It is alive!

If you haven’t figured it out by my recent posts, I purchased another domain to host my longer-form content. And then I spent the weekend building a custom WordPress installation to test out several hypotheses.

• Readers want choices in how their reading material is made available and how it is viewable.
• That the standard blog design favoring current > past reading pieces is not designed for reading long-form fiction, serialized novels or web-novels. There is a wide open gap being overlooked by content delivery (i.e., WordPress and others), plugin developers, and web-designers that have relatively simple solutions. Because those solutions don’t monetize well, they are ignored.
• Most of the social media elements we’ve grown accustomed to seeing in blogs might actually detract away from the experience when it comes to longer-form writing. They become questionable metrics and false flags for en-/dis-couragement that are taken as authentic representations of value by the person providing real-time feedback.
• The internet has gotten bloated, and there is value in stripping things down and embracing design in alignment with more of a Kansō (簡素) philosophy: the Zen aesthetic of simplicity. Folks who are the type to note such things will note that I perhaps should have embraced the philosophy more than I did when they visit, but I did attempt to strip things down to core elements and still remain functionally supportive of “chaptered” fiction.

While I am still finding tweaks to make the site better, ravensweald.art is now live and contained the story of Vengeance, My Heart to the current episode and part. Regular readers will notice that I changed the numbering scheme to eliminate what I decided was a confusing element of the episode “parts” and used a decimal system instead for the titles.

Instead of stars and comments, this site is disconnected from Jetpack and Reader. As a design decision, I decided to remove those feedback loops. But never fear! If you want to follow the site, all you need to do is add it to your sites in Reader as an external site. It is super easy.

Using a desktop web browser. You use the left sidebar to select “+ New Subscription”, then add ravensweald.art to the box that pops up and “enter”. It should pick up the RSS feed and show up in WP Reader like most of the sites you follow.

On mobile, they like to hide it, but it is still doable.

You go to your Reader tab, click on the “XX blogs” (mine says “65” in the image) at the top of the screen, then “Manage” in the middle of the screen by “Filter by Blog”, then enter the same address at the bottom, where it says “Enter a URL or tag to follow”.

It may vary somewhat on iOS, and I’m not sure why it is buried other than they might not want you watching the BBC News’ feed for articles on WP Reader. Heck if I know.

“Why, Michael, are you making this difficult?”

A: I’m feeling obtuse and I want to try something different.

There are a few features which will seem new to people. Instead of comments, I have guestbooks (site-wide and on a per-story basis), which allow folks to provide unidirectional feedback. They are not interactive comments. While I love the interactivity here, I want to step back from it on the fiction site, let it rest, simmer a bit and be less instant. It is an experiment to see what happens when there is limited interaction. I suspect all of the stars and some comments are mostly to enhance someone else’s social media standing. Now, the only reason to visit is to read.

I may regret that choice, but the good news is that I can bring back some of those elements if they are a bad decision.

There is a toggle for customizing your reading experience to the right of the main content body. Looks like a slider. It allows you to view the site to your preferences on a number of things. Give that a whirl (one note, full justification seems to possibly break the container on Opera mobile and it may do so on other mobile browsers — I may see if I need to fix that, if possible).

Please feel free to visit the site, understanding that I am still tweaking things even now and I may add more features via custom plugins as time goes on. Let me know here if you see anything that causes big headaches for you.

Thanks in advance if you visit and/or follow.