Not surprisingly, science fiction (though not overly successful at predicting its rise) has taken to this futuristic resource in a big way. But how to choose which sites to visit?

Here’s one way: visit the ones I visit!

Let’s start with general news sites. I’ve previously mentioned Locus Online, the website of the most important science fiction news magazine. Besides publishing news, links to interviews and reviews and more, there alone you’ll find a links page directing you to more sites than you could possible visit without the assistance of an army of clones. Locus Online is always at the top of my list.

I also like SF Signal, edited by John DeNardo. I like many of its regular features, including SF Tidbits, which provides links to interviews, news, articles, art and more every day of the week. There’s also a weekly roundup of free online fiction and the regular Mind Meld feature where writers are asked their opinion about some related topic (i.e., “The best opening scenes in science fiction,” “How to create drama for posthumans.”)

Then there’s SF Scope, “your source of news about the speculative fiction fields,” which is just what it says on the tin. Its many news and opinion features are edited by Ian Randall Strock (who bought two short stories from me back when he edited Artemis Magazine).

A third one is SF Site. This one is very focused on books, with tons of reviews, along with interviews and more. It has regular columns on both TV SF and graphic novels.

Moving on to writers’ organizations, there are three to mention. First and foremost is the website of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, which includes news about members, publishing news and (most valuable for those wanting to break into the field) some well-worth-your-time articles on the practice of writing SF and fantasy.

On this side of the border, there’s the site SF Canada, our homegrown equivalent of SFWA (I was president for a couple of years).

For those on the dark side, I should also point out the Horror Writers’ Association, at the easy-to-remember horror.org.

Looking for places to sell your science fiction and fantasy? There are numerous market-listing sites. One I like goes by the unlikely name of Ralan’s SpecFic and Horror Webstravaganza—or just Ralan.com for short. Ralan’s website has been around since 1994, and breaks down markets by pay: pro, semi-pro, token and “expo” (i.e., no pay!). He lists both book and short-fiction markets, and also tracks response times.

Of course, just about everyone who is already selling science fiction and fantasy has a website. I have two: edwardwillett.com and leearthurchane.com. One you should definitely check out (besides mine!) is Robert J. Sawyer’s, at sfwriter.com (Rob was a very early Web pioneer, which is how he landed such an awesome URL; SFWRITER is also his license plate!).

You should also pay a visit to Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s site. Rusch is the author of the invaluable Freelancer’s Survival Guide, and regularly posts long, thoughtful essays on the state of publishing today—and how writers can surf the waves of change and hopefully arrive safe on the other side of that dangerous reef we call electronic publishing.

There are some interesting group blogs run by science fiction writers, as well. Deadline Dames is a fun one: subtitled “Nine authors, one website, no excuses,” it details the writing adventures of Devon Monk, Jackie Kessler, Jenna Black, Karen Mahoney, Keri Arthur, Lilith Saintcrow, Rachel Vincent, Rinda Elliott and Toni Andrews, working mainly in the field of urban fantasy.

I also like Science Fiction and Fantasy Novelists, an invitation-only group blog with an impressive list of contributors and always-interesting posts. (I particularly recommend “A Writer’s Letter to Santa,” which any writer, SF- or non, should find amusing.

Finally, no list of sites would be complete without Writer Beware, a publishing industry watchdog group sponsored by SFWA with additional support from the Mystery Writers of America. Writer Beware “shines a bright light into the dark corners of the shadow-world of literary scams, schemes, and pitfalls” and also provides “industry news, writing advice, and a special focus on the wacky things that happen at the fringes of the publishing world.” If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Check it out at Writer Beware first!

This only scratches the surface. There are dozens more that could be listed. But the Web being the linkful place it is, any one of these sites will lead you to some of those dozens more.

And when you think about it, what better use could there be of today’s science-fictional technology than using it to learn more about science fiction?

The first book was Meningitis. Stiff neck? You bet. Of course, I was sitting and typing for hours on end, but I’m sure that was just a coincidence. I also wrote Arthritis (my fingers are still stiff), Ebola Virus (Ebola starts with flu-like symptoms; gee, thanks, that’s specific!), Alzheimer’s Disease (which I can barely even remember writing) and Hemophilia, which at least had the advantage of being a genetic disorder that you’re born with, so it wasn’t anything I could catch.

But just because I’m not writing books about diseases any more doesn’t free me from the tendency to suspect that every minor symptom that crops up could be the sign of the fatal disease or debilitating condition I’m always sure is lurking around the next birthday. (And yes, I did turn 50 a couple of years ago…why do you ask?)

