I usually check your blog through RSS, and I haven’t seen anything in a couple weeks. I assumed you were taking a break, but when I went to the site today, I noticed you had all kinds of new stuff up there! Looks like the old address I was using for the RSS feed (http://becoming-a-writer-seriously.com/feed) doesn’t work anymore. I took the “feed” off the end in my RSS reader and all the new posts came through.

As some of you may recall, I wrote about the inexplicable crash of my blog on 16 October. My webmaster and I thought all of the essential problems had been solved. Obviously not.

I immediately went to my Feedburner account, which manages the RSS subscription feed. I was dumbfounded to discover that on the 16th my subscription numbers dropped from almost 500 subscribers to 167. In other words, two-thirds of the subscribers simply disappeared, with no clear explanation that I can figure out.

That’s like a sword in the stomach for a blogger. It’s taken 22 months of build up my subscription list just shy of the 500 mark, the most important indication that the effort of maintaining the blog has been worth it. To be completely honest, I simply wilted into inaction nearing despair. I still haven’t really recovered.

I hope that other subscribers, like Benjamin, will check in and discover the RSS subscription problem and apply the fix that Benjamin describes above.

WHEN IT RAINS…

When I finally returned to my senses last Sunday, I decided to write a post about the misfortune. And I discovered that my broadband internet service was down — for 3 days. In fact, I’ve been having trouble with the connection for 3 weeks now, off and on. [I'm at my Philippine residence at the moment, with a presumably premium broadband account with the country's leading internet provider.] Today, yet another service person showed up at my door with yet another “fix.” Where the previous five service teams provided fixes that lasted only a few hours, this one may have resolved the problem.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Well, I’ve got lots of potential and very interesting posts on my list. I hope I can muster the discipline to keep going. And mostly, I hope that my lost subscribers somehow find their way back here and either re-subscribe or fix the feed address in their RSS reader. I miss all of you. It’s you the readers who have kept me going, even when discouraged.

I am encouraged by the fact that the subscription number has risen to 192 over the past few days. I’m hoping, as my Christmas present, we’ll be back up to 500. And my New Year’s wish is to breach the 1000 mark during 2009.

Thanks for bearing with me. And Benjamin, thanks especially for alerting me about the problem.

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Not quite four months old now, Michelle Thompson’s blog Juiced on Writing has already climbed into the top-tier of blogs for writers. As she descirbes it,

I want to write. I want to make a living writing – fiction, and non-fiction. And I want to share all the writing resources I find. This is my writing blog. Simple as that.

I’m amazed at just how much information Michelle has already gathered and posted. And the blog is, to boot, beautifully designed. The blog’s content tills similar ground as my own blog, accounting partially for my enthusiasm about it. And as I dug deeper into her social media activity, I discovered that our interests coincide right across the board! Her blog already joins Writers Technology Companion as my favorite writing blogs.

Michelle also actively uses Twitter and FriendFeed, two Web 2.0 facilities that you may wish to check out. Both help you gather breaking information, great tools for writers that wish to stay ahead of the game. Michelle has also participated in the 30-Day Challenge, which amazingly I am working my way through at this very moment. This remarkable Challenge is essentially an online course to lead one through the intricacies of setting up an online business and earning one’s first online dollar by the end of the challenge. If you are a plugged-in writer, this challenge may interest you as well. And there are even more areas when Michelle and I intersect. Oh, the joy of encountering a kindred spirit!

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As most of you know, I keep my eye out for free offerings at Giveaway of the Day that might be of interest to this blog’s readers.  TODAY ONLY, you can download a free copy of Adolix PDF Converter Pro 4.2.

There are lots of free PDF converters out there.  This one has some additional features that make it more useful than most, such as bundling pages into a full document, with control over page order, as well as conversion of the results to several photo formats.  These features may be particularly helpful to writers compiling an e-book.

A couple of cautions:  one downloader noted in the comments section that some anti-virus programs give a false positive — and he’s provided a link to an explanation of what cuases this.  Also, as with all Giveaways, if your hard disk has to be reformatted, you will not be able to re-install the program.

