The Writer's Pulse

WordPress is one of the best blogging platforms you’re likely to find. It’s free, it’s easy-to-use, it’s incredibly customizable. Still, we don’t all have the time or the motivation to design our own themes for WordPress, so we rely on the skills of others.

Here are my top three websites where you can download free, quality WordPress Themes. Read the rest of this entry »

io9 has posted a very interesting feature showcasing the evolution of science fiction book covers throughout the years, ranging from George Orwell’s 1984 to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

You should check it out. Personally, I really like the covers of Signet Classic’s most recent edition of 1984, as well as the 50th anniversary edition of Fahrenheit 451 (both of which I have owned for a while). They’re very simple, but very effective.

Will this ever take off? You tell me.

Sam Banerjee has launched a new website to explain his revolutionary printing style, which is designed to reduce eye strain and help dyslexic readers:

In the ZigZagText printing style, alternate lines of text in a document are reversed. In the first line, the words go from left to right, and in the second line they go from right to left, and so on. I believe this makes the document easier to read, because your eye does not have to jump from the right side of the page all the way back to the left after reading each line. This printing style is also thought to be especially helpful for some dyslexic readers, who often lose their place in a document.

Still curious? Here’s an example of the Zig Zag Text format in action:

> The road grew worse and worse. . . . They drove into the wood. Here
water ,in deeply sank wheels the ,round turn to room no was there <
> splashed and gurgled through them, and sharp twigs struck them in the
.face <

Benerjee is looking for publishers and authors willing to use this new format.

What do you think? Great new idea? Weird?

Remember Steve Vander Ark, the guy who created the website The Harry Potter Lexicon and who cried during his testimony when J.K. Rowling and Warner Brothers sued RDR Books for trying to publish a print version? If not, here’s a good synopsis of the court case.

As it turns out, Vander Ark eventually did get to publish the book, although it was greatly modified to meet the restrictions specified by the court. And, with a dash of irony, he’ll be having a book-signing right near the old cafe where Rowling first wrote Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone(Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, for those outside of the U.S.):

American author Steve Vander Ark will be in Edinburgh later this month to give a talk and sign copies of The Lexicon at Blackwell Bookshop on South Bridge.

The bookshop is just a few doors away from the former cafe where Ms Rowling wrote most of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone 19 years ago. – news.scotsman.com

I’m still not crazy about what Vander Ark did. Originally, anyway. It’s one thing to be an obsessive fan and to create a website about something you enjoy. It’s another thing entirely to publish a book containing material written by someone else (according to one of the original complaints, many of Rowling’s passages were contained within the encyclopedia without any quotes or attributions distinguishing them from Vander Ark’s text).

However, as it seems the legal issues have been worked out, there’s not much more to complain about.

Kanye West knows a thing or two about blogging. Or at least, you know, delegating.

Vulture, over at New York Magazine, caught up with West and asked him how he’s managed to garner such success with his blog. Here’s a snippet of the answer:

“I have two people that I hired and I tell them exactly what I want — it’s just like how a designer would work.

I tell them, you know, Surface magazine, Wallpaper, Architectural Digest, Hypebeast, Bossip — go to these different blogs and keep on pulling information.

And then they send it to me, and I get like 80 e-mails, and I have to check and go through them.”

Like New York Magazine (and probably everyone else reading their article), I was going to make a joke about how, with a photographer, a staff of writers, and an ego the size of the Horsehead Nebula, you too could be as successful as Kanye West. But really, quite a few popular blogs are written and worked on by multiple individuals.

So there.