If you are getting this via RSS and want to stay subscribed, you’ll want to update your feed subscription to point to the URL https://davidmallard.id.au/feed/ – at the moment this redirects to FeedBurner, but soon I’ll be updating the server configuration so the feeds will be delivered directly from my website.

No promises that there will be new content coming or how frequently you might get updates, but with the fragmentation of social media communities and the experience of seeing how publishing on third-party sites can come undone (e.g., a decent chunk of the articles I wrote back in the day and linked to from here have disappeared from the Internet), if I do want to publish anything substantial then it’s likely to happen here.

The post Updating this site’s RSS feeds appeared first on David Mallard.

• At the end of 2012 I left my ivory tower career behind and resigned from Charles Sturt University.
• For the past year I’ve been working as a Policy and Legislation Adviser with Jan Barham. I also did a little work while on leave from CSU for Jeremy Buckingham.
• In August and September I took a short hiatus from my job and contested the federal election (big thanks to First Dog for the drawing I got to use to announce my candidacy).
• Home base remains Orange but work keeps me in Sydney from Monday to Friday most weeks.

I haven’t written much during that time, outside of work. As we get to the end of a year I have some ideas in mind for things I’d like to approach differently and ways I can improve my sense of wellbeing. I’m not a fan of resolutions but do like to have goals and some semblance of a plan for how to achieve them. And writing more, especially on this site, fits into that.

Although I don’t expect to formally publish much work for the foreseeable future, I do think communicating some of my ideas and experiences helps me by opening the door to more reflection and interaction. I still hang about on social media a bit, but I intend to start busing this as more of a home base for thoughts that won’t fit into a tweet.

Someone linked me to a post by Frank Chimero the other day about fragmentation and his plans to build a personal site – “the internet version of a quiet, cluttered cottage in the country.”

I have no more idea than him about what that will look like. It will probably be different for each of us. And I don’t expect I’ll really know until it’s done, which it never will be. But I’m starting by modifying the site’s setup to suit the things I’d like to do. Once that’s done I’ll be in a position to post more, and I hope to follow through on that.

Stay tuned. Meanwhile, enjoy Christmas time and have a happy New Year.

The post Previously… appeared first on David Mallard.

If you don’t already know much about me, I won’t say too much by way of introduction here – other content on these pages will fill you in about who I am. A short list of terms should suffice: a researcher and lecturer; a writer and blogger; a political analyst and communicator; a father and friend.

A few notes about this site. There will end up being a few posts that display publication dates earlier than this launch post – they are items of work I had published or accepted for publication in 2010. I would like readers to be able to locate them, but I also want the posts here to match up with the timing of the actual published work.

The appearance of the site is a work in progress. To get the site online and allow me to begin writing and publishing, I have launched the site using a child theme I built for Justin Tadlock’s Prototype theme for WordPress. One of my plans for 2011 is to extend my web design and development skills, with the aim of producing a new theme for this site that makes full use of emerging web standards (e.g., HTML5 and CSS3), has a distinctive but functional design and is accessible. In the meanwhile, I expect to continue tweaking the current theme, so that the look and feel may change from time to time in some (hopefully) subtle ways.

The subsidiary information on these pages covers some things that may well be obvious but are best made explicit. When I express an opinion on this site, it should not be taken as representing the views of anyone I work for or with. I welcome open discussion and robust debate, but I am the publisher of this site and the judgments about which comments or commenters are unacceptable are mine. Pseudonymous commenters are welcome; anonymous comments and sockpuppetry are not.

In the sidebar sections you will also find links to help you find what you’re interested in on this site, and to communicate or connect with me online and across social media. I hope you will take some time to check this site out, come back to visit, and I look forward to getting the opportunity to discuss with you all the things I am writing about and working on.

The post Open appeared first on David Mallard.