Headache? Brain tumor! Tingling sensation? Multiple sclerosis! Itch? Incurable skin infection!

What I’m really suffering from, of course is cyberchondria: hypochondria exacerbated by the plethora of medical information available, just a few keystrokes away, on the Internet.

This is so common a condition that there’s a Wikipedia entry for it, and where better to turn to information about an Internet-fueled problem than Wikipedia?

Hmm. On second thought, let’s turn to the New York Times.

In an article dated November 25, 2008, John Markoff wrote about the results of a study, conducted by Microsoft, of health-related Web searches on popular search engines, combined with a survey of the company’s employees. “The study,” Markoff wrote, “suggests that self-diagnosis by search engine frequently leads Web searchers to conclude the worst about what ails them.”

Well, duh. But why?

Which isn’t to say you should ignore symptoms, of course; but you shouldn’t jump to conclusions, either. Star Trek: Voyager may have featured a computer-generated doctor, but for the moment, you’re better off going to the real thing.

Oh, and avoid writing books about diseases. That’ll help, too.

The photo: December hoarfrost, Regina, Saskatchewan

At just about the time I came to that conclusion, Justine Larbelestier‘s new site went live. I liked the look of it, and she seemd pleased with the service she had gotten from PagedMedia, which specializes in writers’ sites. So I contacted Stephanie Leary there and we began the process of designing the new, improved, edwardwillett.com.

And now, just in time for the launch of Terra Insegura, here it is! It’s much cleaner and simpler. Not everything made the journey over from the old site, which was getting quite dated-looking, but among the things that did make the journey were all of my science columns, reconfigured as blog posts, dated (as close as I could figure, anyway) to when they were originally written. (Which is why I now have “blog posts” that predate the World Wide Web by two years!)

I suspect I’ll take a big hit in visitors until the search engines catch up with the new URLs for my columns, which have driven the bulk of the traffic to this site. But it needed to be done!

So take time to poke around the site and let me know what you think. Now that it’s up and running I’ll be tweaking it myself going forward.

And thanks to PagedMedia for all their work!

Pretty cool! And to think kidnappers used to have to do this by cutting letters out of magazines.

Desiring Lord appearing?
Expecting Lord’s return? A pleasant surprise is awaiting you
http://www.hidden-advent.org/

The Crucifixion of Jesus
& the Truth About What Happened to the Catholic Church After VaticanII
http://www.mostholyfamilymonastery.com/

Jesus Christ’s Real Story
Who Was Jesus Christ & What Did He Really Teach? Find Out In Free Book
http://www.gnmagazine.org/

Catholic
Your Catholicism guide on the web. Visit Beliefnet.com and learn more
http://www.beliefnet.com/

Does Google know something about my book I don’t?

***

“What’s for dinner?” is a question whose answer can inspire joy, dread, or simply ennui. We all have our favorite recipes, and a few that are far from our favorites. But we get tired of even our favorite things if we get them night after night. And we get tired of our least-favorite things even faster.

What to do? Why, turn to the Internet, of course.

Back when home computers were first being talked about, it was always said you could keep your recipes on them. Now we’ve come full circle with recipes on the World Wide Web…and then some. After all, with a Commodore 64 or TRS-80 you might have been able to keep a few dozen of your own recipes on your computer, but with access to the Web, you’ve got millions at your fingertips.

I always head first to a site called Epicurious, which is run by the folks that bring you Gourmet and bon appétit magazines. It’s subtitled “for people who love to eat,” and that’s a pretty good description.

There’s a lot more than just recipes here, of course. There are articles on cooking techniques, dining and travel, kitchen equipment and much more.

But even if it’s just recipes you’re after, you won’t be disappointed.

Since the next holiday of note is St. Patrick’s Day, I decided to see what I could turn up on Epicurious with a recipe search for “green,” and was rewarded with 4,798 results, beginning with “Green Bean, Orange and Green Olive Salad.”

That seemed a bit overwhelming, so I narrowed the search to “green” and “Irish,” and ended up with a more manageable list: Irish Stew, Irish “Bacon” and Cabbage, Irish Pub Salad, Spinach Soup with Green Onions, Venison Medallions with Juniper and Orange, Beef and Guinness Pie, Potato and Cabbage Bundles, Easy Split Pea Soup. I’m sure you could put together a fine, fine St. Paddy’s day feast with that selection.

Just for fun, I also searched the drink recipes, and was rewarded with “Green Tea and Citrus Whiskey Punch,” which at least would be nice change from beer with food coloring in it.

