Tag: site design

  • Tweaks and Geeks

    Something I learned today. The old (ancient) method of letting people subscribe to your blog on WordPress Reader has been killed entirely by the Jetpack team. It was unsupported, but still worked as recently as a year ago. I tried to make it a simple process of subscribing to my RSS feed at ravensweald.art (which is attempting to remove the social elements from that blog), but that workaround no longer works around.

    So, I modified the site to include instructions on how you can add the story feeds to Reader manually. I wish they would not make it a multistep process, but alas, I’m not sure they really want you to follow a site operating outside of the WordPress.com/Jetpack ecosystem — which is a little silly when you think about it, if my suspicions are true.

    If you have been enjoying Vengeance, My Heart, please consider following the steps outlined on this page to add it to your feed.

    Failing that, consider bookmarking the site in your browser and swinging by a couple times a week: currently M/W/F — I may take a break this Friday to polish Episode 6.1 over the weekend. The episode is mostly ready, but I think I want to make another pass at edits before publishing.

    Hope y’all are doing swell. Let me know if you encounter any issues with my instructions.

  • One of those writing about writing posts

    As the story in Vengeance, My Heart shifts from setting tone and atmosphere to character evolution and development — and quite possibly as a result of changing focus from short, snappy bite sized pieces of the story and shifting over to giving the story more room to breathe — I’ve discovered more tolerance as the writer for longer episode fragments.

    My goal up through the end of Episode 5, was to make sure there was a targeted max word count for each fragment/part/sub-episode to finding in Episode 6 that character development doesn’t work so well with those kinds of metrics. I don’t think it is a significant spoiler to say it is about time to move to that tone/color-setting of the early episodes to dig down into the motivations and explain, in drip-feed fashion, the previously unexplained.

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  • ravensweald.art notes

    A couple of new things that I am trying out on the new site…

    A Curated List

    I’m leaning in on the idea of nontraditional means of cross-seeding readers amongst other writers I have met and appreciate on WordPress over the years. In the old days, they called it a blogroll and it sat prominently in the sidebar of your front blog page. This one is intended to honor the more “Zen” like aesthetic of the site and is tucked away behind a menu item. You can check it out here: Elsewhere

    If your name is not on the list, it is likely because we either don’t banter back and forth or your creative output on your site is less than once a week on average. No insult intended if you feel you should be included. Let me know and I’ll consider adding you.

    Reader Feeds: Entire Posts → Excerpts

    I’ve decided to start crafting “Argument” excerpts instead of publishing the entire episode part to the feed.

    Each feed entry will now read in order: Series/Book, “The Argument”, “Read this episode at Ravensweald” and a copyright notice. If you are using mobile JetPack, you may need to configure the app to open the actual page in a browser instead of in the app’s more limited browser, although the site is so lightweight that only the readability features are impacted (i.e., do not appear). And the floating Ko-Fi button… but I don’t know how many folks feel like buying a coffee anyway.

    This is quickly addressed by tapping the compass button that appears on the Jetpack browser, which will launch it in a proper browser.

    This is to encourage people to step outside the bubble of WordPress Reader, just like many of the other design decisions. Being in the bubble is not a bad thing, but it does have a “fixed” feel to it, which I think adds to the eye fatigue. Besides, the readability tweaks are really cool. 😁

    Other plans

    I have so many plans. But I really should get to actually writing the story more than designing the blog, so…

  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • Wandering eyes

    I will admit it. I occasionally check out other platforms to deliver my writing on. You know, like that meme of the guy checking out another girl while holding his significant other’s hand and her being appalled… Yeah, I’m the guy, the sig other is WordPress and I am ogling the other services.

    While there is a lot of positives to be said about WordPress, there is also 20+ years of baggage that comes with the platform. In trying to be everything to everyone it does have elements that are bloated for your average blogger. Some of that slow-down is self-inflicted when you add plugins (which have their own security risks), but there are plenty of parts under the hood that most of you never have seen, let alone used or needed.

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