In case you missed the fanfare, I have created a heavily modified installation of WordPress to host my longer, serialized fiction instead of posting it here.
Vengeance, My Heart Episode 5.2 is now live at ravensweald.art — Please check it out over there if you were following my foray into Gothic-Sepulchral Western.
The site is part proof of concept, part hypothesis test, and mostly designed around giving the reader a better experience than normally available via standard themes and via community plug-ins.
I really encourage you to give it a spin, even if you don’t care for my brand of fiction. It is designed to give the reader some element of control over the reading experience itself (typography, paragraph spacing and layout, font size, line width, night/day appearances), and to test just how important it is (for me, at least) to receive immediate, conversational feedback via “likes” and interactive comments — or are those things a distraction from the reading/writing experience. On the backend, I have also focused on privacy-forward elements: removing stats and tracking cookies (that I can control), not maintaining a database of email addresses and comments (the guestbook should be one-and-done, no database entries other than, maybe, an IP address to put a cooldown on guestbook spam attacks; Cloudflare is part of the security and content delivery, but should not pose too many privacy issues). And it is zippy (rating >90 for mobile on speed tests, ~100 for desktop).
Anyway, I’ve done rambled enough. Come on by and let me know how it went for you.
17 responses to “Episode 5.2 of VMH is live”
Clever. I’ve visited the site, I like it.
Thanks Steve. I’m still FOMOing a bit but I’m also determined to see this experiment through.
It’s strange not knowing what’s happening after things go out into the ether. Letting go of the illusion of control and knowing is exhilarating in its own way.
Yeah I know what you mean. I had so many rules for SFTD that I’m slowly breaking
The only rule is that there are no rules.
Or somat.
I thought the only rule was don’t cross the streams
Never. Ever. EVER cross the streams.
It would be bad
Excellent story. And really cool you can play around with the format.
My hope is that everyone can find what works best for their reading preferences.
It does look good.
Thank you! Were you able to play with the gadget to fine-tune your reading preferences?
I saw the slider but I liked it where it was. One of my great questions is always how does what I send out look on the other end. Sometimes I think it works, others . . .
While I can’t test every configuration, I do test with my devices a couple of different setups (Opera, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and mobile, tablet, desktop). There are screen emulators out there, something worthwhile to try if you’re curious (and they are still free).
It’s eye opening sometimes when you see something from a perspective that is different from your normal framework.
I searched ravensweald.art in WP reader and added it to my feed, I assume I’ll get jetpack notifications.
Sure, if it is finally picking up the feed, then it should be a go — I tweaked the plugin a few days ago to leverage RSS feed protocols and get faster refreshes, which may have helped.
I’ll let you know. I think my concern would be readers not following over, but maybe I should trust the readers more. We’re actually pretty devoted once we commit, I think. And cutting the spam emails and fake followers—maybe worth it right there.
I think your more casual readers (ones who might read, but more often think “TLDR; here have a performative cookie that we call ‘likes’”), bots, social media addicts and spammers will move on. There is nothing to be gained in that mindset.
The people who recognize the real value you are trying to gift them with will likely come along for the ride.
That said, I’ll probably be doing small breadcrumb reminders of where VMH has gone for the foreseeable future. Maybe stop around the time a certain unresolved bit of the story is resolved…