Happenings at the Econo-Almanac

Hi everyone. It’s time for yet another administrative update on the state of things here at Econo-Almanac world headquarters.

FAQ

I put together a very brief FAQ list. Should be old hat for many of you, but I thought I’d mention it.

More Forums

I forgot to add this item on the original post, so this is an update… now that forum activity has taken off, I’ve expanded the number of forums to hopefully make things more usable. Existing content will all be in the generic “housing market” format, but from here on out folks should feel encouraged to create new topics in the most appropriate forum.

No more comments (for me)

I’m now at the point where my material must be reviewed for securities industry compliance. Here once again is the background: per NASD rules, content authored by me appearing on any public website is considered "advertisement," regardless of what is discussed. (Don’t ask me how they came up with that one.)

The investment advisor firm that I am affiliated with is thus required to "supervise" the content to make exaggerated claims about securities investments or other such naughty stuff. There is no chance of me violating any of the guidelines because they don’t even pertain to the subject matter discussed here. However, the rule is that the firm must supervise (i.e. review) all publicly available web content I’ve written. It is what it is.

Getting an article rubber stamped is a minor inconvenience, but it is manageable because (let’s face it) articles are not all that frequent. Comments are another story… the approval cycle involved basically makes it implausible for me to respond in the comments section, so I will no longer do so. Additionally, since all prior content needs to be approved (and I am already handing these folks a tremendous backlog of material) I will be un-publishing all my old comments.

Comments on articles and forum topics will still be available to everyone else like before. But if you address questions to me I won’t be able to answer them—if you need to talk to me directly, please email rich@piggington.com.

Back in action at voice

After taking a little break, I’ve started writing again for voiceofsandiego.org. The Voice folks have found that readers really like the blog style with shorter and more frequent entries. It makes sense… the longer article format was probably due more to the limitations of paper printing than to readability. In any case, I’ve started writing a Voice blog called A Nerd’s Eye View.

There will be some topical overlap with the Econo-Almanac. Believe it or not, they are paying me, so it’s not really cool to reprint stuff in its entirety over here… what I will probably do is print "teasers" that link over to the specific entries voiceofsandiego.org. I’m trying my best to manage the various constraints on how often I am able to write and where it appears. Please bear with me as I get the kinks all worked out.

Alright, that’s enough droning on. I’ve got some July housing data coming up next…