Once upon a time, there was this neat little corner of the Internets called IndieBloggers. IB was a repository for several incredible essays and stories, most if not all of them written by obscure writers and bloggers. It was quite a wonderful collection, and the best part was that it wasn’t about popularity or fame, but the will and passion for writing.

Certain circumstances, however, forced the rather abrupt closure of IndieBloggers. I vaguely remember leaving a comment on Stacy‘s blog (Stacy is the incredible woman who ran IndieBloggers, by the way) asking her why the IB domain name had been parked. All Stacy told me was that she had “high hopes for this [i.e. IB]” but that “it was time”.

I thought IB would be gone forever.

I thought wrong.

IndieBloggers is back and better than ever—and it’s sporting a new name. Please heartily welcome onto the great big stage called the Interwho, IndieInk!

IndieInk (abbreviated to II) carries on the spirit of IndieBloggers, from the distinctive design to the no-nonsense logo. Entries will no longer be called “posts” but instead “essays”. Also, IndieInk will accept submissions not only from writers, but visual artists as well. (Yes, that means you, talented, undiscovered photographers, painters, and brilliant Photoshoppers!)

IndieInk will go live on Monday, September 21, 2009.

Since IndieInk is just starting out, Stacy needs fresh, brilliant content coming in from writers and artists all over the world, so if you have an old essay lying around (or feel like writing one right now), please submit your work here (for essays) or here (for photos). Remember, IndieInk is all about writing—Technorati rankings and Google PR mean nothing to us. So when you submit your work, please don’t do so if all you want is popularity and fame. Do so because you love to write.

Go ahead, submit—you know you want to!

IndieInk will also gladly accept contributions of the monetary kind. To the best of my knowledge, Stacy shoulders all the costs of maintaining the site, from maintenance to site design, so please help her keep IndieInk alive if you can.

Please send any and all donations to payment@swankwebstyle.com with “DONATION – IndieInk” in the subject or message line. Emily, II’s amazing designer and general Chief of Site Guts will apply your donation directly to the balance due for installation and etc. Because there are no ads on the site there is no revenue coming in, so without your help everything has to come out of Stacy’s pocket. Thank you so much in advance.

I absolutely cannot wait for IndieInk to start spreading the writing fever. I hope you can join us over there—it’s bound to be loads of fun.

Viva IndieInk!

An email from Firefox Download Day hit my inbox today. Firefox 3′s final release is going to be made available for download on June 17. As I’ve blogged before, Mozilla will try to set a world record for most software downloads in one day with their latest version of the famed web browser. If you haven’t pledged to participate in “Download Day” (as the record-setting attempt has been dubbed) yet, go to their page now and pledge to participate! It’s fun, fun, fun!

Twitter’s been down lately. Anyone with an account at the service will know that. The Web’s been abuzz with rants about the downtime, and while Pownce and Jaiku users have taken this opportunity to invite people to switch, Twitterers still can’t find a better service.

Until Plurk came along.

Yes, Plurk. It’s taking the Interwebs by storm and becoming a serious alternative to Twitter. How can it not be, what with its name (Plurk! Plurk! Plurk! I could say it all day), the funny headless pig cartoon, and the cool features that come with it. Many Plurkers (I guess that’s what we’re called) have been asking the questions: Is Plurk a viable alternative to Twitter and are you going back to Twitter or leaving it for good? In this post, I’ll explore the answers to those questions, so follow along!

Continue Reading »

If you’re a lurker of this blog (in which case, OMG!!!), you’ll notice that over the past few weeks, its theme has changed a couple of times. Today, I finally settled on Misty Look by Sadish, a fine theme used by many, many bloggers worldwide, as well as  people on self-hosted WordPress-powered blogs.

I changed a few of the theme’s elements. You’ll notice that my blog’s name and description does not appear above the image header. I removed that from the header.php file. No biggie. I also edited the notfound.php (404 page) a bit. Just a few lines of text, no biggie as well.

The credits due Sadish are maintained in the footer. This really is a fine theme, and I encourage you guys to at least try it out. Sadish’s blog can be found here: http://wprocks.com/.

Good night!