Miscellaneous: Housekeeping

Right. Thank you all for coming. Does everyone have his or her agenda? A short one today, so let’s get to it ...

1. I have been remiss in not pointing out that applications are now being accepted for the 2014 William F. Deeck-Malice Domestic Grant for Unpublished Writers. The prize is given by the organizers of the Malice Domestic conference to aspiring authors of the traditional mystery novel. Rosemarie and I were honored to be 2013 recipients for our book Design for Dying: An Edith Head Mystery. Winning the grant, which includes a $1,500 cash award for conferences or workshops and complimentary registration and board at Malice, has opened countless doors for us. We can’t speak highly enough of this program. You have until November 15 to throw your deerstalker into the ring.

2. After careful consideration, or at least a weekend’s thought, I have decided to turn off comments on the blog.

Why? Because they’re getting in the way of the science, obviously; no legitimate funding agencies will bankroll my research. But I’ll show them! I’LL SHOW THEM ALL!

Also, the ratio of spam comments to real ones has swollen out of proportion. Even moderating them has become several steps too many.

I may revisit the decision. At present my only option for disabling comments regrettably means hiding all previously published ones. I’m trying to find a workaround. In the meantime, if you have any questions or complaints there’s always email or you can yell at me on Twitter.

3. My book is still for sale at Amazon. Two weeks in and Down the Hatch: One Man’s One Year Odyssey Through Classic Cocktail Recipes and Lore is holding its own on the Kindle bestseller list. Buy yourself a copy before you have to start planning those holiday parties.

Miscellaneous: Relaunch!

Consider this post the champagne bottle. I am christening version 2.0 of this blog. I’ll tweak the design, add a few bells and whistles, but basically this is the new internet homestead.

The plan, you may recall, was to maintain the blog at the original URL. It soon became apparent that the best way to keep the old links, comments and images intact was to migrate to a subdomain with a slightly different address. Think of it as the website’s backyard. Look, I put in a deck.

I always knew there’d come a day when I moved the blog off the main page. After all, I bought the domain to build the Vince Keenan brand and promote my various products: books, films, articles, video games, my dance album, my personal fragrance (scribe ... pour homme) and my online series of motivational lectures (Take Out the Biggest Guy on the Yard: Management Lessons from Prison).

Speaking of which, I have to get back to work. Hang around all you like. Just turn off the grill when you’re done, and close the gate so the dog doesn’t get out.

Miscellaneous: Testing

Pay no attention to this post. This is Vince, making sure the first stage of the blog migration was successful. He has nothing interesting to say. As usual.

Miscellaneous: Changes Afoot

Some websites are redesigned, and some have redesigns thrust upon them.

Back in the technologically primitive days when I started VKDC, in the long ago year of 2004, publishing via Blogger on a non-Blogspot domain meant using file transfer protocol. Alas, Blogger has decided to stop supporting FTP at the end of this month. Meaning that I now need to do something.

The plan, if it works, will keep the blog at this URL. The migration process will take some time, more if we screw it up. In the interim, follow me on Twitter for updates.

Once the migration is done, I intend to make some visual changes around here. Believe it or not, six years ago this was a fairly slick design. Now I’m sick of looking at it.

If all goes well, there should be no interruption of the top-drawer service you have come to expect. If all doesn’t go well, which is entirely likely, remember me as a consensus builder. Except when it comes to Bigger Than Life.