Apologies to regular readers for the reduction in the quantity (and possibly quality ;-) of posts in recent times.

I seem to be accruing unavoidable jobs at an alarming rate. Luckily, the end of the semester is only four weeks away, after which normal levels of service threaten to resume.

Secondly, thanks to Jon Carr who emailed me the cleaner, sharper Mail icon now splashed across Hawk Wing’s header. Very kind!personal, mail.app, apple mail, icon, doasisayandnotasido

Yesterday my six year-old son beat me handsomely and repeatedly at a highly addictive Flash game called “Bubble Shooter” :

I foresee years of humiliation stretching out unbroken into the future and only partially concealed under the cover of “supportive parenting”. personal, not apple mail, flash games, Oedipus Rex

Apologies. I’ve been so busy writing for money this week in the other place that I haven’t had much time to post on Hawk Wings. (The first week of the month is always the worst).

Last Friday was the site’s first birthday. It’s come a long way and got a lot more focussed than the first post promised.

Entirely by coincidence Hawk Wings celebrated by breaking through the 10,000 mark in Technorati’s blog ranking system. (Like Daniel Jalkut I find Technorati disturbingly addictive. No doubt that’s part of the secret to the site’s success).

It’s a questionable measure of quality, but it means there are now only 8,965 blogs you would rather be reading than this one. ;-)

It’s been a fun year for me. I’ve learnt a lot about blogging, about WordPress and about Mail and OS X’s other productivity apps. I’ve enjoyed the interaction with the readers more than anything perhaps and the new friendships it has brought.

The blog has done better than it deserves to. While it’s a labour of love and not designed to make a profit, it has landed me other paying jobs, which are starting to affect what I want to do day-to-day. Life-changing stuff.

There are also problems.

Last week I had another email from TextDrive, telling me that Hawk Wings probably needs to move. The email said that Hawk Wings regularly does “about 100K hits daily, with bandwidth ranging in 400 to 800 MB a day.” They started placing blocks on all traffic from particular sites to keep the server alive.

It’s putting to much load on the shared server and making life difficult for other users. Obviously, TextDrive is right; that’s not good and it’s not fair. TextDrive suggests moving to a more robust (and more expensive) hosting solution.

In the short-term, I’ve killed the tag cloud in the sidebar and a few other bits and pieces that increased the site’s demands on the server.

In the medium term, I’ll need to move to another hosting package, hopefully still with TextDrive. I really like its philosophy and the tech support is excellent. But either way, it will mean coughing up more money to keep the site alive.

Quite a few people have donated already. To them I am very grateful.

If you haven’t, I am asking you to help. If you like the kind of things that Hawk Wings posts about, if it has made your email life better or boosted your productivity, consider making a donation to support its future.

You can make a donation via the PayPal button on the blog’s front page or since you are doing me a favour, I’ll bring the button to you:

Here’s to another year as enjoyable as the first!Hawk Wings, apple mail, mail.app, email, productivity, personal, ical, address book, thunderbird, quicksilver

The USA must be having some kind of holiday. All bloggable news has dried up.

I toyed briefly with the idea of making some news up, but decided that Hawk Wings might as well have a little rest as well.

I hope that you enjoy the break. I know I will.

It is also a time for reflection, so here’s a small contribution from Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) (or possibly, Benjamin Franklin):

A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither.

mail.app, apple mail, personal, hawkwings, independence day, no news is good news

I’ve switched Hawk Wings to Markdown, partly because I keep reading how excellent it is, partly because I’m playing with the TextMate Blogging bundle and partly because it’s the weekend, so that if I bugger anything up no one will see.

If you see any messed-up posts as a result, please let me know.hawk wings, personal, textmate, blogging

I almost don’t believe it myself, but I have scored a proper job, posting about Macs for real money.

APC Magazine, one of Australia’s premier IT titles, has launched a swish, revamped web site featuring a number of individually themed blogs. And one of them is mine!

On X Factor , the site’s Apple blog, I’ll be able to get all the non-Mail.app stuff out of my system. There is an X Factor-specific RSS feed .

I have a much wider brief, allowing me to cover “hot new software and hardware, quality freeware and Mac OS X tips and tricks”. I am even allowed to have some opinions. Everything gets done over by a ferocious subeditor, so the quality will be better too.

The site soft-launched today, and you can already find posts there on Gmail tricks with Firefox , a great Take Control book that demystifies running Windows on your Mac with Bootcamp, Q or Parallel Workstation, finding Australian maps to use with Address Book and more.

Of course, it’s exciting for me. But it is also an innovative move in the Australian market.

X Factor is the first substantial and regular commitment to Apple by a mainstream IT publication, which like all the rest is otherwise dominated by Windows and Linux.

I like to think that it is a recognition of Apple’s growing market share and continuing importance as a trend-setter (Check out Mac OS X for a foretaste of Windows Vista, etc, etc). I hope too that it will make a few new friends for Apple as storm troopers from the Dark Side wander into X Factor by mistake.

Best of all, unlike some other offers I’ve had, Hawk Wings is able to continue as usual. This development brings you no relief from the usual torrent of posts about Mail.app, iCal and Address Book and email in general :)personal, hawkwings, apc magazine, apple, windows, X Factor, mail.app, apple mail

For the second year running, Whirlpool won the Best Technology Media Website at the Sun Microsystems IT Journalism Awards .

Whirlpool is (officially) Australia’s best broadband news and community forum site. Although it has strong links with the industry, it is staffed entirely by volunteers and enthusiasts.

It is an astonishing tribute to the power of an intelligent user community that it beat a number of competing commercial sites with professional full-time journalists and budgets in the hundreds of thousands, including ZDNet.com.au and CNet.com.au.

The awards ceremony was held in Sydney last Friday. I had the honour of accepting the award on behalf of the whole Whirlpool team and got to keep the trophy (temporarily), a beautiful bronze Frill-necked Lizard:

Disclaimer: I write for Whirlpool as a reporter.

When I first switched to Macs a few years ago, I found all the help and advice I needed in its Apple Mac forum , which is large enough to contain real experts and small enough to be friendly. I recommend it.

UPDATE: Here is a photo of me (courtesy of itjourno.com.au ) holding up the award in an unprofessional, enthusiast-like way so that the photographer can get a great action shot of the back of the framed award certificate :-)

personal, broadband, Australia, apple, macs, forum, news, you bloody ripper!