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Site Updates

Site Updates

I am making a wiki!

Today while I was at Folklife, I ran into my friend and reader Jamie, who told me that a) she’d finally read Faerie Blood and Bone Walker, and is totally fangirling Elessir (YAY), and b) once she actually heard me pronounce “Elessir”, she asked me about a pronunciation guide for my works.

And I thought, y’know, this is a good excuse to do something I’ve been thinking about doing for a while: which is to say, setting up a little wiki for useful in-universe information about my books.

This has now been done. I’ve spawned off a supplementary site which will have the URL wiki.angelahighland.com. It’ll basically be a wiki only I can edit, so not really actually a wiki–but I’m calling it that anyway for convenience. And because I’ve slapped a theme on it to make it look wiki-like and hopefully navigate wiki-like as well.

So this is where you guys come in: I’d like to hear from anyone who’s read any of my stories as to what information you think would be neat to know. Pronunciation guides for both series of books, the Free Court books AND the Rebels ones, are probable. (Organizationally, how I’ll probably do that is to include a pronunciation guide for individual character pages, pages about places, and such, rather than just one big list of how to pronunce everything.)

But I’d also like to hear from y’all as to what else you think would be interesting to know. Talk to me in the comments! Once I have enough data on it for it to actually be useful, I’ll add it to the main site navigation here on angelahighland.com.

Site Updates

Some site housekeeping notes

I’ve been in a mood to do some digital spring cleaning lately, particularly inspired by an episode of the DBSA podcast where SB Sarah interviewed Fay Wolf about her new book on how to declutter your life. Since they specifically talked about digital decluttering, I felt moved to take care of some overdue decluttering of mine.

Namely:

I’ve been juggling two Gmail addresses for a while and have grown to find this burdensome. So I am in the process of decommissioning my angela.korrati address on Gmail in favor of the annathepiper one. My Contact page has been updated appropriately.

The short stories “The Blood of the Land” and “The Disenchanting of Princess Cerridwen” have not been properly deploying out to iTunes from Smashwords. A fix for this is now in progress.

I have decommissioned the Kobo account I was using for Kobo Writing Life. I’d wound up with two different Kobo accounts when I’d had to open a second one to tie it to Third Place Books, and having two accounts was kind of stupid. Particularly given that I’d stopped deploying books directly via Writing Life, and have been trying to deploy to Kobo via Smashwords instead. So my original Kobo account, the one I’ve been using with Writing Life, has been deactivated. Right now this also means that Faerie Blood is not currently available on the Kobo site. I’m in the process of trying to fix that.

I have removed links to Oyster and to the Nook UK site from any of my titles that had them, since Oyster is pretty much dead, and since B&N has also shut down the Nook in the UK.

Meanwhile, I have done a bunch of updates to my Square store.

First, I realized that the store did not have the Cerridwen short on it. I have now corrected this problem.

The limited edition ebook bundle CD I have of both editions of Faerie Blood is now under the “Ebooks” category with the rest of the books. Also, I have set it so that each of the individual ebooks now includes in its description that I will ship copies electronically by email, AND you will be able to pick which format you want. Your options will be EPUB, MOBI, PDF, and a zip file of all three.

Also: since Square recently did an upgrade to its store system, there’s functionality now for donations. I have decided to use this to test out a Tip Jar on my Square store. The intent here is that for anyone who might have acquired a story of mine for free (such as when I ran “Cerridwen” for free on KDP or when I’ve had things set as Reader Sets Price on Smashwords), and who might want to pay for me something after the fact, this is a mechanism by which you can do that.

Last but not least: I have also now added a “Store” menu to the menu bar on the site. The “Store” link goes off to the Square store, but under that, I’ve also placed links to the Buying From Me page (which is the page for information on how to buy stuff from me directly vs. through any of the major ebook vendors), and to the Faerie Blood and Bone Walker pages on Bandcamp (which are the more useful places for non-US folks to go to order print copies of those books).

Any questions, please let me know!

Site Updates

Testing, testing, testing, is this thing on?

Well, that was certainly unpleasant!

To recap for those of you who don’t follow me directory on the social networks, or who might not have seen me reporting: this past weekend, Dara and I had to completely overhaul our web server. This was basically the same operation we had to do LAST month on the mail server: i.e., completely flatten the box and reinstall a fresh install of the operating system, and then rebuild all our data on it.

What brought this on? My trying to do a WordPress security update, and discovering that the server’s root password no longer worked. Pro tip: that’s bad.

