Category Archives: Site Changes

My website is back!

I have a bunch of things to fix. I’ve updated to a new theme, and it needs to have fewer serifs and more green. I have to reinstate all my old uploaded photos. And I want to play with various plugin settings for comments and stats and crossposts and stuff.

So what happened to my site? The short version is it got hacked, probably ages ago but I just noticed last week, and when I tried to fix it by installing an all new WordPress, something went wrong. Something which I’m pretty sure is my fault although I don’t know what I did wrong.

Dreamhost’s customer support was very fast and thorough, though, and all seems to be well now. Dreamhost is great, btw. And they don’t have sexist commercials (and if you use that other company I do actually think a little less of you).

I’d been rethinking my blog strategy lately, and when I thought I’d be starting from scratch I came up with some new plans. You probably haven’t noticed this, but for the last two years I’ve kept up a pretty regular schedule–writing posts on Wednesdays, and Monday posts that cycle through a certain set of topics. It helped me start blogging regularly, but the problem is sometimes I don’t have time to make a good post, but I feel obliged to post anyway. Plus my writing group set up a group blog, and three posts a week is a lot.

So I’ve decided to ditch the schedule and just post when I feel like it. Even more than the schedule, it was setting aside a specific time of the week to blog that made it possible to post regularly. I lost that regular time ages ago, but I decided a few weeks ago to use Friday lunches.

Which is not to say that blogging is a chore. I like blabbing my thoughts all over the Internet. I just have a habit of a) writing posts in my head instead of in pixels and b) being too busy to do things just because I think they’re fun (this is why “read” now has a slot on my daily calendar).

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Website test

I’m not sure how “renew website registration for one year” turned into “and also register new domain and transfer everything to it”, but that’s what I’ve been doing all evening.

This post is a test.

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Website update, and why do I have one anyway?

Yesterday, I gave my website a much-needed overhaul. There are still a few things I’d like to adjust (updating some links, changing some colors to green, testing the LiveJournal crossposter as soon as I hit publish on this post, etc.), but the important bits are done.

I’m now using WordPress 3’s default theme. My old theme was nice, but this one is widget-ready and makes it simple to change some things I wanted to change, like the header image. (That’s one of the many trees in my backyard.)

So while I was sprucing things up, I was musing on aspiring author websites and why I think they’re silly.

I mean, I know we’re all supposed to have hundreds of blog subscribers and at least 1,547 twitter followers and/or facebook friends before we publish so much as a drabble, or agents will discard our queries unread.

But aspiring author websites still seem weird. (Even though I apparently have one. (Though I had a website before I started writing, so I’d probably have a website even if I weren’t writing. It would be about my vegetable garden and books I’ve read.))

I think it’s my inherent dislike of self-promotion, combined with feeling that unpublished writers have nothing to promote. Obviously I can only speak for myself, but I’m not a brand and I don’t have a platform. I blog for my friends and family. And anyone who cares how my vegetables are doing, like my future self.

So, other unpublished writers (and recently published writers), enlighten me. What’s the value in having a website? With book blurbs and sample chapters? What about blurbs for multiple books in multiple series – does it imply you’re serious about writing, or that you haven’t sold despite trying for a long time (because I’ve seen this one a lot, and it strikes me as the latter, but I’m not really the audience for that)?

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Word Generator & Articles

Added a random isearan word generator and a list of a few of my writing-related articles to the website.

Also updated the site’s main page with more links, including Digg and Associated Content.

Redid a bunch of the css.

Still to come: adding piles of research notes and recipes.

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Site Updates

• Added snippets from my Google Reader Shared Items to the sidebar, thanks to code from Mike Crute and help from a friend.

• Turned off the rich text editor that was eating my paragraph breaks.

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Site Updates

• updated the list of projects on the main page
• updated the writing project timeline

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Site Changes

Made cosmetic changes to the links list on the home page and updated the writing history chart.

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Site Changes

Added a blog. Nothing to see here yet!

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Site Changes

I have finally uploaded the first section of my notes about early life at Harvard College.

Three more chapters of notes to go. At this rate they’ll be up in 2010.

The notes are very skimpy, the result of transcribing five-year-old handwritten scribbles made when I thought I could go look at the book in the library any time I wanted.

It’s a nice project to have around – makes me feel I’ve done something useful with my time when really I’m just putting off working on chapter 2.

In other website additions, I added a link to the Colonial Williamsburg magazine, which is a fun source of colonial (mostly Virginia, of course) info.

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