log off.

Granted, this trash can webpage is actually done with HTML and Javascript, which I don’t know at all, but I do know that it wouldn’t be possible without the update to HTML. Maybe it’s time to learn Javascript, at least the basics.

I’ve done programming before but never with Java or Javascript. On the other hand, I did use Alice for a class in undergrad; it’s like a front-end to Java, and it’s very cool. The user can program in Java without realizing it. It’s just like making an animated story. Seriously, it’s just drag-and-drop, moving characters and other elements around to create an animated Java program. It’s designed for high schoolers and college students, so it’s very use to use, once you know the basics of the program. Check it out if you’re interested in programming; ignore this paragraph if you’re not.

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.

I. Am. Wally.

I recently received an e-mail from my alma mater (Wabash College), asking me to take a survey on the effectiveness of a program called Linking Education and Alumni Development (L.E.A.D.). At the end, I had to write a brief statement as to how I see myself as an alumnus of the college, what my responsibilities are as a graduate.

It wasn’t something I could just whip up in 30 seconds. I knew I had to put some thought into it because, once I hit reply, that would be it; my words would be etched in “stone.” Even if they would only be used internally, for the evaluation of the L.E.A.D. program, they would serve as an honest and potentially deep reflection of my time at Wabash, and I would have to life with whatever I happened to write. Those would be my official feelings about Wabash, and it seemed a little too soon to be making such an important reflective judgment. I only graduated a year ago.

However, it is only now dawning on me that my perspective of the college will probably change with each passing year, decade, and so on, even if only slightly—and perhaps in ways I might not be able to perceive right now. I guess I have that to look forward to. It’s exciting to think that my life, when I look back on it from any given point after 2009, will ultimately tell me how good my college experience was.

What probably won’t ever change is that I am quite proud of my education and my mature decision to attend the college I did. I think that a great number of young men in my position (senior in high school) probably would not have made the same choice. I say this because Wabash is a rigorous liberal arts school with rather a unique structure; it totally kicked my ass the first semester (mostly academically), maybe even the whole first year. Coming from my high school, with its limited resources, I was not prepared for the workload, the professors, the pressure, or the course contents. I’d rarely had homework in high school because I’d always gotten most of it done at school. At Wabash, I worked almost constantly. Thankfully, I figured out how to balance things better after that first year, but wow, what a ride! I feel comfortable admitting that my G.P.A. started at 3.33 and steadily rose every semester, peaking at 4.0 for two of my final three semesters. The last semester went down a tad, but I managed to graduate magna cum laude with a cumulative 3.71. My B.A. is in English, with a history minor, and I am a member of Phi Beta Kappa (which legitimately shocked me). I think Wabash was very good to me.

As I wrap this up, I want to offer some context. Remember that Wabash men—it’s an all-male college (and no, that didn’t affect my decision to go there, because I didn’t really begin to understand my sexuality until I was already a senior at the college)—are called Wallies and that there is one all-inclusive rule that governs our lives both on and off the campus. The Gentleman’s Rule states that “the student is expected to conduct himself at all times, both on and off the campus, as a gentleman and a responsible citizen.”

So, if you’re wondering what my 2010 perspective was, here’s the statement I wrote for the survey:

Even as a child, I was a lover of knowledge, literature, and technology. At Wabash, my unique college experience served to add new and important layers to these passions. Now, as an alumnus of Wabash College, I am forever bound by the Gentleman’s Rule and by the many life and academic lessons I learned at the college. This cherished Wabash education exists as a foundation for my M.F.A. studies and for my life in general. My job as an alumnus is to ensure that future generations can benefit not only from my knowledge and experiences—and the knowledge and experiences of my fellow Wallies—but also from the values added by my continued contact with, endorsement of, and donation to the esteemed Wabash College.

I. Am. Wally.