TypePad Tour: New Orleans and Baton Rouge

After TypePad tours of Boston, Toronto, and London, we head south to visit TypePad members in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. The area is still recovering from the devastation left by Hurricane Katrina more than two years ago, but TypePad bloggers carry on passionately with their lives and professions.

Margaret Saizan started blogging on the eve of Hurricane Katrina and has not let up since. Her blog, Beyond Katrina , contains reports and updates about local recovery efforts, national efforts to hold politicians accountable, and coming hurricanes. Saizan is often joined by contributors Paul Greenberg, a journalism professor at Tulane University who writes extensively about New Orleans, and Matthew White, a New Orleans-based photographer, in discussing the social, economic, and environmental challenges of the recovery effort. Beyond Katrina is a powerful resource, as the number of visitors demonstrates: it has been visited by hundreds of thousands of visitors from over 190 countries. 

Matthew White, who collaborates with Margaret on Beyond Katrina, is building his photography portfolio on TypePad. White had been photographing remote, rural and coastal areas, historical landmarks, and nautical locations before Katrina hit, and now has a portfolio called the Louisiana Collection that includes historical landmarks lost to the hurricanes of 2005. We think you’ll agree that it’s a beautiful photography blog.

Jonah P. Langenbeck writes about New Orleans, the New Orleans Saints, “the beautiful and heartbreaking urban system of post-K New Orleans.” and his job as an interactive designer in the marketing department of Cox Communications in his blog, Spastic Robot. He’s been using TypePad since 2004, so you can follow his experiences and musings through the 2004 election, to Katrina, to the post-Katrina recovery period. There’s plenty of local color and commentary in his blog as well.   

Up the road in Baton Rouge, the Louisiana State University Press  joins the Harvard, MIT, Yale, University of California and other University Press organizations in using TypePad to promote and educate readers about their current and upcoming publications, authors and events. The LSU Press is dedicated to the publication of regional, general interest, and scholarly books, and takes great pride in being the original publisher of John Kennedy Toole’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces. Anyone at the Press can suggest an idea for a post to the blog, and the marketing department writes and posts the information. This is not a scholarly and edudite blog, but rather a glimpse at the high quality fiction, poetry and non-fiction books that emanate from the region.

We'll be back next month with a tour of TypePad users somewhere else in the world.

Comments

[Melissa Roberts]

While you're touring New Orleans, please stop by and say hello. I'm at http://melissaroberts.typepad.com

Good ju-ju,
~ Melissa