So yeah. Cue emergency server maintenance and tearing my hair out trying to figure out the safest way to reconstruct both my WordPress sites: annathepiper.org and angelahighland.com. I THINK my sites are now both back up again, after I did a completely fresh install of WordPress AND a fresh install of necessary themes and plugins, and then restored the old tables out of the database and the old media to populate both sites.

So if y’all are reading this, do me a favor: please browse around on both annathepiper.org and angelahighland.com, and let me know if anything looks broken.

Known issues on annathepiper.org:

* Clicking on the flickr galleries on the GBS pictures I have there is borked, but that was borked before all this happened;
* The RP logs archive pages there aren’t working yet either

I am not currently aware of anything actively broken on angelahighland.com, but if you see something that looks wacky, please let me know immediately! Especially if it’s on any of the higher level pages for my various books.

If you’re feeling particularly ambitious, go talk to Dara and let her know too if anything looks wacky on crimeandtheforcesofevil.com.

Still to do: I need to reconstruct and restore the other WordPress blogs we host, most of which will be rolled together into a single WordPress install to minimize the number of access points onto our system. This impacts baconforbirds.com (which we WILL be bringing back online by Paul’s request even if he’s not actively working on the site right now), upcc.org, uplakekenmore.org, and emeraldforestfilk.org. I will also be looking into converting lexfa.org into a WordPress blog to add to the aforementioned single install.

Any questions, talk to me!

Site Updates

Some items of interest, including a crowdfund!

Some of y’all may have noticed that I’ve rearranged the look of the main book pages for Faerie Blood, Bone Walker, Valor of the Healer, Vengeance of the Hunter, and Victory of the Hawk–not only the individual novel pages, but also the overall Books and Rebels of Adalonia landing pages. This is to finally take advantage of some functionality I brought in with my current theme, but also some plugins I’ve installed to get some Bootstrap fun going on.

You’ll see this new functionality in the various buttons on these pages. This all lets me clean the pages up considerably, make them shorter and better organized, and less of a “huge collection of links”. Plus, I get to better emphasize the various blurbs and immediate calls to action at the tops of each page.

I also removed the sidebar from those pages, since the sidebar is something I wanted to keep specifically for the blog section of the site. This change is for two reasons: one, to make the book pages less busy, and two, to make them render more nicely on phone-sized screens.

I may continue to tweak the layouts of things, so if you see something suddenly start to look different, don’t be surprised by that! And if you see anything that actually looks broken, please let me know.

***

I’ve been working on an updated version of the short story “The Disenchanting of Princess Cerridwen”, since the version currently on the site is out of date now that the Rebels of Adalonia trilogy is complete. The new version will have an editing pass, and some tweaks to correct details that were specifically mentioned in Victory of the Hawk.

I’m hoping to do the same thing with this story that I did with “The Blood of the Land”, and release it as a standalone download to the various places I sell my titles. But first, I’ve got to get it some proper cover art. More bulletins on this as events warrant!

***

After seeing one of the best-selling Carina authors post results of a survey of her readers, and specifically noting how a bunch of them reported that Facebook is a source of data for them about finding new books, I’ve been doing an experiment this month. Namely, I’m running ads on Facebook to promote the Rebels books as well as Faerie Blood.

I know, I know–I wince at the idea of actually throwing money at Facebook, but it is important to note that I have had a significant uptick in daily traffic around here with these ads being live. And a notable, if small, uptick in sales as well. So far, this experiment does appear to be valuable. And if Facebook actually can result in me selling books to people who haven’t previously discovered me, hey, I’ll get over any willies about throwing money at them!

ALSO: if anyone reading this did in fact come over because of finding me at Facebook, hi there! Do please feel free to say hi.

***

Last but not least, I’ve just thrown a contribution to this IndieGogo campaign for an anthology to celebrate ten years of The Future Fire. I follow their Twitter account, and moreover, my pal Su J. Sokol, who I’ve featured on Boosting the Signal, will appear in this anthology.

So consider checking this out, won’t you? Thank you!

(Speaking of Su, I owe her book a review. I hope to get that posted soon, so keep an eye out for that!)

Site Updates

New theme on the site, WOO!

So y’all may notice* that things look a tad different around here. This is because I’ve activated a brand new theme on the site, namely, Florence by the folks at Solo Pine Designs. There are a few reasons for this!

One, AngelaHighland.com IS my professional writing site, and I wanted to step up its game for overall appearance. So I wanted to put out a little money to buy a professional theme that matched my overall personal preferences in how my site should look: i.e., minimal, mostly white, but with the proper font choices and other little accents to give the whole thing a unified look.