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Writer and blogger Dan Morrill has recently stumbled onto an intriguing strategy to distribute his free e-book. He set up a blog to promote it, but discovered that blogs take a LONG time to build enough readership to matter. Then he thought, rather out of the box, what if I make it available via BitTorrent.

I’m guessing most of you, along with me too, know little about BitTorrent, especially if you are over 30. BitTorrent is an internet technology that facilitates downloading big files. Among young internet users, it is vastly popular for downloading full-length movies and music. A lot of these downloads skirt on the “illegal,” a fact that scares many people away from BitTorrent.

Still, Morrill thought, why not give it a try, even if books do not come to mind when thinking about BitTorrent. He uploaded his book to the bit-torrent service Mininova, which gets over a million visitors a day from around the world. Very quickly, several hundred copies were downloaded. When I checked today, almost 2000 copies had been downloaded. And maybe even just as important, people are beginning to blog about his free book. The word is spreading.

You can read Dan’s first-hand account of his distribution experience his blog Techwag. He’s written an even more detailed account at Toolbox for IT.

I hope you’ve stuck with this post, because here’s the best part. The book he wrote is titled Selling Books on Amazon. He self-published the book with Amazon’s subsidiary Booksurge a couple months ago. [In fact, you can even buy a paper-bound copy at this blog's own Bookstore, organized by me but powered by Amazon.]

A word of caution: If you are a first-time Mininova user, be aware that some computers equipped with an external wireless router may have problems. Some Linksys routers — sadly, that’s mine — go haywire with the multiple bit-torrent download streams.

For folks like me, that prefer the more traditional method of downloading PDF files, you can find Dan’s free e-book download page at the website he constructed for the book.

In my view, this book is a “must” download for anyone who needs to market a book. The book’s content is comprehensive, examining even other online sales channels. But his focus is on Amazon, providing a genuine step-by-step guide through the process. Thanks, Dan, for sharing it with us.

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Book cover via Amazon

After hearing so much about David Allen’s Getting Things Done — GTD has become the pop shorthand for it — and running into so many spin-offs, I bought the book almost a year ago.  I was very impressed and immediately set up a GTD filing system for myself.

In the book, Allen describes a low-tech paper-based system.  He encourages people to “dump” all of their ideas onto separate pieces of paper.  I adopted the old-fashioned stenographer’s spiral pad, which I now have within an arm’s reach at ALL TIMES.  These notes are torn out frequently and placed into a “To File” folder.  At least once a week, perhaps more, one goes through the “To File” folder and shuffles the paper into more structured files:  folders for each day of the month, project folders, next action folders and such.  I’ve discovered the system quite workable.

Because Allen’s system is paper-based, it might appeal especially to writers.  In fact, there’s a remarkable similarity between Allen’s system and some recommendations from the Maui Writers Conference about how to organize your thoughts for a big book project.  In this case, the Maui workshop leaders recommended ideas on separate sheets of paper, organized into the proverbial stacks of papers piled up in an organized sequence on tables and floors.  Most of us know and probably use that strategy often in our writing projects.

Of course, I went online to search for more information — and I was absolutely swamped with print outs, which I dutifully collected for a projected GTD series for this blog.  The series has never materialized — due, quite frankly, to INFORMATION OVERLOAD!

Within the past two weeks, several GTD-related things have come to my attention, so I’ll pass along a few posts.  They won’t be as organized as I would like.  Still, I think I should go ahead and bring them to your attention.

Before I sign off today, I’m passing along a link to The Best Mac Software for Productivity and Getting Things Done, posted just a few minutes ago at Pete Williams blog PrenuerMarking.  This blog is worth following by anyone interested in productivity and marketing.  His insights are not limited to Mac users, though they do get some extra bonuses from the blog.  By the way, I learned about the post so quickly via my Twitter account, which seems to increase in importance to me with each passing week.

Oh, and yes, you can buy Allen’s book from our blog’s bookstore, set up and organized by me, but powered by Amazon.

