Portland.BloggersPub

Frustrated with my lack of creative output. Frustrated with people who want more structure but can’t be bothered to help create it and end up wandering over to other communities where someone else has already sucked it up and done…

Congratulations to Ooligan Press on winning PubWest Design Awards for
three of its books!

- A Silver Award goes to Dreams of the West: A History of the Chinese
in Oregon 1850-1950 (hardcover), for its excellence in the Historical/
Biographical category
- A Silver Award goes to You Have Time for This: Contemporary
American Short Stories, for its excellence in the Short Stories/
Poetry/Anthologies category
- Two Bronze Awards go to The Portland Red Guide for its achievements
in the Guide/Travel Book and Jacket/Cover Design categories.

To view the other winners, click here.

Headed up to Journeys last night around 9PM, and things were gettin’ a little crazy at the bar. In fact, I and later TJ and Will were relegated to one of the tables before we could insinuate ourselves back over to the bar proper. The whole place was in a punchy mood, likely a result […]

“I am convinced that the climate of skepticism, which for the last two hundred years has made it unfashionable and even embarrassing to suggest that Jesus’ resurrection really happened, was never and is not now itself a neutral thing, sociologically…

Boston Print Buyers just launched a great new resource for publishers: A glossary of print terms. I think it’s a great idea. My guess is that they probably got pissed off from too many miscommunications from people saying that they wanted one thing and in reality wanted something completely different. With a large glossary posted on their webpage, they are saving the trouble. Their hard work compiling so many terms can benefit publishers everywhere, check it out!

So I’m updated to the latest version of Wordpress, which is the engine that drives this ‘blog. Until I have the time to take a look under the hood and re-arrange some things - the blog’s gonna look a little basic. Thanks for your patience.

Let me confess- I haven’t read The Shack yet. I’m actually afraid to. I have it sitting on my shelf- it was sent to me for review… The thing is, I know a bit about the plot, and to be…

I love it when you find new tools that help you organize the way you work already. Dennis Stoval introduced me to a plug-in for FireFox called Zotero (seen at left in a screen-capture). Zotero is a tool to assist organizing your research. It integrates itself seamlessly into FireFox by adding a little caption in the bottom of your status bar and (for some sites) a button up in your address bar where the RSS feed links sometimes show up. What it does is allow you to capture websites, books from Amazon, news pages etcetera and keep track of the information you find allowing both for offline browsing of your research and quick citations in a handful of formats (including Chicago Style).

I started using Zotero somewhat hesitantly since I never quite understood its full purpose. I found myself quickly becoming reliant on it for my research. Basically I can browse the internet and library resources in the way I normally would and whenever I stumble across any information that I think I might use will come in handy I can capture the website via Firefox. Now I have the opportunity to sort/search/organize all this information weeding through what’s useful and what’s not for the sake of my novel, also allowing me to be continuously building a big bibliography. It’s nice because it avoids the pitfalls of learning some snippet of information and then later forgetting where you learned it from. The downfall is that since files are saved locally I can’t access my Zotero collection if I’m on another computer such as in a library or at work. It has an export feature which is important for backup purposes, but since you need to install the Zotero plugin in Firefox, you won’t be able to use it anywhere that won’t allow you to install new programs (pretty much anywhere but on your computer). They are in the process of creating a new version in which they promise “server-side tools”, so I think they might already be working on this.

For the purposes of my novel I am combining Zotero with the flowcharting abilities of FreeMind for some amazing organizational effects. I definitely recommend that you check this out!

Sorry the blog has been so dark this week. I took a few days a went down to the coast with the family to a Quaker Pastor’s retreat. It was great to be there, great to feel so very welcomed……