A tiny reminder regarding the Freelance Friday posts. These are not complete listings of my freelance work each week, I’m just highlighting the stuff I think deserves some recognition, or is just plain interesting. For instance, I’m doing a lot of news posts on The Blog Herald that won’t make it to these posts.

• The MMO Post-Launch Period: Do’s and Don’ts
  A story on MMOs post-launch, on GigaOM
• Organize Your Team with Collabtive
  A tutorial on Collabtive, on NETTUTS
• ReadWriteWeb: Top Tier Bloggers Make $25 Per Post
  Feature story on top tier blog earning, on The Blog Herald
• How To Get In Touch with Michael Arrington: Sue TechCrunch
  Fun/interesting news story, on The Blog Herald
• Gawker Media Layoffs 19, Suspends Pageview Bonuses Temporarily
  Feature news story on Gawker Media slashing, on The Blog Herald

I’d also like to drop an ego link to Spyre Studios’ 25 kick-ass blog designs post, where Devlounge is featured. Thanks a lot, Jon!

This pinged in my inbox yesterday, in response to the TechCrunch getting sued story on The Blog Herald:

You little bitch:

Arrington is crying foul bc he’s scared. It’s patent litigation, moron. Why don’t you engage in some enterprise reporting and find out what’s REALLY going on. Start by reading today’s LA Times and SF Chronicle.

Arrington is a big ball of hot gas. He aint gonna give you no job. Might as well show some integrity and try to be fair in your reporting.

Douchebag.

Naturally, this is just someone having a hard time getting in touch with Michael Arrington, but obviously doesn’t want to sue, so she or he is trying to get his TechCrunch fan mail reach its destination through me. I find it hilarious, how about you?

I write a lot. Sometimes more than I’d want to admit, but at the very least, we’re talking several pages daily. I actually used to write a lot more, in my teens, since I was one of those teenagers that wasn’t stimulated by school, hence I skipped classes and spent my time reading and writing. As you’ve probably gathered, fiction is an obsession of mine, fantasy in particular, although that follows my mood.

Add all the freelance writing I do, on a weekday basis, and my own projects, as well as my blogs, and you’ve got quite a lot of writing right there. Not to mention the fact that I always play with a handful of projects in one of my Moleskine notebooks at all times, not all writing is done on the computer. More

This week has been rough on me, due to illness and a lot of appointments, making it hard to do any serious work. But I did that anyway, as you can see, and I also wrapped up a few things, which felt nice. More on that later.

• Bloatware: How to Avoid It In Your Application
  A column on bloatware, on Devlounge
• B5media Revamps Pay Model, Bloggers Lose Money
  A feature story on b5media’s new pay model, on The Blog Herald
• Interview with Brian Gardner on the Revolution Theme Going Open Source
  An interview with Brian, as a follow-up to the previous story, on The Blog Herald
• Brian Gardner’s Revolution Theme Goes Open Source
  Feature story on the Revolution Theme going GPL, on The Blog Herald
• Using WordPress or Movable Type as a CMS
  A wrap-up post on blog platforms as CMS’s, on The Blog Herald

As I said, news due soon!

You know, editors are lazy some times. Rather, they are whenever they can afford to be, which isn’t because they have low standards or are nasty little buggers. No, it’s a lot easier than that, they are busy busy busy running the publication, making sure it works out in any possible way. Online editors usually have more than just content in mind, they need to make sure that the traffic is decent enough, otherwise the site will falter as will the cash flow, and with no money to spend on good writers, well, there’s just not much to do then, right? More

This week has been crazy, and this is catching up with me right now. I’ll have to break my rule and pull some workhours this weekend, probably on Sunday. This includes writing and revising freelance work for various sites, design work, theme packaging, and possibly some development with the Notes Blog theme, which I have been forced to neglect most of the week. I’m not happy with the current situation, and it shows in the lack of posts here, but hopefully I’ll be back on track by next week.

• Outsourcing Comments: What Do You Think?
  A column on hosted comment services for blogs, on Devlounge
• Interview with Helium’s Mark Ranalli, on citizen journalism and more
  Interview, on The Blog Herald
• GigaOM, VentureBeat, and ReadWriteWeb Content on NYTimes.com
  A feature story on syndication, on The Blog Herald
• Twitter on the Web: Not Exactly Up to Date
  News post on the Twitter redesign, on The Blog Herald
• Twhirl Adds Laconica Support, One of Many
  A news post on Laconica and Twhirl, on The Blog Herald

See you next week.

I made my debut post on GigaOM this week, which was fun. I’m doing some freelance work for them, and I’d reckon you’ll see my name pop up in the content every now and then from now on. Not on a daily basis or anything, but there’s some stuff lined up. Other than that, there’s been a lot of meetings and stuff to manage due to the fiscal year coming to a close for my company, and the fact that we signed a distributor’s agreement for Scandinavia for a certain product. More

You might think this is a little premature, since WordPress 2.7 isn’t due out until in November this year, but I just couldn’t wait any longer. I’ve mentioned my Notes Blog WordPress theme previously, and I’ve promised to make it available for free.

And you know what, I intend to keep that promise!

My goal is to have the Notes Blog theme available for download by the time WordPress 2.7 is launched, with a possible beta version before that. Again, we’re talking November here, no sooner. And no, there won’t be support for previous versions of WordPress, although the theme might very well work in them anyway. Most likely, actually, but don’t come whining to me if it doesn’t.

So what’s the fuzz about, why WordPress 2.7 and why not now? More

I’ve been working on some design stuff this week, it’ll probably be a blog post in the coming week. Some good news, and some bad, at least for me and my plans… I also pulled The Blog Herald out of the beta sphere, so now my version is up there. There are still plans, ideas, and whatnot, but due to several reasons, none of these will be realized anytime soon. That might be a good thing, though, since it means that we can focus on the content. Because of my behind the scenes work, most of this week’s Blog Herald stories have been news posts.

• Google Buys Korean Blog Company
  Google spends money in Korea, on The Blog Herald
• The Death of Internet Explorer 6: Still Prematurely Called
  A column on Internet Explorer 6, on Devlounge
• NCsoft Consolidates Studios Into NC West
  I wrote the expert’s opinion on this matter, on Forever Geek

My shortest list yet! I did, however, just finish The Green Knight short story, so you could always read that.

I just can’t get used to the madness that is Windows Vista! Granted, it has gotten a lot better since SP1 was pushed out through Windows Update, but there are still things that annoy the crap out of me. Like the fact that it thinks it is a good idea to start searching the whole bloody computer for possible security issues, viruses, trojans, and whatnot, just like that. That’s great for stability, and for performance too, having the computer doing that while I’m playing an intense game of Age of Conan. I also absolutely hate the fact that the system keeps warning me that UAC is disabled. Well duh, how do you think that happened?!

The worst part of it all, however, is the default update routines for Windows Update. Downloading updates in the background is fine, it won’t take so much off my computer’s performance, but then installing them, rebooting the computer, without giving me a chance to say no, well, that’s not OK!

The fact that this can happen while I’m doing something else, like playing a game, is truly poor design. Sure, I can turn it off, but why was it on per default, and what if I lose data to this madness? So no, Windows Vista is not my ideal desktop…