Is That You God? Make The Palin Stop…

Posted by admin on September 24, 2008

Extra points if you get the reference…

Remember: Your fiction has to make more sense than reality because, well, because of stuff like this.

Get A Job You Worthless Lazy Bum! – Freelance Job Boards for Writers

Posted by admin on September 5, 2008

Ready to get off the couch? Your Vampire/Werewolf/Romance just not getting done? Job sucks, kids hate you and dog has worms? Tired of Explaining the difference between a Venti and a tall? C’mon man, I feel your Pain. Sure the Classifieds Suck, but that’s why Tim invented the teh innernets- to make it easy to find paying jobs for freelance writers.

Bizreef- A Freelance Auction Site. Charges a small fee to freelancers for the contact.

Constant Content- An Internet Syndicator. Post your toss-offs here and hope someone buys them. Free to sign up and post.

ELance-Like Ebay for creators-Get it? Post a profile and submit bids on jobs. Read ‘em carefully, cause if you underbid, you still have to perform.

FreelanceWritingJobs- Professional Blog with Daily Gigs.

The Golden Pencil- Scours Craigslist and feeds the results to you.

Guru- Billed as the world’s largest online Service marketplace

Helium- Choose a topic, post, and maybe get paid.

iFreelance- Good For You. Lots of little one-offs.

MediaBistro- Full Time Positions and Freelancing- One of the best. Complete their extensive, free registration to get the jobs to come to you.

Project4Hire- Not a lot for writers, but shows average bid on jobs

SunOasis- Barebones site with a good selection of jobs. Has a few networking sites on ning.

New Search: Byte Me

Posted by admin on July 28, 2008

I’m Sure you’ve seen a lot of the hype about cuil.com.

And, after trying it for about three seconds, I can safely say that’s all it is:hype.

Cuil is a new search engine. Cuil is supposed to be some welsh/Gaelic word for “Cool”. Created by ex-Google employees, it’s trying hard to be an anti-Google. Logging on gets you a black screen with a small search window, and a blurb stating Cuil will not save your personal information. So far so good.

The problem is, once you type something into the search box. Cuil advertises that they’ve indexed three times the pages as Google. I believe it, since only about a third of any responses will be any good.  Typing even the simplest search terms in the box will give you some hilariously inappropriate web pages, and lots and lots of spam.

For example, typing in “byzantine roads” gives me the entrecard entry for this page, but not this page. Typing in “Steel Valley Outdoors”, my other site gives similar results, including lots of unrelated sccapers. Also, Cuil seems to find weird, semi-related thumbnails for it’s pages, but doesn’t quite get them right. Some lizard keeps showing up for “Steel Valley Smash.” It’s very Hunter Thompson: It’s sorta close, but not quite and makes me angry.

Typing in Google gives you, um google. so you can actually get something done. Good Luck. Try Cuil at your own risk.

More Free Goodies: Online Office Suites

Posted by admin on June 25, 2008

Got A few more Online Office Suites to talk about:

Buzzword is now part of Acrobat.com, Adobe’s fledgling online office suite. Right now, it consists of Buzzword, chat, a whiteboard, Document Storage and not much else. But, like Buzzword, the flash based, animated menus are clean looking and easy to use, and it promises to deliver more in the future.

Then There’s Entrepreneur’s Zoho Based Entrepreneur Assist. Although it uses the Popular Zoho Online office Suite, Entrpreneur adds templates for the small businessman and a limited library of business books. Unfortunately, they’ve added these as an afterthought while crippling many of the features of Zoho and adding Visa Ads. Stick With Zoho.

I Don’t get AjaxWrite- It’s a Word Clone that runs online. So I guess if you think Word is the end-all, be-all of word processors, but always wanted to have an online version, knock yourself out. Oh, Except it works only on Firefox, Not Explorer. So you can’t be THAT into Windows. Also, It’s supposed to be part of a suite, but they’re not well inegrated.

So I guess it’s Google Docs or Zoho for the time being…. I Don’t think I’ll add any more of these to the links page quite yet.

20 Free Wordpress Themes for Writers

Posted by admin on June 8, 2008

Isn’t it time you started a Blog?

Having a professional, well maintained blog is becoming essential to your writing career. Promote your writing, develop a community of fans,  create a strong presence: all possible with a well designed, popular blog.

So here are 20 Free Wordpress templates designed to help you project a professional, polished image. As always I have tried to link directly to the designer’s site, but have quite a few going to the WordPress Theme Viewer. I have tried to stay away from LinkWare: you’re trying to promote yourself, not someone else.

20. Typewriter-Let’s start with the obvious- Typewriter is a clean, well laid out design with an image of a classic, retro typewriter in the header. Basic Blog Theme without a lot of features.

19. Tropical Grunge-

Tropical Grunge Wordpress theme

A Dark Green Background with a light text area, Tropical Grunge has a cool header image and would work well on Fantasy writers’ blogs.

18. Abstractia- Another Dark Green Theme, with a little more professional look.

Abstractica Wordpress Theme

17. Zeke 1.0- A popular Theme. Dark Red header and yellow text, with a woody background. Well laid out for monetization and sales.

Zeke Wordpress Theme

16. RetroBook-An antique book. Small area for text, lots of wasted space. If you want to put up a bio and biblio, but don’t want to actually blog, this might be the way to go.

retrobook Wordpress Theme

15. Nebula- A great Sci-Fi Theme. Dark Text on a static image of the Horsehead Nebula.

14. PDawn- dark theme, with a depressing/ Horror image. Very understated and elegant. Would Work for most horror, except Extreme.

PDawn Theme

13. Point Blank- Speaking of extreme Horror…Milo is a prolific designer of awesome looking themes. He’s all over the Wordpress Theme Viewer. Unfortunately, a lot of his themes can be considered experimental- Cool looking and State-Of-The-Art, but hard to use and modify. Point Blank isn’t one of these. It works, and works well.

Point Blank Horror Wordpress Theme

12.Nebula 1.8- Another Dark Sci-Fi Theme. More of a dark Tech / Cyber feel.

11.WP-Premium- A professional Theme with three different color schemes. What I’m using here (Red Theme). Not real personal, but easy to work with.

10. Options Theme- Unusual Theme with lots of “Options” Can be used for a blog or a Magazine Style Theme. Two Color Styles- “Light, which was this site’s previous theme and is more personal, and “Dark”, Which I use on Battlestar Grammactica. Theme options are controlled not by editing the files, but through a Dashboard Applet.

9- Visionary- Another Theme by the same designer as Options. This is a News style theme, but is not as cluttered and should work well for a personal writer’s site. No Picture since it’s a clean grid / Magazine style theme.

8,7,6,5,4. Notebook, Duffy, Blue Jeans, Aspire and Genesis- All these themes are pretty impressive, and pretty nice looking. Aspire was used on My daughter’s site, and was the inspiration for this list. When looking for the original designer, I came across InfoCreek’s website and all these Themes. They all seem based on the same structure.

Duffy Theme

Duffy and Aspire are Antique themes, Notebook has a Feminine touch, Blue Jeans is Rustic and Genesis is High Tech.

3. Halloween-Good Dark Template. Actually not so much Horror as Grungy Industrial. Extra Points Because the Designer uses it for his own Site.

Horror Wordpress Theme

2.DFire-A dark Theme with Light Sidebars and an Unusual color scheme. Nice images throughout.

DFire Theme

1.Sandbox- C’mon, You’re Creative, right? Why Not Make your own theme to reflect your true personality? Sandbox is a theme designed to allow easy customization and configuration. A lot of the Free themes I’ve found use this as their starting point.