Gay novelist on a hot tin roof

Working on LEGENDS today became quite exciting as the navigation was set up and tested. Two chapters are "up" already; two more will be going on tomorrow and the day after, and then -- newsletter time. I'll have about the first five or seven thousand words online, and maybe fifteen thousand words in hand as a buffer.

Here's the final template:

I have to admit to being blown away. To my eyes, it's one of the most visually astonishing pages in the blogosphere -- and it's one of a kind. Jade had worked magic on this. You'd never guess it for a Blogger template.

The heatwave continues: we had a reprieve today, down to a microscopic smidgen under 39C, and it actually felt like a reprieve. Only 103F. Still, we have another four or five more days of this before we get down to something decent, temperature-wise ... and it's been too much for many people.I saw a little of the local news a half hour ago; the state coroner is at flat chat, investigating "an undisclosed number of sudden deaths" today. Well two days ago they "disclosed" the number of 18 on Saturday; yesterday they reported 20 more. Today? It's been the coolest day for a week, and I should imagine anyone who's been hanging by a thread just can't take much more.

The other side to the story was that the local power company is in over its head -- unable to cope with demand. We need to extend our power generation facilities before next summer. Hopefully they'll be looking at solar or wind ... but I doubt it. Kevin Rudd's idea of working hard to save the climate is to offer paltry cuts in carbon emissions, to take effect about three weeks after sea level has risen so high, they're knee-deep and wading at Parliament House. (Interestingly, 51% of our local power company is owned by a Chinese multinational based in Hong Kong, and the other 49% is owned by an Australian investment company, Spark Infrastructure ... right now, the Chinese investors must be wondering if they made a wise purchase, since they're going to have to put money into the system -- which wouldn't be their first choice!)

I took a half hour to look at the visitor stats for January, and was fascinated and gratified. It's still amazing to me -- and wonderful -- to get visitors from every corner of the globe. Even now, as we make inroads on February, I'm waiting for any kind of response from Google regarding my zeroed-out page rankings, so ... stand by for this blog to "migrate." As I've mentioned once or twice, I'm actually wondering about striking a new blog, importing this whole project into it, all of a piece, then deliberately going to Google and deleting the old one out of the index (wouldn't be a great loss: everyone who reads this page knows it's here, and knows it's probably moving ... and no one else has been able to find it with a search since October).

Deleting the old blog is a necessary nasty -- if you don't do this, Ma Goog will call your new blog "duplicate content," and the penalty for this is ... you guessed: SERP invisibility.

SERP is an acronym. They would like you to believe that it stands for Search Engine Results Pages, but it doesn't. In reality it stands for Spuriously Egalitarian Reporting Parameters. There's a lot of long words in there; basically means there is no such thing as equality of content providers (like Keegan) on the search engine front ... they make up the rules to suit themselves, and then smother you with them.

Bear with me. I'm getting there, slowly but surely!

Cheers,
MK