Hewn and Hammered

Hewn & Hammered is changing!

No, we're not becoming an ad farm. But things are changing around here, hopefully for the better.

I'll be giving up my singleminded focus on homebuilding, furniture, and the Arts & Crafts Movement, and incorporating more and more on my other interests - other aspects of craftsmanship, mainly, including typography, calligraphy and graphic design; textile design and technology; painting and other forms of visual art, and more.

I hope you find the little bits that I post here useful and interesting! - JLT

A New Focus for Hewn & Hammered

I want to start out by apologizing for the infrequent posts here in the last six months. Family responsibilities have kept me (happily!) very busy.

Thus, in an attempt to increase the amount of interesting, useful, readable content here, I've decided to change the focus of the site somewhat. While we will still focus on architectural and design issues, we'll expand a little bit - we'll still include content related to old homes & the modern and historical Arts & Crafts Movements, but I'll also be posting regular articles on more contemporary, non-A&C work.

Modern furniture, architecture and design objects - still, always, with an emphasis on the wood, the hand-made, the product of skilled craft - will become a big part of this site. I know some of you are not nearly as interested in this sort of thing, but I hope this will bring a large number of new readers here. I promise to keep posting things that fans of Arts & Crafts will appreciate, though!

A Sad Day for H&H: Ebay Hates Us

I had hoped to be giving you some good news today, but unfortunately I can't. I had been part of the Ebay affiliate program for several years, and had just hired a really excellent web developer to build us a gallery of Arts & Crafts items available for sale on ebay, with links to each item (the developer had previously built a similar gallery system for The Mid Century Modernist). Unfortunatelty, I just found out that Ebay has denied my third application (without explanation) to rejoin the affiliate program, and they won't accept a new application. Coincidentally, that website just received notice that they were no longer welcome as part of the program, either!

My plan was for two content streams here: editorial content on the left, a constant stream of interesting, hand-selected furniture items, metalwork, ceramics and other related items in the Mission Revival and Arts & Crafts styles on the right.

Well, now I have to pay the developer, without the income I'd hoped to have from the Ebay affiliate sales. Hopefully you can all visit our sponsors on the right and maybe that will go a tiny way toward my recouping this loss.

And if anyone else has suggestions for other affiliate programs that carry these types of items (I can't think of any!), let me know.

Finally, I've heard that a number of other blogs and websites that rely on the money they make as Ebay affiliates/partners are also starting to be dropped from the program. If you are a member of their program, beware.

Stickley Says Relax - redux

Due to popular demand (the previous run of green shirts has now sold out), here's a new version of the "Stickley Says Relax" shirt, this time printed-on-demand on a blue American Apparel short-sleeved shirt. $20, perfect for the American Craftsman aficionado(s) in your life.

Qu3stions.com

The main reason things have been slow around here - and I don't just mean as slow as they've been for the past year since I became a daddy, but really slow - is that I've been working on interviewing folks for Qu3stions.com, a new short-form interview blog. So far I've talked to technologist Anil Dash, journalist Chandler Burr, and typographer Gerald Lange; today's interview is with Thy Tran, a chef-instructor and food writer in San Francisco.

Know any especially interesting folks who would make a good interview? Post their names in the comment below, or drop me a line at the email link above.

time out for Bagcheck

Sorry I haven't been posting a whole lot here; I've been busy with a few other projects. One is yet another expression of my unfortunate materialism: check out bagcheck.net. I'll try to get moving on Hewn & Hammered again this coming week!

Our feed has moved!

Hi everybody. Due to the very confusing inner workings of Feedburner, Google Adsense & Google in general, our feed has had to move. If you're subscribing via reader, email, or in any other fancy modern way, please visit our new rss feed.

redesign in progress

As anal-retentive as I am about type, you'd think I'd iron out all the bugs before dropping the new template into place. This time, however, I've decided to be a bit more experiential. I still can't get the ads to work right (saving typelists and the custom html widget seem to time out upon trying to save the google ads code, but nothing else causes this odd behavior); I need to tighten up the 2-line headers, although I'll try to keep those to a single line in the future (any idea on the best way to do this via css?).

I'm open to additional suggestions for improvements - please do let me know what I should change, but remember that my level of technical expertise is not especially high, and I do need to lean on more-experienced friends for much of the implementation.

new baby; Hewn and Hammered languishes

There's a very good reason for the less-than-regular posts that have dotted Hewn & Hammered since New Years. We came home from Korea on 12.31 with this wonderful holiday present, whom I am happy to say is presently (and pretty much for the foreseeable future) going to be taking up all my time.

So it was pretty much the most awesome Christmas / Chanuka / New Years ever.

as if our discussion board wasn't enough...

we've now got a Hewn & Hammered chatroom, too. Talk about your house, ask questions, share advice ... just don't be rude.

They're still adding new features from time to time. Eventually I should be able to post logs of interesting conversations, etc.