Two, something I’ve learned from the day job is that Google has started penalizing the search rankings of sites that aren’t mobile-friendly. By which I mean: sites that don’t have a mobile version loading for mobile devices that visit them, or, alternately, which do not have a theme that automatically adapts to a mobile device. Dara has recently done some work in the former area, i.e., setting up a separate page to serve as the landing point for mobile devices, and she’s already seen some interesting results in her Google numbers. Me, I am opting instead for a theme that’s responsive in design–i.e., which displays itself one way on desktops and tablets, and another way when viewed on phones.

Three, the Solo Pine folks are a Seattle-based couple who do web design, and hey, since they’re local, I was all the more happy to throw them a little bit of my money. So if you’re in the market for a theme for your site, you might go check out what they have to offer. They’ve got a system set up to do tech support for you too, if you need it.

Some other notes:

I particularly liked how the Florence theme handled displaying the site menu. If you look at the site on desktop or tablet, you should see the full menu bar. If you look at it on a phone, it should condense down to a nice little icon in the upper left corner that you can tap on to get to the menu.

Plus, the theme nicely handles interacting with my various social media presences. If you look up at the right hand corner, as well as down in the footer, you should see various icons pointing off to my main social network pages. Those aren’t all of them–I’ve left off YouTube, Soundcloud, and Vimeo, for example–but those are the ones of most importance.

And I’m not done yet with the various changes. I’m still working on various rearrangings of content on various pages on my dev site, and as I get things looking better there, I’ll be porting those changes over to here. I’ve already done this to the homepage, which you can now see no longer has a sidebar, and which is a little nicer in how it presents the covers of how it presents my books to you, too. Most importantly, the homepage SHOULD look good when viewed on a phone, too.

Be on the lookout for further changes to appear on the menu as I rearrange that, maybe delete some pages and move others. And I’ll definitely be updating the layout on the official book pages as well.

If you see anything that looks problematic or confusing, even if you thought it was problematic or confusing before I installed the new theme, talk to me! I may have already addressed the problem on the dev site. And if I haven’t, I want to know what confuses people so I can work on fixing it!

Hope y’all like the new look, anyway! I sure do.

* And if you didn’t notice because you’re reading this post on LJ or Dreamwidth, click on over to the site to see what I’m talking about!

Site Updates

Dayjob experience coming in handy for my sites

So this is kind of a wacky thing–I’m finding myself able to use a couple of things learned from projects at work in the managing of my own sites. Those of you out there who read me, if you’re running your own sites as well, especially if you’re a fellow indie writer, you might want to consider these for your sites.

One: Google and other search engine spiders care if you have a sitemap.xml file. This is not something that users would normally hit–it’s a file that sits there entirely for the benefit of search engines, so that they can better index your site. I have chosen to address this by installing a WordPress plugin that dynamically generates one of these.

If you’re a fellow WordPress user, you might want to investigate this too. And if you’re blogging on a different platform, such as Blogger, and you have useful data on how to set up such a thing, drop me a comment!

Two: Google also cares now if your site is mobile-friendly, i.e., if you have something better than just the desktop view of your site when people come and visit you on their mobile devices. I am choosing to address this on annathepiper.org, which is still up even though I’m not actively posting to it, by installing the new Twenty Fifteen WordPress theme, which is specifically set up to render well on mobile devices as well as on desktop computers.

I am also currently shopping around for options for professionally designed themes to deploy on angelahighland.com. And I recommend anybody running their own site do the same–especially fellow writers. I’m eyeing Solo Pine right now, as I like their design esthetic, and bonus that they’re also headquartered in Seattle.

If you’ve got the technical and design chops to roll your own theme, go for it. But if you don’t, consider shopping around for a modern, mobile-friendly theme for your site. Think about what you like design-wise, and what features you want in a theme as well.

Other things I’m doing right now of note: as mentioned in a previous post, I’m doing some significant housekeeping of old content. I’m going through old posts on angelahighland.com and annathepiper.org, deleting anything on annathepiper.org that I’ve already copied over onto angelahighland.com, and fixing broken content as well. This is to reduce duplication of content, which will hopefully make angelahighland.com tastier to the search engine spiders as they crawl around the web.

Anybody have other tips to share as to how to spruce up your site for the spiders?

Site Updates

Murkworks.net web server and blogs updated

All,

Dara had to perform some maintenance on our web server last night, and it turned out to be an unexpectedly bumpy ride–thanks to unexpected changes in the process of updating to Apache 2.4. All this work kept her up until 4:30. AUGH.

Likewise, I have also updated all blogs we host to WordPress 4.2.1.

We THINK we’ve gotten everything working, but just in case, if anyone reading this has resources we host, doublecheck your stuff and let us know if anything looks screwy. And if anybody sees anything screwy with angelahighland.com in particular, let me know and I’ll check it out.