I’ve been slack…

I start a blog, put a few entries in, then leave it fallow for ages. Not cool. Still, it’s not like I have a regular readership, apart from the Google webcrawler…

Anyway. I’ve been doing stuff – honest! I’ve even managed to get the first chapter of Joanne’s forthcoming book, Danann Frost Embraces the Darkness, up on her blog!

I’m doing the final layout and the cover for the book, which will be submitted to the printers later this week.

Joanne’s blog

I have just run up a blog for Joanne. Facebook’s good, but I think she needs something she’s got a little more control over. Besides, networkedblogs will automatically feed Facebook with her blog posts…

No content over there yet… but give her time.

Outsourcing to India? No, expanding there.

Examination of Jo’s website stats, Facebook fans and anecdotal evidence that it may be too damn expensive in India to purchase from Amazon suggested that it may be time to consider talking to POD companies in India. The sample seems to have been doing well over there.

The good news is that it’s turning out pretty cheap per copy; interestingly, we can get POD US Trade Paperback format books printed at a price that lets us price them around what imported US Trade Paperbacks seem to be discounted to, even taking into account postage charges inside India. The royalties aren’t huge, but the strategy is more about getting it into the hands of readers at this stage than getting rich – wherever they may be.

The bad news is, postage is going to be a killer for anyone outside India; I know it was for the proof copy, which should hopefully arrive in Australia late next week or early in the following one. Amazon is clearly still the best bet for the rest of the world.

Swag!

Call me crazy, call me mercenary, call me a guy with way too much free time on his hands, but I’ve been having fun with a store at Cafepress. It started off as a joke, a single christmas gift (which was very well received, I must say), and kind of got out of hand.

Migrated blog content from previous location

Blog content migrated from freewha.valiukas.org to valiukas.wordpress.com for a variety of reasons; some technical, but mostly to do with not wanting to spend any more money on the thing. Ad-supported hosting is great when it works, but when the ad injection breaks basic wordpress functionality… well, that’s the time to either pay the US$12 per year they want to drop ads or move. Why yes, I AM that cheap, thanks for asking. Besides, cranking this up lets me play with wordpress.com’s offerings a little more; one of the other sites I look after may need a blog in the not too distant future, so I’ll need to make a decision about whether it’s better to host and patch and upgrade and monitor a wordpress install myself or leave that to the experts.

Yay! Amazon!

Danann Frost Falls from Grace is now available through Amazon – the price is the same as through CreateSpace, but the shipping should be MUCH less…

Joanne's book – Danann Frost Falls from Grace

I have the very great privilege of announcing that Joanne’s book is about to come out, provided we don’t find any showstoppers in the proof. It arrived by courier today, and she’s currently checking it. If all is well, it’ll be approved for release this evening.

Danann Frost Falls from Grace should be available from her CreateSpace EStore from some time this evening, and from Amazon as soon as they get it into their system.

Joanne’s main website is also up.

Her web presence is a little spartan right now, but there’s a free sample of the first 19 chapters of the book available as a PDF download; that’s about a quarter of the book, available for free.

Now… how do I create one of those Facebook “spam all your friends” apps about this? Self-publishing is good as it means you can sacrifice trees without having to make it through a publisher’s slush pile, but bad insofar as you have to do all the marketing yourself.

Ooops Indeed, and vulnerabilities, and more of the same. And why it's important to share.

Fun new access-denial vulnerability for WordPress <= 2.8.3 – guess what I just updated…

Oh, and the IP address for this server changed again, so I couldn’t get in for a few days (wondered why the Russian blogspam notification emails stopped for a few days…).  I’m not about to let these guys do DNS *completely* for me, but I wonder if I could arrange a delegation for freewha.valiukas.org to save this kind of thing from happening again.

Stallman eats a tasty snack. While I have little doubt that the man is far smarter than I’ll ever be, I obviously have far better manners. I’d have made sure I brought along enough for everyone…

Whoops!

Well, once again freewha decided to change the IP address without notification… and in a momentary attack of luserism I lost everything while trying to identify the issue. I wasn’t helped much by the fact that some of the static content continued to work for a while from the old location, making it look like something related to  WordPress and/or mysql  failed when in fact all that was on an entirely different box. I haven’t been making my own database backups either, so the older posts are gone. Maybe I can get some of them back off the wayback machine in six months.