Among the other useful features my wife and I have found at Epicurious is a food dictionary, so if, for example, you run across a recipe calling for harusame, you will know that you need to go buy some Japanese noodles made from soybean, rice or potato flour.

If the recipes at Epicurious sound a bit…adventurous…you might prefer to look at some older-fashioned recipes from, say, fifty years ago.

Or a thousand.

Or two thousand, for that matter.

Oldfashionedcooking.com offers “old-fashioned recipes from vintage cookbooks.” Their recent additions, when I visited, included corn bread, egg salad, and various cakes and cookies.

A search “Irish” here got me Irish Apple Pie, Grated Irish Potato, Chocolate Blancmange (which involves something called Irish moss, which, a quick visit back to Epicurious’s food dictionary informed me, is carrageen, “a stubby, purplish seaweed found along the west coast of Ireland, as well as America’s Atlantic coast,” that, dried, is used as a thickening agent), and, of course, Irish Stew.

If the recipes from vintage cookbooks aren’t old enough for you, you might want to visit Medieval Cookery, which is just what it sounds like: a site devoted to medieval cooking, complete with recipes, links to online medieval cookbooks, a dictionary of Middle-English cooking terms, and even a selection of food related paintings. Here you can find recipes for everything from “Gyngerbrede” to Candied Horseradish, Parsnip Pie, Rique-Manger (eggs and apples), Cinnamon Soup and Pochee (poached eggs with custard sauce).

Or you can go even further back and try some of the handful of authentic ancient Roman recipes posted at NOVA Online, the website for the popular PBS science program. Seasoned Mussels, Boiled Eggs in Pine Nut Sauce, Lucanian Sausages, Mulsum (honeyed wine), Garum Fish Sauce, Pear Patina and Libum (sweet cheesecake) are all on the menu.

As you can probably tell, if you go old-fashioned enough, your recipes start getting adventurous again. But what about those occasions when adventurous is exactly what you’re looking for?

Then you might try Nick Paine’s Exotic Kitchen. Nick Paine calls himself “The World’s Only Culinary Archaeologist,”and in his pictures he looks like a cross between an aging rock star and a Hell’s Angel. He likes to travel the world and try some of humanity’s more exotic fare right where it originates. So, on his list of “Top Ten Expedition Meals” you can find Armadillo Ranchera, Cretan Snails, Iguana and Sarapatera (freshwater turtle stew cooked in the turtle’s own cleaned shell). You might have trouble getting the ingredients—Superstore doesn’t carry Armadillo, as far as I know—but it’s interesting to read the recipes.

Of course, lots of people have their own favorite recipes (though perhaps not for Iguana) they’d love to share with others—and there are plenty of places to do that online, too.

One I came across is called the GardenWeb Recipe Exchange, part of GardenWeb, “The Internet’s Garden & Home Community,” and it’s essentially a message board where people both post recipes and post requests for recipes. When I visited this week, the most recent message was a recipe for Pancake Sandwiches. A couple of messages down, someone was looking for cooked salsa recipes; someone else was looking for an authentic chow mein recipe. And they found them, too!

Now, I enjoy cooking, and I’m not ashamed to say so. But if you have a masculine self-image you’d like to bolster while you’re wearing a frilly apron in the kitchen, you can always remind yourself that cooking is a very scientific endeavour. And if anyone questions that, point them to The Science of Cooking, a site created by San Francisco’s Exploratorium, the original science museum. There are sections on eggs, pickles, candy, bread, spices, seasoning and meat, webcasts on topics like the science of bread, answers to weekly questions (This week’s: “What can I do about bitter eggplant?”) and, yes, recipes.

So: if you don’t like the answer to the question, “What’s for dinner?”, surf the Web, and change it.

Just don’t blame me if your kids don’t eat your Armadillo Ranchera.

***

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” author L.P. Hartley famously wrote to begin his 1953 novel The Go-Between. And like most foreign countries, while we might not want to live there, we often enjoy visiting it.

And where better to visit it than on the World Wide Web, which, I’ve decided for the sake of a metaphor, is rapidly becoming the world’s attic. It’s the place where you put old things you don’t quite know what to do with but aren’t willing to get rid of, with the big difference that, unlike your attic, the whole world is free to rummage around in the stuff you put there.

Of course, there are millions of sites devoted to the past in some form, but I decided to focus on a few that bolster my “Internet/attic” theme. They also happen to be personal favorites.

