Month: August 2005

self-publishing

I found out a little more about DIY publishing, which I plan to do if I ever get to the point of having a manuscript in need of publication. It actually seems pretty straightforward, with the advances in print-on-demand technology.

I had seen CafePress before, mostly for T-shirts and stickers and the like, but I didn’t know they printed books. What is even more impressive is the cost: I could print a single copy of a 300 page book for $16… somewhat less than the usual cost of a standard academic book of that length, with all the same features: Pefect Binding, color cover, B&W images within. Plus, I could sell copies (with no up-front costs) for $20 each (a typical price for something that length) and make $4/copy (20%). If I can trust everything I read on the internet, royalty payments almost never exceed 15% normally and typically require a minimum level of sales (perhaps in the thousands of copies) before taking effect. And there are no restrictions, so I could later sign a contract with a traditional publisher for the same book once it achieved moderate success. And I could license the text under whatever sort of copyleft license I wanted, basically to allow unrestricted use and copying for non-commercial use.

An even bigger advantage is that I could test out an idea that I think would be really appropriate for scholarly work: I could publish two different editions, with one containing more detail, theoretical discussion, and footnotes instead of endnotes, while the other would be geared toward students and lay readers and be much shorter.

Of course, I don’t have any gauge for how serious the drawbacks of DIY publishing are. There would be no professional editor, no marketing, no instant credibility granted by an academic press, no hardback edition to show off to my family, and if I wanted an ISBN (which I would) I would have to arrange that myself at significantly more cost than the book itself. The current ISBN system is not very DIY-friendly; you have to buy the rights to a minimum of 10 ISBN numbers (I know, it’s repetitive to add “number,” but it sounds more natural). This may change by the time I want to publish something, but it may not; the U.S. ISBN agency seems to be a non-profit, but it is associated with and run by a for-profit publishing services company, Bowker, that probably has no incentive to make self-publishing any easier.

giving AdSense a spin

I’ve now added Google AdSense ads just to this page. I don’t expect to make any money from them, I just wanted to find out what they were like to use, and how the system works. They say they’ll get back to you about an application in 1-2 days, but I received my approval within a few hours. Apparently some bloggers make quite a bit of money from this kind of thing. I also hope that Google will finally index this site now that it has their ads, which are supposed to be context specific (although I only have blog ads so far).

The two different IPs from Mountain View, California looked at this site (presumably Google)… one visited for 0 seconds (possibly a bot), and another visited for 11 seconds. They took one look and loved it, apparently. Also interesting and mildly surprising, they were both using Internet Explorer.

books, books, books

Today, I got a copy of Dava Sobel’s new book The Planets. The neat thing about it is, it won’t be released until October 11; I got an advanced proof copy from eBay for $.99 plus $2.50 shipping. I hope to finish it and post a review before it come out.

I was supposed to have read both of Sobel’s previous best-sellers, Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter, for history of science classes. I’ve skipped very little reading for any history of science classes, but those two I happened not to read, although I have both. Longitude I just forgot to buy, and by the time it came up on the syllabus I was too busy to find it. Galileo’s Daughter I read a little bit of, but either lost interest or just procrastinated too long. I don’t remember what I thought of it, but I’m looking forward to this new book; Sobel is widely acknowledged as an excellent writer. Soon I’ll be able to judge for myself (and for anyone who happens to read my review).

I’m also looking forward to read the four short articles that comprise the Focus section (entitled “The Generalist Vision in the History of Science”) of the new issue of Isis; all the authors are very prominent historians of science, and I’ve read and enjoyed the work of three of them in the past year (Robert Kohler, Steven Shapin, and Paula Findlen). And two of them (Kohler and Shapin) gave HSHM colloquia last year. Shapin was great to talk to (although his talk was not so great), and Kohler was also pretty interesting (even though he didn’t seem too impressed with my painting inspired by his book). Generalist history of science is what I’m all about (and tangentially, it’s what I wrote my paper about in “Intro to History of Science” last semester), so maybe these articles will inspire me further.

I’m almost done with Mary Terrall’s great Maupertuis book that we read half of last semester. I plan to seriously update his Wikipedia entry once I finish; currently it’s just straight from the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica (which is out of copyright), and hardly does Maupertuis justice.

Reading: The Man Who Flattened the Earth

No more work

Today was my last day working at Manuscripts and Archives (and yesterday was my last day sorting through the William Bullitt papers). It was definitely a good summer job for me… $10/hour, low stress, I got much more acquainted with how a world-class library operates, I got to see some interesting source materials (for example, gruesome photos from the Kent State shootings, and a hand-written draft of a congratulatory letter from American diplomat William Bullitt to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek right after the surrender of Japan in WWII), and I built a little bit of muscle hauling all those boxes. Plus, it never hurts for an historian to get in good with the archivists.

They threw me a miniature going-away party at Ashley’s Ice Cream… It was really nice getting all the compliments and appreciative remarks, and even though I’m glad I don’t have to work any more, it was a pleasant environment as far as work goes. Plus, my co-worker Michael offered to help with the move as I was leaving today, which I plan to take him up on.

