...And that about covers it.  The old blog turned out to be perfect spambot chum; it was getting eaten alive by them.  Anyway, it didn't use up to date RSS or ATOM, and that made it invisible to a lot of legitimate web tools, like RSS aggregators. 

The fact is that there was tons of information on the old site, but it was all buried in blog posts that you had to search through.  This time around I'm going to be building separate static pages for my books, and there's a calendar app that puts my appearances etc. in one easily-found place.  There's a home page where I can highlight stuff (like the upcoming Pirate Sun), and I can add new sections as I want.

There's still a lot to do, but I hate those tacky "under construction" signs that people put on websites.  If a page is empty, you can assume I'm working on it.  If it's a bit clumsy looking, you can rest assured I'll improve it.  In particular, I'm slowly adding more graphical stuff and navigation options.  Obviously, the book pages aren't complete yet--but I want them to look really good, so they'll take some time.

In order to keep the spambots out, I've had to require that you login to comment.  Luckily, it's easy and fast to create yourself an account, and I'm hoping to institute OpenID login in the near future.

Anyway, here it is for good or ill.  The site's scheduled to go live on Monday, Jan. 28, 2008.  We'll see if it crashes big-time in the next couple of weeks, or turns out to be stable.  Opinions?  Let me know.