Penhouse

Hi guys,

The Penhouse server will be down for maintenance around 5:00pm (SAST), and should be online again around 5:30pm.

~ Wogan

Hey everyone,

Penhouse has been offline for the last 2 weeks – terribly sorry about that. The server credit expired sooner than I expected, and I wasn’t in a position to just purchase more (having just moved house).

Hopefully we won’t have an outage like that again for the forseeable future.

Once again, my bad >.>

~ Wogan

I’ve just added 13 new themes to Penhouse. You’ll see them on the Appearance tab when you log in to your blog.

Personally, I’m partial to Decorative 2.0 and MNML 1.2, but that’s just me

Enjoy! And if you run into any problems with these themes, just let me know.

Oh, side note: You can use the Buddypress Default theme now. It looks just like the main website, and has a customizable header. Good if you need something really wide and open.

Dealing with a spam issue – the registration process needs to be revised.

Recaptcha has been implemented successfully – registrations re-enabled.

Well, Penhouse is finally live. If you’ve been waiting to sign up,  now is a good time. We’ve already got a few authors on board, so why not join?

Also, we have a Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Penhouse/308493006820

And a Twitter page: http://twitter.com/penhouse_za (though this one is still being set up)

NB: Stuff’s still under development here. Just saying.

Ok, so, Penhouse. The idea here is to create a space for South African writers to, well, write. And collaborate, share, all those other nice things that the Internet in 2010 has enabled. So far, we’re about 95% of the way there, with just a few more tweaks to go – as well as a lot of documentation.

Why penhouse? Why an online medium for an industry that, for all intents and purposes, is threatened by the internet? With the rapid decline of the newspaper industry, and the encroaching reach of ebooks and readers (Kindle,  Nook, and now the iPad), publishing is slowly taking on new meaning. The internet, with it’s open-content model, means anyone, anywhere can publish anything online – and it’s only getting cheaper and easier by the day.

Self-publishing is also becoming a more viable route for content producers, with Print-on-Demand providers like http://www.lulu.com/. These days, print is not so much the message, as it’s only the medium – and one among many, at that.

Here’s a fun fact – in Japan, people are writing novels on cellphones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_phone_novel – the first of which went on to become a fully published book. That phenomenon is just reaching South African shores, under the collective brand of the “m-novel”:

• http://www.techsmart.co.za/features/news/First_African_m-novel.html
• http://m4lit.wordpress.com/

The face of publishing is rapidly changing, and when the right tools are made available, anything can happen. That’s where Penhouse comes in – creating a space for local authors to do just that. Accounts are free, the hosting itself is free – just bring yourself and your creativity