So I’m horrible at naming stories. A majority of the stories I have are named simply for a character or perhaps a place in the story. Angelica was no exception to that and while the story is indeed about her, it’s not entirely about her. So along with the site revamp, I have come up with a real title for the story and have replaced most references to ‘Angelica’ with ‘Shifting Winds’.
Sorry for the confusion this will cause. I’ll try to keep this post at the top for a bit so everyone sees it.
Things are going to be a little messy for the next…several days. I’m going to be redoing the theme of the site, but first I need to get the blog site’s pages organized to work with the new theme. That means links will be disappearing, reappearing, and moving all around. New pages will pop up, old ones might disappear, and some will change. I’ll try to make sure all the major links are always there and working. If not…I’ll probably fix it myself in short order. Anyway, thanks for your patience.
So yesterday two things happened. First off, I put off updating because I thought I had a portion of the next section of Estrella written on paper at home, and I was going to go home and type it up and post it. Truth be told, it is there somewhere, but I can’t find it. As such I have to rewrite that section, and I’m sorry for the delay.
Secondly, it came to my attention that in my attempt to make the blog look as similar to my original website as possible, there was no way to go to older posts. I took the basic theme from the minimalistic one Koi made for our guild website, and that removed all of the archive and “older post” links. As such, I spent most of yesterday adding the bar on the side with the archives…which brings me to the second apology. For those of you using Firefox (as I do at work) you’re good. You can see the new bar, it’s pretty, and you can click on it, and the world is a wonderful and happy place.
For those of you who use Internet Explorer (as I do at home) some unknown, hidden option is making the body of the post wider than the space allotted to it, (Or perhaps IE is just interpreting something wrong. I wouldn’t be surprised.) thus covering over most of the bar on the right. After discovering this odd behavior or IE, I spent about an hour tracking down what controlled that bit of my website and trying to fix it to no avail. As such I am deferring to Matt, as soon as he gets his lazy butt out of bed. For now, I just wanted to explain wth is going on.
Edit: And once again, Matt saves the day. But now I see other things I’d like to ‘fix’. I know it’s silly to work on a live site, but I’m just a silly person. I’ll try and make sure nothing stays aqua, or hidden for very long.
Edit2: Learning many things. Once of which is to look-up stuff sometimes rather than trying to figure it out through trial and error. Another being that IE is like an annoying conservative when it comes to tables. If an item is in a table IE believe that it should be in that position, and no other, and that the entire table should follow that no matter what any css or anything else in the world might have to say. Firefox kinda looks at it as a suggestion and goes from there. As such, I will probably go on a crusade to get rid of all tables from my site at some point in the future. It wasn’t viable until I learned more about css, but I think I can handle it now.
I read webcomics. I am a sucker for pretty pictures, and for stories, and anything that would combine the two is of course something that would interest me. And as much as I like the “joke a day” comics, I find myself much more attracted to the webcomics that have one major underlying plot (as opposed to just an infinite number of archs) because it’s so much like reading a novel, just with pictures.
The point? I clicked on a new link today, and found myself at a webpage that was set up like a webcomic, but was actually…well he calls it an e-novel. Basically instead of putting up a new comic on some weekly updating schedule, he puts up installments of a book. Each installment usually isn’t as long as a chapter, though some are longer than others. It’s more like each installment is a scene or so.
While I wasn’t interested in the story itself (I don’t like ‘Dark Fantasy’, as he labeled his genre.) the concept of the webpage itself is greatly interesting to me. It also shows me that perhaps there are people out there who will come to a website for something even if there aren’t pretty pictures. (Of course webcomics will probably always be more popular, but his link was an ad on a webcomic site so there’s some correlation.) But this has given me some interesting ideas for my own website, which is made all the easier by the recently added “blog” on the front page.
One of my major issues is my inability to keep focused on one story for very long. I can go through stints of writing on one story for a few weeks, and then have weeks where all I do is read over random stories and maybe write a few lines on the end, or make some changes, and still other times all I’ll work on is the background or details of the world. However, the blog would help greatly in this, in that each “piece” I post is put into a category. That way you could choose the “Demonslayer” category and just see the posts that add to that story. Then once I have posted all of the pieces of a chapter, I can compile the chapter and put it into the already existing structure of my website. But perhaps fact that I won’t have to have an entire chapter done before I post it will encourage me to post more than I have.
Of course the issue still comes out of the fact that I want people to read what I write. I do write for myself. I write what I like and what I want to see, but at the same time there’s nothing better than getting feedback on something I’ve written. (Assuming it isn’t done in a nasty way, I even appreciate constructive criticism.) Not only does it make me feel good that someone else might care about something I’ve put so much time and effort into, but other perspectives and suggestions help to expand my skill.
At the same time, I don’t believe I have nearly enough confidence to actually rent out ad space on popular websites to bring people in. But I do want to bring in some people; more people than are just randomly floating around here because they know me from who knows when. (Not that I don’t appreciate you guys hanging around.) After talking to Ajin, of Misadventures Etc fame, I found out all he really did was post the links on a few forums he went around to, and possibly word of mouth did the rest. Now he’s rubbing elbows with some of the greats of furry artdom. (Though improving his art skill has done a lot toward that end as well.)
I suppose, however, that the first step is…well taking the first step. Posting a piece of story to the blog. Perhaps throwing up the link to this site on a few of the forums I go around to, and see if anything happens.
I know it doesn’t look like a new site, but then again that was kind of the point. Previously I wrote all my “update” messages into the database behind this site, and some php code would pull out the most recent ones, and display them on the site. It worked okay, but it is somewhat of a hassle, and also a little limiting. As such I was going to insert my livejournal account here…till I found out you have to pay for that feature.
Off I then went to www.blogger.com, made an account, wrote a post, only to find out it won’t upload to ftps, (which I found out is different from sftp, which it does do) so I was left high and dry until I remembered wordpress.org (Not the .com one.), which is what Koi used for our guild website. Well this one did what I wanted, only in order to make it look like my website, I had to edit the theme around their code. It turned out almost perfect except for the stray bottom bar that I am currently trying to figure out how to move. I’m sure I could do it with css, but I’m not all that fluent. We’ll see how it goes.