I’ll start with the more distant past. There are thousands of sites devoted to various historical eras, but one site I’ve really been enjoying isn’t about the usual sort of history. Rather than being focused on text, it’s focused on images. It’s called BiblioOdyssey. A fellow named Paul, who lives in Sydney, runs the site—blog, really—and he describes it as “wonderful things made by other people.”

It’s an excellent description. Paul scours the net for fantastic images from old documents and posts his finds.

When I visited the site, for example, the top post was from Wolfenbüttel Digital Library, and displayed a fascinating series of illustrations of the rulers of Hungary from the 10th century up until 1664, which is when the book they’re taken from was published. (It’s extremely long Latin name translates as Mausoleum of the Most Powerful Kings and Dukes of Hungary.)

Below that, Paul had posted some gorgeous examples of ornamental typography from the 16th, 17th and 18th century; below that, beautiful colored images from a 15th century edition of the famous maps drawn by the Greek astronomer Ptolemy around 160 A.D. And so on, and so on.

There are ample links to the original sources of all this material, so that a visit to BibliOdyssey can quickly draw you into some of the oldest and most intriguing sections of the Internet attic.

Of course, not very many people have stuff from the 15th century in their attics, so I may be undercutting my thesis here. Let’s look at some sites focusing on the more recent past, shall we?

One of my interests, of course, is science and technology, and as it happens, there are some terrific sites that focus on old technology: inventions that never took off, early versions of the things we take for granted today, all that kind of stuff.

One I found is The Museum of Retro Technology, which has pretty awful page design but lots of interesting information.

Where else can you find out about the the Leyland Steam lawnmower, one of the first power mowers, produced for just a few years at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries? Oil-fired, about six feet tall, and requiring careful maintenance to ensure that it didn’t rupture and maim or kill its operator, it was not built in large numbers.

At the same site, you’ll discover that James Bond was not the first to carry lethal gadgets: there are images of a knife, spoon and fork set, each of which has a built-in flintlock pistol, dating back to 1715. (Oddly, the barrels point at the user, not other guests, so it’s hard to imagine exactly how they would have been used, unless one was literally interested in shooting off one’s mouth.)

Another retro-tech site I’ve been enjoying is another blog. It’s called Modern Mechanix, and it consists entirely of photos and articles scanned out of old copies of Modern Mechanix, Mechanics Illustrated, Popular Science and similar magazines.

The most recent offerings when I last dropped by included an article from the July, 1940, issue of Popular Science about one George Spiegel of Elizabeth, New Jersey, who liked to attach special lightweight reed pipes to the tail feathers of his pigeons so that “when they fly, a musical whistling flows from their feathers,” and, from the August, 1934, issue of Modern Mechanix, an item on the fascinating invention of Paul H. Rowe, a Los Angeles sound engineer: an automatic device that would answer his phone and record a message when he was out.

Yeah, like that would ever catch on.

One thing lots of people have in their attics are old photographs, and, yes, there are sites devoted to them.

My favorite goes by the unusual name of Shorpy. I’ll let it describe itself: “Shorpy.com is the 100-year-old photography blog that brings our ancestors back, at least to the desktop. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a boy who worked in an Alabama coal mine near the turn of the century.”

The photos on Shorpy are high-resolution, and range in time from the dawn of photography up until about the 1940s. Recent photos have included images of the damage caused to southern towns by cannon fire during the Civil War, sharecroppers living in poverty in the Deep South, child workers in early 20th century textile mills, incredibly vibrant color images of women working in airplane factories during the Second World War, and a picture taken from a New York skyscraper very early in the last century.

One of the most interesting things about Shorpy: anyone can join and upload their own vintage photographs—whether found in the attic or not.

Of course, we don’t just rummage in the attic to be educated or wax nostalgic. Sometimes we like to point and laugh at stuff from old fads. Are, yes, there sites that get a lot of fun out the past.

One of the best, is The Institute of Official Cheer, which is a section of the website run by James Lileks, a former columnist and now a daily blogger for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. He’s also the author of several books that poke fun at the recent past, including The Gallery of Regrettable Food and Gastroanomalies, both of which offer up awful-sounding (and looking) recipes from the past, and my favorite, Interior Desecrations, which pokes fun at 1970s interior design. Online, you can find outtakes from some of those books, plus lots of other stuff: he pokes fun at bad comic books, old ads, postcards of motels from all over North America, and…well, just about anything he can find and scan.

After all, while the past is a different country, it’s unlike a real country in one important aspect: you can point your finger at all the funny things its residents did and laugh all you want without offending anyone.

