Quick Notes..

Hello all..

Spent last weekend in Gatlinburg, Tennessee . Had a little shopping to do. I also found time to visit Dave Mann at Gatlinburg Magic Shop in Gatlinburg. I always stop in when I'm on that side of the mountains. Dave is a true professional, and can assist you with virtually anything to do with magic...

He's not hard to find either.. Gatlinburg Magic Shop (Matrix Magic) is in the five story mall located on main street in the center of town, about a stones throw from Ripley's Aquarium..

I've finished my upcoming issue of eMagic Deluxe. It won't publish until Wednesday, Dec. 15th, but I like to go ahead and get it ready so I'm not trying to do everything at the last moment.

Just to give you an idea of what goes into each issue... I first have to determine the content. Am I going to write an article or conduct an interview? If I'm going to do an interview, then I go through the whole process of contacting a well-known figure, sending questions and answers back and forth, and editing the final draft for clarity, space consideration ( emails can only be a certain length to assure that they will pass through most systems..), and correct grammar.

Everything is saved on my desktop in notepad. I also must consider what additional content I want to include in the issue. After everything is gathered together on one page, I go to format-it.com and format the newsletter to 70 characters per line. If I don't do this step, then I run the risk of having one or more lines being way too long. This also helps provide a consistent look to eMagic Deluxe..

Once I have everything in order, I open an html editor on my desktop and paste the newsletter in and begin the process of converting the text to html. The html editor will do part of the work for me, but I have to do the links and bold print and what-not by hand.

I copy everything and go to Mailer4u.com, my list manager, paste the newsletter in the form and begin editing the html document in preparation for mailing. I go back and forth between edit and view to make sure everything looks 'proper', and that all my links are working and taking the readers where the're suppose to go..

When I'm satisified, I hit 'send' and sit back and wait on it's arrival in my inbox, right? Not hardly... Now, I've got to go to both www.StreetMagic.info and www.streetmagic.official.ws and create a new page for the latest issue. Portions of the html have to be changed around to facilitate addition to the web page. For instance, I remove the bold commands and insert Headline commands, size the text to the page, colorize if I want to, add images, and remove certain information that is intended for subscribers only...

I also add links to this page to the archive section on my home pages, and , I add meta tags to these new pages and submit them to several different search engines.

Now.. I ftp everything to my hosting accounts and go online to check for accuracy. With any luck, I am now through with this issue. Without a little luck, I have to go back, make corrections, and repeat the last few steps again..

I suppose you can't tell by appearance that so much goes into publishing a simple little newsletter. Not only do I do all the above, but I also have to edit everything to TRY to slide it by the spam filters my readers have set up to block the newsletters they have subscribed to...

So.. the next time you receive a copy of eMagic Deluxe Journal of Magic, take a moment and look it over. Hey - I had to jump through hoops just to get it to you !

I also want to sincerely thank Tim Quinlan of Inside Magic fame for the following quote after my last issue:

• When you visit Mr. Carruth’s site to read his interview with Mr. Turcotte, be sure to sign up for one of the best newsletters for our profession.

I suspect Tim may have been up a little too long when he wrote that... but I sure do appreciate it!

Later....