Writing for the Web

Taking a Holiday

I'm away on Wednesday, June 21 for a week in the Canadian Rockies. I won't have much access to a computer, so if you send me email I won't be able to answer (or post here) until the very end of June or the beginning of July.

Hope your week will be as happy and surprising as mine will be. My wife and I find Jasper National Park an amazing place, even after visiting it every summer for almost thirty years!

I'll spend at least a little time working on the revision of Writing for the Web. If you have comments and suggestions for the next edition, by all means drop me a note, or post a comment, and I'll read it with interest when I get home.

Taking a Breather

I haven't posted much here in the last couple of months...in large part because I've been too busy working on the third edition of Writing for the Web. It's been an instructive experience: I hadn't realized how much has changed on the Web since the second edition came out in 2000.

Perhaps the most challenging new development is the emergence of the multiple site: people aren't just creating one website and throwing everything into it any more. Now they've got a standard website for archival purposes—to display graphic work, for example, or earlier written work—plus a blog on their current activities...and maybe several such blogs.

Typically, I noticed this in other people's sites before realizing that's exactly what I've been doing for three years now. I'd had a personal site plus a site for fiction writers, both on my college's website. When the college cleared out such personal pages, I didn't bother to re-create them elsewhere. By then I had half a dozen blogs dealing with different topics.

Well, I'm going off for a week of computer detox in the Canadian Rockies, where I will work on the third edition in longhand, and the chapter on multiple sites will occupy me when I'm not enjoying the trails and views in Jasper National Park. With any luck, the revision will be finished sometime in July and out in the bookstores in the fall.