About our staff
Editorial Director
Brian Livingston, editorial director of WindowsSecrets.com, is the co-author of
Windows Vista Secrets,
Windows Me Secrets,
and nine other books. He was named Entrepreneur of the Year at the 6th annual
Internet Content Summit in New York City on May 8, 2006.
Associate Editor
Scott Dunn has been a contributing editor of PC World since 1992 and currently writes for the magazine's Here's How section. He is the co-author of
101 Windows Tips & Tricks (Peachpit) with Jesse Berst and Charles Bermant.
Technical Editor
Dennis O'Reilly edited PC World from early 2000 through December 2007, ending with the title of senior associate editor. Prior to PC World,
Dennis (no relation to Tim O'Reilly, the founder of O'Reilly Media) was a senior editor of Ziff Davis's Computer Select subscription
service from 1985 to early 2000.
Research Director
Vickie Stevens is the developer of Windows Secrets' WinFind search engine and writes the Reviews Overviews section of the site. She
received a Bachelor of Computer Science degree from City University in 2003. She previously worked at Virginia Mason
Medical Center in Seattle, Washington.
Program Director
Brent Scheffler develops code for the WindowsSecrets.com Web server and maintains our Exchange mail server. He is a founder of the Fremont
Linux Users Group in Seattle and a recent graduate of Humboldt State University.
Contributing Editors
In addition to Windows Secrets, Scott Spanbauer frequently contributes to Business 2.0, CIO, Forbes ASAP, and Fortune Small Business and was technical editor of Jim Aspinwall's PC Hacks (2005). He has also been involved with PC World in one capacity or another since 1987: assistant editor, editor, senior associate editor, and currently contributing editor.
Susan Bradley is a Small Business Server and Security MVP — Most Valuable Professional — a title awarded by Microsoft to independent experts who do not work for the company. She's also a partner in a California CPA firm.
Mark Joseph Edwards is a senior contributing editor of Windows IT Pro Magazine and regularly writes for its Security Matters blog. He's a network engineer, freelance writer, and the author of Internet Security with Windows NT.
Woody Leonhard writes books about Windows and Office. His latest works — Windows Vista All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies and Windows Vista Timesaving Techniques For Dummies — explore what you need to know about Vista in a way that won't put you to sleep. He and Ed Bott also wrote the encyclopedic Special Edition Using Office 2007.
Ryan Russell is quality assurance manager at BigFix Inc., a configuration management company.
He moderated the vuln-dev mailing list for three years under the alias "Blue Boar."
He was the lead author of Hack-Proofing Your Network, 2nd Ed., and the technical editor of the
Stealing the Network book series.
About our history
The Windows Secrets Newsletter began with the merger in July 2004 of two high-tech e-mail newsletters. Brian's Buzz on Windows had been edited by Brian Livingston since February 2003, and Woody's Windows Watch had been founded by Woody Leonhard in 1998. The two publications merged on July 22, 2004, and began using the domain name WindowsSecrets.com for the first time. Brian's 50,000 subscribers joined Woody's 100,000-strong list to form a combined, unduplicated subscriber base of about 140,000.
The LangaList, an e-mail newsletter edited since 1997 by Fred Langa (left), merged with Windows Secrets on Nov. 16, 2006. Adding its 145,000 subscribers resulted in a publication with a circulation of about 270,000. Prior to starting the LangaList, Fred was editor of Byte Magazine (1987 to 1991) and editorial director of CMP Media (1991 to 1996), overseeing Windows Magazine and others. He was editor of the Windows Secrets Newsletter from November 2006 to April 2007, and then editor-at-large until May 2008, when he retired.
Today, Windows Secrets is also distributed via an RSS feed with tens of thousands of recipients, and the site delivers almost 1 million page views per month to visitors.
