This weekend's bits and pieces...

The next AT Blog Carnival is coming up fast. They're accepting submissions until the 27th of October so you only have another week to get your posts submitted! It has the theme "Mad Scientist", and Lon says he's especially looking for posts about things created with assistive tech, and "how to" type posts but anything is welcome. It'll be posted on 31st of October at the AT Blog Carnival website.

I've updated ATMac's "About" page and created sub-pages for Joe Barnick and Paul Natsch, who regularly write articles for ATMac - well, they wrote their own pages actually. I'd like to give a big "thank you" to Paul and Joe too, for their recent articles. My goal is to publish three articles per week plus perhaps a round-up like this on a weekend which adds up to a lot of words - it really helps to have other people write articles sometimes! What's your favourite disability-relevant Mac topic? Want to write an article?

Other work has been going on lately behind the scenes. It will make ATMac easier to maintain in the long run and make it easier for people to find relevant articles in search engines, amongst other things, so it's worth doing. Unfortunately, it's the type of annoying work that takes a lot of time and makes absolutely no noticeable difference to the appearance of the site, so it feels rather like a black hole for my energy. On the plus side it doesn't take a lot of concentration, so I've been able to do it while I still have my brain fogged up by the virus I have at the moment.

In statistics news, you may be interested to know that ATMac is now seeing 700-900 different visitors on a regular day. This means that, overall, there's a lot of people out there who are interested in disability and Apple-related information which is good news for all of us. More people means more leverage and more possibilities that Apple will concentrate on assistive technology. Good stuff all around.

Have a good weekend, all.

- Ricky Buchanan

The Assistive Technology Blog Carnival Edition #6: Back to School Issue was released this week. It seems most of the bloggers are still on school holidays so the entries are a bit thin on the ground. The Mac AT bloggers can do better than this at representing ourselves in the blogosphere - submit something at the AT Blog Carnival website. You can submit articles for the carnival at any time - no need to wait until near the end of the month. Just pick a post you've made that talks about computers and disability in some way and submit away - it doesn't have to be a grand masterpiece or anything.

There's a new poll available on ATMac - this time we're exploring what Apple hardware you all own so select as many boxes as apply to you ... I added a box for "other" too, but I don't think I missed anything major. Here's the poll:

[poll id="3"]

You can find the poll on the right hand side of the web page all the time if you want to fill it in later, or want to watch the figures change as other people answer. I'm especially curious how many people have iPhones and iPod Touches because I'm so envious of you! Please leave comments if you have any further poll ideas.

There's another way to browse the archives now, with the new Categories page. There's a link to this page in the navigation bar at the top of the website pages, and it's listed on the Resources page also. The new page shows you all the categories that blog posts are listed in, so if you're looking for just the posts relevant to switch users, to VoiceOver users, to teachers, or any other specific topic, this is the place to go. A big thanks to Afuna for helping me with the behind the scenes code to make the page work - she spent a whole day figuring it out for me after I broke it (oops!) and I was tearing my hair out over it. Thanks Afuna, it's much appreciated.

That's all for now. What happened in your computing world this week?

- Ricky Buchanan