Just remember, in fifty year’s time, our descendants will be pointing and laughing at us, too.

***

The gala opening of the new Persephone Theatre in Saskatoon last week had Saskatchewan people thinking about live theatre.

Of course, I think about live theatre all the time, since I’m often involved in one production or another as an actor or director, so this week I compiled a collection of links to sites on the Internet you can go to when you, too, want to know more about theatre.

I started right here in Saskatchewan with our two premiere professional companies, Persephone Theatre in Saskatoon and Globe Theatre in Regina.

At both sites, as you would expect, you can read about current and upcoming productions, buy tickets, see photographs, and more. There’s a bit of information about the history of the new theatre, and some photographs from the early days of construction, that might be of particular interest on the Persephone site right now.

One thing you can’t do at the Persephone site that you can do at Globe’s site is buy tickets online. In fact, if there were some sort of competition for Best Website by a Saskatchewan Theatre Company, which there isn’t, I’d have to give it to Globe Theatre. Its site was recently redesigned and is very slick and easy to use, but then, I suspect Persephone Theatre’s been more focused on its building than its website recently.

Both sites also offer information about their history, their children’s and educational programs, and so on.

Of course, many other Saskatchewan theatre companies, large and small, also have websites: Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan, Regina Little Theatre and Regina Lyric Light Opera and other community companies, Saskatchewan Native Theatre Company, Dancing Sky Theatre, Saskatoon Opera…the list goes on and on.

The best place to start if you’re looking for an overview of Canadian theatre in general is probably Theatre Canada. They describe themselves as “a planning guide for live theatre outings,” and provide links to more than 450 Canadian theatres, arranged by province, area and city. There’s also a kid-friendly section with information about children’s theatre, theatre camps, workshops and schools, a news and reviews section, and even free e-greeting cards with performing arts themes.

A lot of theatres aren’t included in their listings, though (apparently they charge a small one-time fee for a theatre to be listed), so don’t consider the site comprehensive. In Saskatchewan, for instance, they only list Globe, Persephone, and Regina Little Theatre.

A rather different resource is the Canadian Theatre Encylopedia, which began life as “The Encyclopedia of Canadian Theatre on the WWW,” back in 1993. Started by Gaetan Charlebois, a theatre editor with Montreal’s Hour Magazine, it’s goal is to create and maintain online a highly accessible database of information about Canadian actors, playwrights, directors, producers, designers, theatre organizations and institutions, composers and plays. It’s currently hosted and maintained by Athabasca University.

Moving beyond Canada’s borders, the premiere theatre site of all would have to be the online home of Playbill magazine. Here you’ll find the latest news about new productions of plays and musicals, and not just in New York: there’s news from Toronto, the U.K., all over. There are photographs, quotes, video clips and, of course, the latest Broadway grosses: I can tell you, for example, that last week, the musical Wicked was the top-grossing show on Broadway, bringing in $1,373,768 from 13,888 paying customers, for an average ticket price of $98.77. It’s playing in the 1,809-seat Gershwin Theatre, which was 96 percent full.

I also enjoy Broadway World, with a similar mix of information but presented with a bit more multimedia flash: you can watch good-resolution clips of Broadway World TV here, for example, which features backstage interviews (and a look at performances) of new shows, such as The Little Mermaid, which just opened. Broadway World also posts lots of photographs from opening night parties, just to emphasize the fact that you are not the kind of person who gets invited to the opening parties of Broadway shows.

Well, at least I’m not.

Less glitzy is Curtain Up, “The Internet Theater Magazine of Reviews, Features, Annotated Listings,” founded in 1996 by Elyse Sommer and (I’m guessing from the look of it) not significantly redesigned since then. Still, it’s an active site that solicits reviews and news from…well, you, if you want to try your hand writing for them. It covers New York, London, Berkshires, Philadelphia, California, New Jersey and “Elsewhere.” It even reviews a few restaurants.

So if you’re seeking theatre information, you’ll find a ton of it online. Just don’t lose track of time while you’re looking at all this stuff.

You wouldn’t want to miss the curtain of the live, not-on-the-computer theatre that’s probably happening somewhere near you tonight.

You can browse it to see what’s in each issue, but you can’t, unfortunately, access the complete articles for free:

Access is by site license for institutions, or articles can be purchased individually.

However, you can visit History of the Journal Nature for a multimedia celebration of the journal’s history.

This BBC story has more.

(Via MedGadget.)

