OUTSIDE INTERESTS

To people reading me anywhere but on the duck

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A heads up to those who read my exclusively on LJ or MySpace, or anyplace I might be lucky enough to be posted to (and I’m not doing this to get traffic to the duck, I swear):

As I start more internalize my posts, I find that I reference a lot of the same people, projects, obsessions, etc… I am a lazy sod at my very core, and while I love talking about myself, it occurs to me that a lot of me has a bit of backstory. I am far too self-consumed to hold your hand and walk you through my varied and fascinating life, but I want you to be *in the know* as the hep cats say.

There is a wicked cool plugin available on for WordPress called Ubernyms, which allows me to type in a person, p lace or think I heart talking about, say – RJ, and every time I reference him in a post, a little green line will appear under his name and if you hover over that green line, you see a little black box that says: “Rob Callahan, Novelist, my writing partner, lives in MN on purpose.” Ubernyms replaces < acronym > which does the same thing, but not nearly as wicked kewl-ly. This will save me an insane amount of time when writing posts, because I am lazy and sometimes the biggest mistakes (other than the spelling, the grammar, and the punctuation) come from making sure everyone and everything is linked to properly. It’s not unlikely for me to have upwards of ten to fifteen tabs open in FireFox and all it takes is one to crash a post in progress (see previous post).

This is primarily for people reading me for the first time and certainly no one is obligated to hover or follow any link I might put up.

This also means that unless I specifically link to something in a post, if this post appears anywhere else other than the duck, stuff won’t be linked to. I noticed this yesterday when I had several people ask me about Never – which on the duck is an ubernym, with a box and a link. I just assumed people knew I was writing other novels (in addition to Isle of Shadows, The Caretaker, and The Cat Dragged Inn).

Okay, now I’m just showing off. (If you were on the duck, you could see what I mean.)

A real heads up goes to marie (note: not an ubernym), whom I’m not sure is even blogging regularly anymore, but she had a similar doohicky on her blog, probably done with similar .php scripting (because she rocks at that). I loved it and it was through trying to recreate the same thing via reverse engineering (the real drive behind blogging) I found ubernyms.

As you were, and thanks for reading wherever you are.

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Just this fox. I'm a writer of horror and dark fantasy. I totally don't brag about it. The latter statement is an utter lie.
  • PJ
    February 1, 2007 - 11:57 am

    For the longer ubernyms, is there a way to have the box stay a bit longer? I had to repeatedly cursor over one or two to get all the way through. Normally I am a fast reader so I think font size works against me. Does this mean I must read here instead of LJ? You know I am inherently lazy.

  • littleblackduck
    February 1, 2007 - 12:16 pm

    That’s an excellent question, and I dunno. Looks like they last about four seconds, I should probably consider keeping them shorter, or dig a little deeper to keep them hangin longer. Either way, it sounds like work.

    You can read wherever you want, but you may not be *in the know*.

  • PJ
    February 1, 2007 - 12:23 pm

    Wah! I wanna be in the know!! Actually, since you are kind enough to crosspost, to be in the know one need only cllck on the little black duck link and viola!

But how do you really feel?

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