I built the original craphound.com back in 1999, so that I could send Jim Van Pelt something to link to on his Campbell Awards site. I was the proverbial shoeless cobbler’s son: I had been earning my living on the Web for seven years, but I’d never bothered to build a personal site.

That was before there was anything like a blog-engine for easy management, so I did it all by hand, and I maintained it (or, in fact, didn’t maintain it) by hand for the intervening years.

It’s time to retire the old boy. The site did me well, but it’s an unmanageable mess. If you want to access it still, I’ve left all the old pages online — check them out here (if you must).

Now that I’ve got a sweet, ligthweight content management system on my back-end I’m hoping that I’m going to be able to keep the site more up-to-date, with each new publication and each new interview or press-mention.

Back in 2003, Mena Trott was kind enough to build me a website for my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, putting together a beautiful Movable Type template that was simple, elegant and flexible.

I’ve now implemented variations on that template three more times: for my short story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More, for my second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, and now for this re-design of Craphound.com itself (I’ll be re-implementing it again, shortly, for my next novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town).

Each time I re-implement this, I am struck anew by how easy and clean Mena’s design and implementation are. She is truly a virtuosa MT haxx0r, and I’m a lucky man to have had her assistance.

Thanks, Mena!