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You may have noticed that my blog was blank for several days.  It appears it may have been hacked, with something weaseling its way into my blog database and scrambling up lots of underlaying code.

With the help of my vigilant webmaster, who looks after the hosting of my blog, we are beginning to reconstruct the blog.  So far, most of it is back in place, but some elements remain difficult to resolve.

I bring this to your attention to underscore the value of having a webmaster in the wings.  I would never have been able to get this blog back online by myself.  In fact, I was considering total abandonment of the blog and all of the information I’ve collected and organized here.  But Jim Faelker galloped in to the rescue, spending several hours examing and saving the database, reloading the program, upgrading to a more recent version of WordPress and moving everything over to a new server.  It took him several hours.  Thanks, Jim!

Jim’s services don’t come cheap — but in circumstances such as these, he certainly earns his money.

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I’m sure you’ve already read elsewhere that many writers can supplement their income and increase story placements by providing accompanying photographs. Once upon a time that was sometimes a difficult and inconvenient task.

With the advent of the small digital camera, that’s changed. The spec’s of these little wonders are improving all the time, even up to publication standard. Prices continue to come down. And, best of all, they are convenient to carry with you all the time.

All that being said, one must still come up with quality images.

Last night I met a propective new member at the Camera Club of the Philippines who’s willing to help all of us improve our skills with these compact digital cameras. Peter Emmett, a long-time UK expat [he doesn't like cold rain], is putting together a free, online photography course on how to get the best possible images out of portable digital cameras. His website also carries many of his own photographs and quite a number of very useful links.

If you realize that maybe it’s time for you to upgrade your skills, visit Peter’s website and look into his free online photography course.

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Fortunately, the social networking facility LinkedIn has pointed me toward something interesting to share: The eBook Coach. While this site is blatantly promotional, I think it is worth a visit. The site reminds us that creating an e-book can indeed be a worthwhile task. And this site appears to offer a lot of advice about how to do it.

I want also to say a bit about LinkedIn too. I suspect many of you have at least heard about it, and perhaps even have joined. This social network has a much more serious objective than other social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. This one aims to help one build professional relationships that may make a difference to you.

I have to admit that I haven’t yet dived fully into developing my presence at LinkedIn. I’m still a rather casual user. But even so, my network is growing, with very little effort. And that network is beginning to yield results.

I am, for example, linked in with Rick Frishman, author of several books in the Author 101 series about the business side of writing. I regard his books highly and trust his recommendations. It was Rick that wrote a recommendation about The eBook Coach. Yes, the network at work! [By the way, some of his books are available in my Amazon Storefront.]

I mention all of this as a way of recommending that writers join LinkedIn, even if you are not yet published. It’s a resource that may, over time, become very valuable to your career.

FINAL NOTE: For much more information about eBooks, visit The Writer’s Technology Companion, which has quite a number of posts about ebooks. I think you will find this websites to be one of the very best for writers.

Plastic Logic has announced a new e-book reader presenting standard 8 1/2 x 11 pages. The device will not be available until next year. My guess is that this announcement was scheduled to beat the anticipated announcement from Kindle of a trade-book size reader. There is already speculation that the Plastic Logic reader may offer salvation to the daily newsletter. At the San Francisco Chronicle, according to the International Herald Tribune, sixty-five percent of its costs go to the process of printing and distributing its print edition. A digital edition, downloadable via the interest would eliminate these costs.

Publisher’s Weekly has just carried an announcement of a new, upgraded Sony Reader, to be in stores in November. One of the new features is the touch-screen, which allows readers to turn pages with a swipe of a finger. Sony also its doubling its catalog of books available for its reader, from 50,000 to 100,000.

When I visited the Amazon Books homepage a couple days ago, I was greeted with an advertisement for its Kindle, touting availability of several major newspapers via electronic subscription. While the screen is small by newspaper standards, the sample pages look quite readable.

While many writers decry the difficulty of promoting and selling their books, I think the emerging younger writers will come up with a lot of creative approaches that will prove successful. It’s all worth watching.