***

Over the past few years the growing use of computers and the Internet has contributed a lot of weird new words to our language. People talk about ROM and RAM and “megs of memory,” Googling and websurfing and more. But one of the weirdest words of all is blog, which sounds more like something you have to clean up—“Dear, the dog left a big blog on the sidewalk, can you take care of it?”—than anything to do with computers.

But, in fact, blogging is big—and you can try it yourself for free.

A blog is simply a series of posts that are displayed on a web page in reverse chronological order: in other words, the freshest post is at the top, and as you scroll down, you move back in time.

The word blog—which I agree is ugly, but we seem to be stuck with it—is short for Web log.

Exactly who invented the Web log is amatter of intense debate, at least among the kind of people who intensely debate things like this.

According to an article on CNET News.com last year celebrating the 10th anniversary of blogging, Dave Winer, who launched Scripting News on April 1, 1997, claims it as the longest currently running Web log on the Internet: but he didn’t originally call it a Web log.

The term appears to have been invented by Jorn Barger, a programmer, futurist, and James Joyce scholar to describe his site RobotWisdom.com, which he started in December, 1997. It was essentially a day-by-day log of what he was reading and thinking about. He needed something to call it, and came up with WebLog. He also says Winer’s site wasn’t really a blog because “he mixed up the reverse-chronological ordering too much,” and that RobotWisdom.com was the first blog.

Peter Merholz of Peterme.com shortened WebLog to “blog,” and since people always prefer short words, a new four-letter word (albeit not a swear word, except perhaps for the occasional old-media news reporter who finds him or herself scooped by one) entered the vernacular.

As of last April, Technorati was tracking more than 70 million blogs worldwide—and at the time was seeing about 120,000 being created every day, or about 1.4 per second.

Of course, not all of those are active: a lot of people start blogs and then let them fall by the wayside when they discover it’s actually quite a bit of work keeping one going. In any event, the odds are hardly anybody is going to read them: most blogs get only a handful of readers, or none at all, on any given day.

Some, however, get more. A lot more. As of this morning, the truth laid bear, which tracks these things, had the gadget blog Gizmodo at the top of the list, with 2,466,128 visits per day. But the 5,000th most popular blog was only getting around 200 visitors a day. Most get far, far fewer.

If you’d like to try blogging, there are several places that host blogs for free. The biggest is probably Blogger, which is owned by Google. It’s easy to get started: you go to the main page, create an account, give your blog a name, choose a template (which determines the look of the blog) and you’re off and running.

You can post either by visiting the website or simply by emailing a special address.

Blogger makes it easy not only to post text, but to upload pictures and video. And you can jump in and modify the template as much as you like—moving things around, changing the look of your posts, changing the background, whatever—all for free.

One of the nicest bits of blogging software is WordPress. Normally you install WordPress on your own webhost, but that can be a bit of a hassle and isn’t something a novice is going to want to mess with. If you’d like, you can instead get an account at WordPress.com and create your blog there. WordPress.com provides statistics, so you can see ho many visitors you are (or aren’t) getting and which pages they visit. WordPress also lets you create regular Web pages as well as blog posts, so you could use it to host a complete website with a blog component.

A couple of other free blog hosts are BlogText.org, although it doesn’t let you modify your page as much as some of the others, eBloggy, BlogDrive and tBlog. Be aware that some of these free sites place advertisements on your blog which you’ll probably have no control over.

Big sites like MySpace and LiveJournal host blogs, to. One of the interesting things about MySpace and LiveJournal is that you can make “friends” out of other people on the service, who will then automatically be notified on one of their pages of any new posts you put up (and vice versa).

But you can achieve that same goal with most blogging software through something called RSS feeds (RSS stands for “Real Simple Syndication”). People can subscribe to your feed, and then, rather than have to actually visit your blog, can read your posts using a something called a feed reader, which presents everything in a uniform format on a single page. My favorite is Google Reader: I subscribe to dozens of blogs using it and can scroll through the posts rapidly to see which ones I actually want to read.

Of course, as well as read blogs, I maintain my own. My main one is called Hassenpfeffer, and is hosted by Blogger; I copy it to LiveJournal and MySpace, as well. I also maintain a blog for SF Canada, the association of professional speculative fiction writers in Canada, which highlights writing-related news from our members, and I’m one of the group bloggers at a site called Futurismic, which focuses on future trends and interesting science trends from a science-fiction lovers’ perspective.

Oh, and then I have a couple of blogs which have gone completely inactive, but we won’t talk about those.

And how many visitors do I get at my blogs every day, you ask?

Oh, will you look at that. I’m out of time.