Now it’s time to start packing for the move to Storrs. Faith is done with her organic chemistry class now, too, so we’ll have pretty much all week.

Obviously, I’ve made some changes to the blog (now blogs). I hope that in the future my academic blog, at least, will be worth reading for people who don’t know me and who will be uninterested in the other stuff. And Faith gets exasperated with all my nerdy ramblings when she reads my blog. Plus, I convinced her to start a blog. So this way, everyone is happy, except people who wanted to hang on every word I type regardless of subject; they will now have to do some clicking to find everything.

Aside from the obvious, I also signed up for a website traffic statistics, which seemed like the best, least invasive one availabe: StatCounter. I was always jealous of how Matt could learn so much about people just from the log of visiters on his site (like the interesting things people search for involving Ole Molvig, since Matt’s site was the first Google result for Ole’s name for a while). It’s quite impressive how much information you can track… already today, someone other than me has looked at my blog. And I even know that their host-name, which seems to indicate that they were in HGS 242 (I believe that is the HSHM program office, but the History Common room is right next door and they might share an IP); I suspect it was Brendan, since he’s one of the few people I’ve told about the site (and if Matt has found it through his site traffic reports, he would probably access it from his room). That’s scary, that I have much detail with very little effort! Makes me think I should disable cookies.

Welcome to Ragesoss

As of August 5th, 2005, this I’ve broken this blog up into sub-blogs, so that each is more specifically focused. And I’ve convinced Faith to start a blog. There will (probably) be no more postings in this section.

Ragesoss 2 is:

  • Ragesoss 2.01: for general goings on, movies, social life, cats, etc.
  • Ragesoss 2.02: for history, science, history of science, Yale, etc.
  • Ragesoss 2.03: for metablog issues, video games, software and other nerdy topics
  • Faith 1.0: Faith’s blog, and by default, also the blog of my bonzai sapling named Faith

TrackBacks

Trackbacks don’t quite work the way I thought they did. I assumed it was some automatic thing, where, as long as they were enabled, linking to another blog entry automatically created a trackback. In reality, you have to manually send a ping each time you want a trackback link to appear on a blog you link to.

HaloScan now provides my trackbacks and comments. It seemed at first like my native Blogger comments (all 3) were lost, but they are still there with the permanent links. HaloScan seems nice and non-invasive (and the link I added on the side was voluntary, though requested). When you try to add a comment, there is a pop-up that has a few ads, which must be how they provide the service for free (along with donations), but the ads are at the bottom, and don’t get in the way of anything.

Searching…

The topic of search engines (and the information and concepts they represent) is sort of why I started this blog in the first place, and I’ve been getting more interested. I remember I used to use dogpile long ago, when search engines were young and sucky. But then I found that Google produced results that were simply better in every possible way from the other engines (i.e., AltaVista, Yahoo!, and HotBot at the time).

But it’s no longer the case that Google produces the only good results. In fact, for some reason Google still hasn’t indexed this blog after about 2 months, but MSN has it indexed through last week. The other two main, unique search engines also turn up a few links not found on the others, mainly obscure forums, when I query “ragesoss.” One reason Google probably hasn’t indexed me is that no one links to me. I thought people would link to me through trackbacks and the like, but I found out they aren’t (natively) supported for Blogger. I’m trying to remedy that.

Amazingly, for results for the same query from Google, MSN, Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves, 84.9% of the results (from the first page) are unique to only one of the searches, meaning all four differ significantly from the others and may be valuable in certain situations: check it out.

I really am turning into a nerd. I mean, I am who I am, more or less who I’ve always been, but I’m awful young to be as eclectic as I’m becoming.

I found something else that I didn’t save from the computer disaster: I had commented on (pretty much line-edited) my friend and fellow historian Brenda’s whole long paper on the history of nursing at Yale, which we were going to discuss with Naomi Rogers (along with my own paper for her class). I thought I had saved the two or three files that were on the desktop that I hadn’t previously backed up, but alas, it’s nowhere to be found. Oh well.

I started a new project this week. Now, in addition to being in the middle of about 5 books, trying to study for German, working 2 jobs (kind of… they’re both at Manuscripts and Archives), trying to grow a bonzai (which I’ve named Faith… if it dies I’ll find a Faith II), and preparing to move in less than 2 weeks (along with the usual assortment of video games and ebay scouring), I’m learning how to program. Specifically, I’m learning Python, which is apparently a common language for open source projects. My goal is to be able to contribute something to open source recreation of Darklands. I’m going to try to program the character creation part (which is remarkably complicated, unfortunately).

We found the whole last season of Alias through the P2P program Shareaza, and it was good enough resolution that it looked like real HD when we hooked it up to the TV. I’m not really into it (although Jennifer Garner is fun to look at), but I do like how the main overarching plot is sort of (fictional) history of science themed.

Reading: The Man Who Flattened the Earth, Darwinian Heresies

Listening: Weakerthans, Pink Floyd, Tom Waits, Ruby 1

Watching: bits of Seinfeld