I’m happy to present an addition to this site that has been a long time coming. As my longtime readers know, there has never been a way to directly contribute to this site. When I first launched Literary Kicks six and a half years ago, my plan was to invite contributions by email. I would review these contributions, edit them, convert them to HTML — simple as that. This not-so-brilliant plan crash-landed about two years later. I just couldn’t keep up, and so I switched to plan B: avoiding my email and hiding out from my readers.
But even as I hid out, I never forgot my ultimate goal, which was to create a forum for many diverse voices. It’s taken me a long time to get my community publishing system off the ground — partly because as a technical architect and a Java programmer I needed to put a lot of thought into how to do this right. I’ve got a long way to go, but I’m ready to launch a few simple message boards. These are pretty basic — the innovative stuff is what I hope will come next.
In order to add this functionality I’ve had to move Literary Kicks from the server host that has been running it for years to a new host that specializes in Java servlet integration. If you are linking this site to the old URL, “http://www.charm.net/~brooklyn”, please change it to the permanent URL, http://www.litkicks.com, instead. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the folks at Charm.net for giving me such great service for six and a half years. I picked them in 1994 because I liked their name. Since then the internet has grown into the biggest cultural force of its time. It also produced a lot of hysterical investment activity that has now resulted in a minor stock crash. The Pets.com sock puppet was born, and the Pets.com sock puppet has died. But good companies like Charm.net stick around and gradually, intelligently evolve and grow. Litkicks is trying to do the same. So please check these new boards out, and please don’t hesitate to create a member name and be among the first to say hi!
Oh yeah — happy Martin Luther King Day, and happy 2001.
