voxwoman: (Default)
I've spent probably the past 2 weeks working on a custom theme for my mom's author website, and I finally got it done yesterday and..... there are problems with the formatting. I gave up for now, and found a free theme that's geared towards authors with widgets and plugins that let you have posts about featured books persist in the sidebars.

It's sort of live right now, with not a whole lot of content in it over at elizabethmansfield.com.  I will be tweaking the appearance a bit, but I have a buttload of content to enter into it. I have probably a 40 or 50-page HTML website that needs to be converted, and covers to upload and such. I am just not in the mood right now.

I feel slightly defeated over not being able to implement my original design - I got really close. Really really close. But I tagged some things incorrectly in the body of the pages, and that screwed up how posts look if they use formatting like bullet lists and the like. It would probably take me another 2 weeks to fix it working at night and on weekends, and I just don't have the bandwidth to devote to that as I am now way behind in my quilting and getting my other projects done. I may get back to it someday - once all the content is uploaded in to the blog, changing the theme is relatively painless.

I probably should have done this in a different CMS system like Joomla, but the Wordpress class on lynda.com seemed to be very comprehensive, and it was, for a basic thing - adding plugins and widgets broke my design, and I don't have the WP or PHP skillz to really be able to tweak the design for it to work properly.

It's rather annoying that the latest web coding has become so specialized and complex; it's making me nostaligic for the old web 1.0 and Blink tags...
voxwoman: (Default)
is resurrect my mother's website.

The backstory: That is one of the conditions of an eBook publisher with whom my agent's been negotiating. Since the demise of the (what I like to call) "classy" Regency in favor of the current trend for "soft-core porn" Regencies, her dead-tree publisher is not going to any effort to republish anything anymore (despite the very good sales/royalties we received from the Double Regency that was issued 2 holiday seasons ago). So, once we get the rights to the catalog back (we have some but not all of them), we will be reissuing them as eBooks.

I've been debating about how to go about this task. I'm leaning towards some sort of CMS system - maybe Drupal or Wordpress if I can figure out how to do non-blogging things with it. But I also want to incorporate SEO principles so that the site comes up high in the search engines when people are looking for Regency Romances and not just my mother's author name.

I also want to write a Wikipedia page for her, but I'm concerned about posting things like her maiden name and personal details that could be used for identity theft (since she's only been dead for 6 and a half years).

If any of you have any advice about what CMS system to use, I'd be glad to hear about your experiences. What I'd like to have on the site is a bibliography of all her novels (and other work) that is searchable by title at a minimum. It might be nice to be able to search on location, or character names, or plots/themes, but I also don't know if I want to do that data entry. I'd also like a blog interface, where I can either write stuff myself, or post some of mom's unpublished work - like greeting cards she wrote for family members, filk songs (non sf-based, but she'd been writing them since before WWII), her short fiction and possibly her old non-fiction articles. This should also be searchable (but I'm probably going to use tagging of posts for that).

July 2016

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