Self-employed as a writer/publisher/game designer, I am the author of two books, Discardia: More Life, Less Stuff and The Art of the Shim: Low-Alcohol Cocktails to Keep You Level. I hold degrees in History and Library Science, and am currently developing Kabalor, an inclusive indie game of storytelling and collaborative spellcasting.
MetaGrrrl.com is Dinah's personal site. It has been an active weblog since October 1998. It was hand-coded at first, then I became one of the first users of Blogger. After a while I decided I wanted more control over the management of my content and to host it myself. I investigated the two main options at the time, Greymatter and Movable Type and concluded that MT was a better fit for my technical skills. It was a tremendously rewarding move and I was very happy with the product. When the makers of Movable Type announced their new hosted service, TypePad, which would provide all the features of MT which I was using plus some exciting new ones all for significantly less than I was paying in hosting at the time, I joined the beta test and moved my site to TypePad at the earliest opportunity. Since then I've been greatly enjoying the ability to focus on my writing rather than on being my own system administrator.
The site began in 1998 as part of my senior thesis project for my Masters Degree in Library and Information Science. Initially, it consisted of work related to my thesis subject, "Documentation of the Design Process in Online Environments", plus a few odds & ends of personal writing and amusements. Prior to that I had made some webpages with small amounts of light, amusing content which found its way onto metagrrrl.com as "The Eclectic Encyclopedia". At the start of October 1998 I began writing brief pieces about what was going on in my life, interesting websites I had found and my comments on them. A week later I made a single page on which to lay out shorter, more informal pieces of writing in (if memory serves) reverse chronological order. In retrospect, once there was a word for it, one can say I began my weblog October 10th, 1998. In 2003, I began filling in my history before 1998 to transform my weblog into a full portrait of my life and what has been on my mind at various times in it.
Sharing information and liking things.