Storytime

I just got to the stage where my fiction subdomain is getting becoming functional. The keyword is “functional”, but it is far from finished/polished and the content quality there is. erm, lacking at the moment. Of course, it is purely for testing ideas and functionality, so it will eventually be wiped.

It is not currently behind a “maintenance mode” wall, so if you want to see how the Fictioneer WordPress template demos on my site, you can check it out at fiction.ravensweald.com.

Fictioneer theme features

There is a lot under the hood on this theme and good, well though-out reasons for that functionality having been changed from what you think of as normally being a WordPress theme. It does mean that I’ll have to change some of my thinking, but this theme is the first one that I’ve discovered over the many years of blogging that really leans into the concept of writing an online novel. Many themes out there that say they are designed for novelists typically lack the necessary functionality, or want to have it both ways (appeal to bloggers only, or novelists kind of). Fictioneer is a theme that is novelist-first (rather than an afterthought), readership second, with blogging somewhere down the line beyond those two audiences. You can use it to blog, but you’re probably going to find something more suitable and easier to wrangle if that is your primary focus.

Without going too far into the weeds, the theme offers for authors:

• Books/Stories, which can be further divided into chapters and groups (Part I, for example, of a 2-part book).
• Taxonomies and genres
• Assign age groups (and gate those pages if you are so inclined)
• Have public and paid books and chapters with password-expiring posts (think Ko-Fi and Patreon first-access)
• Use shortcodes to highlight specific (or random) works you want to highlight in multiple different ways
• And probably quite a few other features I am forgetting at the moment

For the reader (who are often neglected when it comes to things like this):

• Various tweaks to presentation and an embedded focused reading mode
• Chapter lists, jump to top/bottom of chapter, chapter read/unread (with cookies)
• Day/night mode reading embedded
• Bookmarks (with cookies)
• New chapter notifications (email sign up)
• Sensible navigation within a given story (next, last, story chapter list, reorder of chapter lists)
• Reading time and word counts
• Trigger warnings (for those authors who prefer to employ them), with canned language describing the reason for the warning
• And probably more things I will discover

What might annoy people

Not everyone visiting is going to like this theme, however — namely because of the commenting and other interactivity elements.

I’m going with the flow on this theme and using their comment system, rather than trying to jimmy Jetpack into behaving correctly. First off, I think commenting as currently envisioned is not really the best utilization of the tool for longer fiction. Rather than a Facebook-style back and forth banter, fiction tends to lean more towards single-comment/single-response in nature. Blogs need something more responsive, fiction seems less needy in that respect.

So, while people are able to log on with gravitar (WP’s multiple-site login), I am not convinced that Jetpack is the best method for integrating comments/responses. Being able to get notifications to you specific comment via email seems perfectly acceptable where banter is not the focus. Besides, I like the idea of having spoiler tags and easy formatting options for the commentor.

My recent experience with Jetpack integration has left a sour taste in my mouth and, while I finally got it working for this blog, I am now interested in exploring other options for interaction as a result. So, while you can follow via Reader, the commenting system will not be integrated as part of the Jetpack ecosphere.

Additionally, I have decided against enabling “likes” or ratings for the various posts. First, it is easiest with Jetpack, which I will not be using as a plugin, but I have long-wondered at the actual value of “likes” when a good chunk of them seem to be spam accounts or people who have not read my posts who are trying to get me to read their site to shower them with stars. You know they are spam stars when twenty or more likes show up in the course of two minutes. These people are not reading my content. I thought about “rate my chapter/story” plugins, but in the course of doing so, saw a comment that questioned the value the same as I have, additionally mentioning the problematic elements of homogeny in reading collectives, or directing a writer’s focus by “rewarding” material they favor over material that might be less desirable because it isn’t similar enough to the last story.

So, some people will probably be annoyed with that element missing as well.

Conclusions

Overall, however, it is the very theme and ecosphere I’ve been hoping to find for years now. Like I said, you can do this with standard themes to some extent, but not nearly as well as when you “break” the themes as they were intended to be to get to something more functional for certain users and their readers. Folks like Ted (Ted’s Desk of 1000 Voices) would probably really very much groove on having some of these functionalities, in fact — if he could live without the social functions (and he could have those if he gave up on the better-designed functions).

I’m also letting this experiences inform my approach here at the Ravensweald blog. In my recent spat with Jetpack and Akismet (spam filtering packed with Jetpack) and their trying to leverage money because I had the audacity to list my small book of poetry while using a free account (until I removed that reference), I decided it was time to look into other options for spam filters and statistics so that I am not dependent upon their goodwill for functionality that I refuse to pay hundreds of dollars for just because I wrote a book that I have not made enough to buy a new keyboard for my desktop, let alone absurd amounts of money for basic features. So I am looking hard at how to run a clean and tight ship and it might reflect here as well in terms of plugins and functionalities.

I’m also thinking about forking off my music efforts as a subdomain, as I think I can probably find a theme that supports bandcamp-like functionality.

All that remains, then, is bringing Sceadugenga over to this host and refining that to focus on more esoteric stuff (like runes and ogam).

This will still be my poetry/blog site, but I want to make sure that I have some separation between efforts in order to improve overall functionality of all of my endeavors.