New serialized fiction site (incoming)

Hey all —

As my post indicated yesterday, I had thought more about forking off the serialized fiction to another site to improve overall readability of my fiction content and the content stream here. Well, I did it.

It is still a work in progress, and not ready to be public-facing. But maybe today or early this week it will be ready.

In the meantime, however, I thought I would explain the philosophy surrounding my decision.

My biggest gripe with trying to present long fiction over multiple posts is that the blogosphere is really not friendly to that idea in terms of design principles. Nor is there much in the way of support for readability that limits eye fatigue (which is why we tend to wander a bit after a few paragraphs, scanning for the “good parts”).

The fiction site is designed from the bottom up to be less blog and more book. With the help of AI coding, I am also able to creating custom plugins that simply do not exist in the wild or are the type tend to fade away due to vulnerability or compatibility issues.

I am going with dark mode as default on the site. However… it can be individualized based on the reader’s preference. Here is a screen of the normal color schemes:

I will point out that the font was from testing, a “Typewriter” font set to full justification. The default font is a highly web-readable serifed font, not the one portrayed here. I have set it up for Ko-Fi “Buy me a Coffee” types of donations ($1 minimum, $5 default, and I expect the average to remain somewhere on the order of $0), with a neat little button in the lower left. Probably not the best navigation example at the top of the content for the screen shot (missing the next), but it includes a previous, next, and table of contents for options. That is replicated at the bottom of the content as well.

The taxonomy is custom and relies on “pages” rather than “posts”. The breadcrumb for the taxonomy is Series > Book > Episode. This was another custom plugin designed with the help of AI.

If you are not terribly excited about reading in a courier-styled font, there is always other options. In fact, readability is baked into this design with the plugin (also designed with the help of AI). The first “Source Serif” is the default font, in case you were interested:

For those of you who prefer to read on a lighter page and are potentially dyslexic, there are options for you as well:

And there is always those folks who like a bit of sepia instead of the brighter backgrounds:

In addition to multiple fonts, and backgrounds, there are settings for font size, padding between lines and paragraphs, preferred reading width (narrower for some folks relieved eye strain) and a choice between left/open justification and fully justified paragraphs. The only font that is loaded by the site is the “Source Serif” — everything else is loaded from your individual OS, decreasing loading times on-screen.

I also am trying to make this site super-lightweight in terms of loading times, minimizing the use of javascript except as required to get certain features (like the floating popup controls). I am avoiding “javascript creep” wherever possible.

The great thing is, this should also saved via your browser and retained the next time you visit the site. Same font/backgrounds, etc. as you last visit (until you clean your site memory, then it reverts to default). No loading from the site, no cookies, no privacy issues (I am also trying to lean privacy-first with this site). Unless it needs tweaking (some of this has and I haven’t tested the specific functionality yet), it will also recall what episode/subchapter you were on when you return and offer you to “return to Ep. 5.1”. But that still needs some testing, so I can’t promise it will be there out of box.

All that remains at the moment for me is to decide if and how to do a comment/contact form. And migrate some of the content over to the site, of course (Vivian Locke’s story will show up there as well as Vengeance, My Heart).

What will not be on the site:

• Jetpack/WordPress Reader integration
• Likes/Stars
• Standard Commenting/Contact schemes

I’m looking into a subscription element so folks can add the site easily to WordPress Reader, but that will not connect likes or comments to WordPress Reader. It is an intentional feature of the design.

WordPress Reader can be used to follow any site that has an RSS feed, so you will be able to add this site to your feeds if you want to be notified directly of new episodes. I’ll explain how (it’s really super-easy) once this goes live.

Why no Jetpack integration with likes, Reader, or classic comments?

I increasingly have the suspicion that these elements are net negatives. The whole social media schema encourages a lot of the wrong metrics that we measure ourselves by and rewards gamifying the system. I want to experiment with removing the reliance on these mechanisms as a metric in the same way as I am removing stats and SEO from the site — going back to the focus being on writing instead of eying hits, likes and comments. Going “old school” before the days of social media, essentially. I question the quality of the feedback loop and I want to see what it does to my thinking without it being integral to the site.

I’m heading back to building for the day, but I’m excited to have you come by when it is done and visit this new facet of my journey and hope you can gain something from a different philosophy to site design.