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.
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