Possibly my most enthusiastic feedback ever!

It’s a pity you don’t have a donate button! I’d without a doubt donate to this brilliant blog! I suppose for now i’ll settle for bookmarking and adding your RSS feed to my Google account.
I look forward to brand new updates and will talk about this blog with
my Facebook group. Talk soon!

Too bad it’s from an obvious spammer, sigh. 🙂

In a related off-topic rant, Gmail is pissing me off just a little. Not only do they appear to be dead-set to ram their tiny ‘New Compose Window’ down my throat, even though I really don’t like trying to organize an email in such a small space, but when I tried to send them feedback, their ‘Send Feedback’ window was so freakin’ huge that I couldn’t see or find the SEND button on my netbook. I managed to send it off by clicking on some text and then hitting the Enter key, but that’s not really a good user experience, Google guys.

I understand that you’re excited about rolling out new toys, and that it makes support harder if the users have hundreds of different interface choices, but I like the Old Compose Window!

My ISP is doing the same thing with their webmail – they got rid of the nice, simple, quick, easy to use mail interface and replaced it with some complex monstrosity that’s trying too hard to look like Outlook and requires Java. Sigh. At least I can simply access my ISP email through my iPhone.

Staking a claim on my literary name

Well, I mentioned yesterday that I have a brand-new twitter handle, and that’s just a part of what I’ve been doing to finally ‘stake my claim’ to the name Chris Kelworth around the internet. Generally, I’ve been following the checklist laid down by Lani and Alastair on the rather staticky podcast episode Storywonk Sunday: Cuddling Afterwards. In addition to the twitter username change to @ChrisKelworth, I have:

• Registered chriskelworth.com and set it to forward to the kelworthfiles.wordpress.com address for the time being.
• Signed up to gmail as chriskelworth@gmail.com
• Opened up a facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/chris.kelworth

The idea is to establish yourself in all these places where potential readers might be looking for you, before somebody else comes along and takes the same names – or if you find that one of them is already taken, you want to find that out as soon as possible so that you can make alternate plans – whether that’s changing your pen name or signing up with a variant and beginning to promote that address.

If you’re an author or a writer, have you done any of these things to claim your name? Tell me all about it in the comments.