Subdomain progress

I know, yawn, blow-by-blow accounts are so dull and so very much not droll (let us not confuse the two “d” words, please), but I’m going to natter on a bit about it anyway. It would possibly be wise to skip this post unless you are somewhat interested in the process.

It has been fascinating at just how powerful the theme is at fiction.ravensweald.com. And I haven’t even written any real fiction yet.

One of the things I found fun to add today was “Recommendations”. Kind of a blogroll for books and stories. I added Ray Van Horn Jr.’s Coming of Rage and Ted’s Chivalry, and plan to add others. Ted, you need to put on your blurb hat so I can have something better that “something something something” in the description. I plan to add other bits of fiction writing in the recommendations, with the focus being 100% on indie writers like those of you who visit here. While I won’t have the theme’s functionality here for such things on my primary site, I am considering something similar for poetry collections here if I can find a similar plugin.

Most of the features are toggled off, and probably with good reason, as they appear to conflict with some plugins, several of which I tried today. For instance, Jetpack (which provides integration with the WordPress.com ecosphere), is entirely broken: Commenting doesn’t seem to work as intended out of the box, and forget about likes. As I was saying in my last post, that might be for the better. I suspect there are some additional things needed to make that work (I think I saw something at the Git repository about it), but it was more a curiosity thing for me.

The RSS feed published by the theme works 10 times better than almost any feed generation I’ve seen in recent years, and I think that might be essential, as there are more than posts that should be included in the feed — and the standard feed on most blogs does not account for the addition “post” types like chapters, stories, recommendations, sections, etc. I’ll do a tutorial post for anyone who is interested in adding the fiction.ravensweald.com feed to their Reader (essentially “following” my subdomain in Reader, without the “like” functionality and comment tracking). And, if you’re a Feedly or InoReader user, well, those follows are integrated in the theme along with standard RSS feeds.

I still need to familiarize myself with what’s offered because some of the greatness of the theme was hidden behind the toggles I hadn’t opted to turn on initially.

I’ve tried out a number of plugins there that I wouldn’t try here, as this site was going for more “tried and true” stability (see where that got me?). The other site has more playground elements, mostly because things might not work with the nonstandard theme. I am actually learning quite a bit about how better to optimize this site as a result of the tweaks and playing around. It is time-consuming, but I never think of learning as a waste of time. And I am doing plenty of learning. And, amazingly, things are not going fubar as much as I might have thought they would.

It’s still not much to look at — most of the changes and tweaks are backend kind of things as I learn how to use the embedded shortcodes, which are the real powerhouse of the theme. And navigation menus. And landing pages for certain things (like: which genres are used somewhere on the site, but not necessarily included in the menu drop down).

And, because I am not using Jetpack, I can promote my book of poetry over there (in draft and unpublished).

Lots going on today. I am itching to get back to being creative, however, so I may lay off on any more refinements so that I can work on content.