Pigs, Gourds, and Wikis

I've been meaning to explain the name of my blog for some time now. It may seem like a very strange name, given the focus on all things EPUB lately. I mean to write about the other parts of the pigs, gourds, and wikis triad, really I do. You see, I live on a farm, and we raise chickens, sheep, cows, and an occasional pig, though there are no pigs this year since we're about to move to Barcelona for a spell. We have had as many as 75 chickens at once (50 for meat and 25 laying hens), and this year we got our first calf, Julieta.

That means we're milking once a day (and letting Julieta do the evening shift). Though “we” is a misnomer, since I've been holed up in my office tending to the “wikis” part of my life pretty steadily for the last four or five months.

The gourds piece is the part of me that loves to create things. When I started this blog, I was growing, drying, cleaning, carving, and painting gourds, not necessarily in that order. I had a short-lived run at selling them too, though that wasn't nearly as fun as making them. The problem is that now I have big boxes of beautiful, but neglected gourds. But on other days I've been known to sew, and to knit, to weave, to garden, to make crazy snowflakes out of origami paper, and to write web pages.

These days, however, all the focus seems to go to the wiki part of the trio. I'm busy writing a book on EPUB, or how to create electronic books that look especially good on the iPad and as good as possible on less graphic environments like the Barnes and Noble Nook, or even Adobe Digital Editions. Just for the record, “wikis” is more a metaphor than anything else, though I did create an exhaustive guide to iPhoto Book Themes using a wiki for structure.