Sorry for all the random housekeeping posts, but why stop now. If you want some good reading and dialog (okay, not all of it’s good) check out my 4th of July post.

I’ve been doing a lot of random things lately, so I thought I’d consolidate it all into one post and give you an update on things.

• The first is my website, ariahfine.com, which I mentioned yesterday. I’d still really like some feedback on it if you have a minute.
• I’ve been doing quite a bit of freelancing reporting for the Twin Cities Daily Planet. It’s been a good learning experience and helped me broaden my writing a bit. I hope to do mostly stories focusing on my community, but for now I’m trying a lot of different things just to get in the game. Anyways, two of my stories I just wrote actually turned out to be in the top five most read on the site. Here’s a screenshot:
  
  I wrote ‘Bike Cops Nab Bat Man‘ (and no, it’s not fictional) and ‘Book note: Pious parable parses presidential politics.’
• The project that’s been on my mind a lot is called the North Minneapolis Encyclopedia. It’s basically a Wikipedia specifically for North Minneapolis. For those who don’t know what a Wiki is, it’s a collaborative website, meaning anyone can add or edit content. Here’s just a couple reasons I think this could be beneficial. First, in an area like North, there are a TON of non-profits, churches and others who have programs to meet people’s needs, but rarely is there a central resource to know about them, and those that do exist are often incomplete, meaning a lot of people don’t know were to go for help. This site could allow anyone, from staff at the non-profit to a web-savvy patron, to edit the information on the site and keep it updated.
  If I can get others on board it could be come a valuable resource quite quickly. If it just me working a few minutes here and there it might take a while but it will still become a useful resource and collection of information I think. We’ll see what happens. I’d really love to find some partners in the project (even web-savvy, long distance interested parties who are good with a little google searching).
• On top of that project I’ve picked up a number of different web design projects for community groups. I’m doing a website for the Northside Food Project (focused on bringing health food options to North Minneapolis), another for Northside Resident Redevelopment Council, and another handful of other sites that are currently in the works. I’ll probably post links once they are each up and running and fully operational.
• A just wrote an article for the Sanctuary CDC
• I’m still meeting a lot of neighbors and trying to figure out my role and opportunity in the community
• Still working on a children’s book manuscript, hoping some connections will help get it going.
• Last, I’m working on trying to make a free pdf ebook about finances to post on my ever so popular Why I Ditched Dave Ramsey blog post.

That’s probably enough to bore you for now. Seems like one topic sort of dominated the conversation above, but it is what it is.