Splinters

I’ve spun off the Maya portion of this site to a new domain, www.buriedmirror.com. The name alludes to the ancient Mesoamerican practice of including mirrors in burial sites. There’s still a lot of moving of files to do, but eventually this will enable me to collect all my Mesoamerican material on one dedicated site.

Previously I had splintered off my San Francisciana to my site www.friscovista.com. That site does not receive as much traffic as this one (but I haven’t really worked at getting links yet). But I like the way it is accumulating a comparatively coherent body of material.

It raises the question of dedicated sites versus those where anything goes (like this one). When I ran my publishing company, Mercury House, I tried to be a traditional generalist house. Of course, while no book publishing is easy, niche publishing is easier than generalist publishing because it’s easier to establish an identity and it’s easier to define and reach a specific market segment.

Some bloggers invoke the 80/20 rule (for example, Google Blogoscoped, whose tagline is “80% Google”). The idea is that if 80 percent of your posts are on one topic the other 20 percent can be on whatever. There’s probably something to it. But — although this site tends to feature book- and print-related topics such as writing, translation, publishing, printing, art and photography, graphic design, and typography — I intend to keep it free-wheeling, not worrying about sticking to a particular topic.

Frisco Vista
main: www.friscovista.com
blog: www.friscovista.com/news/
feed: feeds.feedburner.com/friscovista

Buried Mirror
main:www.buriedmirror.com
blog: www.buriedmirror.com/latest/
feed: hburiedmirror.rightreading.com/latest/wp-rss.php