…and I’m really not happy with that gold effect, but I will have to find another tutorial later.

I wasn't looking for WoW. Whoops. Click to go to the site.

But I also hate the site, because it is a huge, huge time suck. Because then you click on the entry for WoW. Then n00bs.

Under no circumstances should you ever talk to a n00b. They are highly dangerous in their extreme radioactivity and the communication can be fatal.

And then, an hour later, you realize that you still haven’t found the half-remembered reference to a virgin cult that you were Googling in the first place.

At first, most of the pictures look like typical still photography. Then (if you don’t leave your mouse over them), the images animate — not in a smooth, movie-video way, but a high-quality-GIF-put-a-bunch-of-still-frames-together-way. It’s almost like something out of a science fiction film … and it freaks me out, just a little.

On the other hand, as Fashionising points out — this might be a new direction for online photography, especially as print begins to die. It *is* visually interesting, and maybe at some point I’ll become used to it. Right now, though, it’s in a weird photographic version of the uncanny valley.

…is several of them. Sigh.

(Unless you are my daughter. She’s excited now, because a new laptop for Mommy = a reformatted laptop for her.)

ha! where did they come up with this? I laughed so hard when I saw it under my search for "sexy construction worker" I couldn't NOT use it. Rock on, Fotolia.com!

I have a couple of awesome quotes from even awesomer authors for The Iron Duke, and so of course I’m completely changing my front page layout so that I can highlight them with big glittery font and sparkles. I’m also making minor cosmetic changes to my site this week, so please bear with me if formatting or pages suddenly get down and funky. If you are at the site and it does go crazy (or worse, disappear) just know that somewhere in Oregon, a redheaded author is tearing at her hair and shouting OMG! OMG! Undo! Undo!

That image always makes ME feel better, anyway.

So of course I set up a poll, because there’s nothing more fun to do on a Friday night, right?

Please, please, please give some indication of the content … “A must read post about My Little Pony! http://link.com”

There are simply too many links online to click a random one. So be kind to your followers, and tell them what you’re linking. They’ll appreciate it (and probably be more likely to click.)

If you won a copy of Demon Blood over at Odd Shots, you might have to send me your address again.

I currently have the addresses for these winners:

Mireyah Wolfe
Stacy S
BarbaritaV
Margaret
Laria
Pam P.

Thanks, and sorry about this!

I’ve done a surprising amount of browsing since I’ve bought my iPhone, and I find that the blogs and sites I visit most often are the ones that I can easily browse — i.e., the blogs that have been mobile-enabled.

I was reminded of this recently when the Book Smugglers enabled their blog. Before, it took forever to load, you had to do the pinch-and-open thing to your screen to read any content, and so on. Well, it’s the difference between –

Don't ask how long this took to load.

Between

Now, you DO lose some pretty formatting, and knowing how hard we all work on making our websites pretty, it does hurt to get rid of that theme. But for the mobile user, LOSING THE PRETTY IS WORTH IT. And I’ve recently upgraded to WP Touch Pro version — I haven’t had a lot of time to play with it yet, but there are options for changing the look of your mobile site. I imagine that more will be coming, and that before too long, it will be relatively simple to individualize mobile sites via this plug in (or others like it.)

And there are some issues. For example, a long word won’t hyphenate and wrap correctly next to a picture, so you’ll get breaks like this:

Right now, my Upcoming page doesn’t look pretty at all in the mobile theme — but it loads quickly and is easily navigable, which is a MILLION times more valuable to me while I’m poking around on my phone than keeping everything perfectly aligned. So if you’ve got a WordPress site, seriously — it’s a simple FREE plug-in (though I’m finding the Pro version is worth the $29, too.)