Tag Archives: Wordpress

The story behind today

By | |
8 Comments

I am so proud of myself for figuring out some of the basic features of WordPress that it’s actually embarrassing.

Honestly, the story behind today’s post starts out and ultimately ends on a boring note: after researching size reduction and media file plugins, I accidentally deleted every single image I have (had) on my website. For some reason I didn’t shed the tears over this like I should have; probably because I suspected, between all the hours of research into shortcutting this process, that I was going to have to delete and re-upload everything anyways. This just forced the issue.

So while I’m plugging away on my media storage back behind the curtain (I’ll be cleaning up files and re-uploading in short bursts; if there are still some images missing into November, they’ll be back before the new year), here’s my slightly more thrilling news: I’ve finally put an email subscription button on my site.

*Cue cheers*

My update schedule has gotten absurdly sporadic, and I don’t plan on hammering my self-control into a calendar-shaped rectangle anytime soon. While I still stick by my one-post-a-week guarantee, some weeks I do more as the spirit moves me and other times I just barely make a single update by Saturday night. So! That was the very long way to say: if you’re tired of manually checking the website (or don’t have an RSS feed), you can now sign up to receive an email every time I update the blog.

*Nero gives the gladiatorial contender the thumbs up; cheering increases*

The second half of my search yielded the amazing news that I can actually enable comments on specific pages – a WordPress component, as it turns out. Despite the fact that this took me nearly two years to figure it, it thrills me to my core. Now all of my stories and poems have a comment section at the bottom of their page. Only having comments on blog posts bugged me because it automatically disconnected people’s reactions from the thing they were reacting to, and inadvertently discouraged people other than my friendly neighborhood IT guy from commenting on the story and/or poem itself. Who in the world is going to bother when commenting is a multi-step process (again, besides my brother; thanks, bro!)?

Next up we have the beginnings of my re-design for the mobile experience. I’m working on switching around how the header menu looks on a smaller screen and blah blah blah nobody cares. Short version: it won’t do what I think I’m telling it to do, but I’ll save the sweet talk for another day.

Finally, we have more behind-the-scenes chicanery. I have 117 blog posts (including this one), and every single one of them needs to be bagged and tagged. Right now my search function is fabulously useless. If anyone wants to re-read a specific post, they’re better off going to Google and typing the name of my website plus whatever topic they’re looking for into the search bar.

Ugh, it’s officially Monday in this time zone. So, uh, ta-da. My weekly post.

Revampira

By | |
7 Comments

Business update today because I couldn’t get my ten-speed into gear. I spent the weekend peddling around Youtube, watching Yugioh Abridged and wondering if this was the culmination of my life’s ambitions (ideally, no; in actual practice: yes).

I have known for some time that my website has been crying out for a revamp. While I like the clean look of the layout of my site’s organization on a desktop, the mobile experience looks like someone vomited a semester’s-worth of creative homework assignments into the navigation bar, put their hands up, and then walked away. I was able to ignore the problem – or at least keep it simmering far back in my mind, where I didn’t have to acknowledge it – right up until I finally joined my generation and got a smartphone.

Personally, I don’t like dealing with such a small screen. I can type 90+ words a minute on a keyboard, which makes my 3wpm thumb-pad typing not only inefficient, but painfully so. Of course, it wouldn’t be quite so bad if I wasn’t so ham-fisted. I have no idea how grown men use smartphones. I’ve got the hands of a child, but I can’t type “don’t” without thumb-mashing out the word “fpm’r” and counting on autocorrect to pick up my slack. Worse is when I accidentally okay “fpm’r” as a real word, and suddenly I’m spending half my screen time backspacing while gently talking the keys into doing what I want them to do, like the mother who just spotted their child holding an uncapped permanent marker.

But never mind all the complaining, I have to do something anyways. Unfortunately, I’m not entirely certain how to fix the problem. There’s the nightmarish prospect of changing static pages to posts while figuring out how to keep them pinned, trying to turn my home page back into my main blog without accidentally losing anything, and, oh yeah, I still need to go through my entire media file archive and exchange every single picture with smaller versions of the exact same file. Which will take ages, but even worse: all that work is a non-starter for a blog post. Nobody wants to hear me whine incessantly about work they don’t actually see. You may not even want to hear me complain about it now, but here I am.

I have some additional notes (I jot down ideas for blog topics as they come to me) about talking Facebook and evaluating the use of visuals as a marketing aspect of social media, but blegh. Apparently I also need batteries (last but not least on the list is literally “Also need batteries”), which is not the best way to make sure that I don’t forget something at the store.

Second to last note, on the other hand, is simply “which is unfortunate as I am very lazy.”

You know…that actually explains a lot.