Flashback

So there's a lot of chatter on Twitter lately about blog designs and website builds and etc etc. If you have not been to my website, this is the minimum level of quality I expect for a user-created website. Blogger and like services are expanding their styles to blend the boundaries between blogs and websites, but for the moment, I continue to contend they serve two different purposes. There are different graphical designs and interfaces that best accomplish those purposes, and as such, the two should be separate entities. I am in the minority on this one. Most new authors and aspiring authors seem to think blogs are enough. Established authors have blogs integrated into their own sites, so either way you get a single-platform delivery, though the latter is an achievement that most of us could not do and most services do not make easy for us (or if it's easy, it's not cheap).

I saw a really nice website today and my first thought was, "How pretty. Too bad it's crap."

What what? Why is it crap if it's pretty. Well, obviously, something could focus on its esthetic without accomplishing its purpose as a platform to introduce users to you and your work. In this case, its splash page was covered with Flash animation. Now, me being of a certain age, I was on computers when the internet first became available to the public at large, so things like Flash animation still dazzle. I didn't just build personal pages in Geocities. I used Angelfire too. These are the old build-your-own page and fill it with animated gifs and blinking fonts sites. Flash? Super awesome compared to the way things were.

Unfortunately, Flash has not evolved fast enough. While you may not be thinking about it now, you need to start thinking about mobile delivery. View your site on an Android and/or iOS phone and see the difference. For me, unfortunately, the template service I used to build my site does not offer fill scripting functionality, so I have to (*shudder*) use tables to format the page to look the way I want it. Tables no worky on mobile platforms, which is why I'm formulating a redesign in my brain. The thing is, Flash no worky either. Sure OSes like Android and WebOS claim to have Flash functionality, and to a degree this is true. But it's not full Flash. It's a mobile Flash and Air support and both are reportedly buggy.

When you do all those snazzy things on your site with Flash like have your name come swooping in front the side? Unless your site is specifically coded to adapt to users that don't have Flash functionality, your name is missing from the page. Or worse, you get a big ass question mark because your phone lacks the necessary plug-in to run the animation. You want your website looking in tip-top shape in any format a user may view it in.

So when next you contemplate a redesign to your site and perhaps think on splurging a little for some professional work, here are some things to think on:

  • No Flash
  • NO tables. None.
  • No frames except for iFrames. Old-style frames are like tables except scroll bars appear at the edge of them, meaning you may have a scroll bar in the middle of your page, which looks dumb.
  • iframes are okay. iframes aren't like old-style frames. They're a little pop-up window that pops up within the page. It looks like a Flash animation but is actually JavaScript
  • If the producer is capable, make the build HTML5 compliant. Capable or not, they should be working with JavaScript (js) and cascading style sheets (css)
  • No files necessary for your site to function (such as .js files) should be hosted on the produces server. Get that thing for yourself and host it with the rest of your site. You are fully autonomous. If they flake out and delete all their content they ever worked on, this should not affect you in the slightest.
  • No audio/video auto-play. Only emo teenagers auto-play music.

New Things

The template for the blog has changed yet again. I liked that last one, but there were too many small things that needed fixing. Date wasn't displaying properly. The manner in which comments were listed was dumb. User pics weren't showing up like they were supposed to. I'll be the first to admit that my JavaScript isn't the strongest, but things I know should have worked weren't working, and I want to have a blog that I can customize to suit my purposes.

So I found this new thing. As good as the last? No. But better than the standard brown world thing and more readable than my original that so many people (*cough* Rich *cough*) complained about.

So we'll see if this one sticks.

Something else I did today is try out Google Documents. Oh, I've used it before, but never for anything that was important. Namely, I've never used it for my writing. So I created a brand spanking new super-secret Google account (you can't hack what you don't know is there!) and ran through some trial documents. I am unsure of whether GDocs is a suitable replacement for a word processor.

Why would I even be considering it? Because of THIS! My Eee PC is aging and the new models don't use XP as their OS any more. A netbook using Windows 7 is counterintuitive. More so when it's Windows 7 Starter (which isn't much of a starter). The Chromebook is a web-paced portal device but it allows you to work offline. This wouldn't replace my Asus laptop at home but my Asus Eee PC that I write on. That thing doesn't have anything on it other than Open Office. So not being able to install applications isn't much of a concern for me. Acer is making an 11-inch WiFi only (well, they're making a 3G version as well but I have no need for that). And with a cell phone that acts as a mobile hotspot, this may be the next logical step in my computing evolution.

The problem with Google Docs is A) the terms for which you have to agree to use it (they're standard stuff, but I don't like terms for my work), B) it indents lines using an indent formatting rather than a tab mark, and most importantly C) there is no custom dictionaries. You can add words to the dictionary, but you can never remove them. And you cannot have multiple dictionaries, which is exactly what I do for my books. What is a valid word in one novel may not be a valid word in another. So I make a new dictionary with each manuscript. I can't do that with Google Docs and that's a really big deal.

Still, the Eee PC hasn't kicked it yet. We'll revisit this proposition once it is gone and I need a new laptop.

Back to the Future!

So Blogger was reset to a previous back up. Anything you posted yesterday is most likely not there. Cool thing is, I actually scheduled yesterday's post Wednesday night so it was still saved as a draft. I pushed it live again.

It's a pretty big deal Blogger going down like that. Some people really saw the cloud as dark as it could be and are rushing to back up everything. This may be a good idea, but it takes enough effort that I am not one of those people. One of the benefits (risks) of cloud computing is that the external service maintains its own content integrity. I trust Google enough not to lose my entire site. I certainly wouldn't want to invest the effort backing up my site after every post.

If Google should somehow vanish from the earth and their content collapse, it's been fun talking to you all.

...some more than others. Some of you are too quiet, so how can that be fun? Talk more. We like that sort of thing.

Do Good Deeds

Perhaps the best benefit of a growing write-o-sphere on the tubes is that we can gather as a group for good causes. Charity auctions abound where you can donate to diabetes research, adopt a town in the storm ravaged south, or donate to the Red Cross general fund on behalf of the southern storms.

And those auctions are pretty nifty. Free books, a nook with a crap ton of ebooks, page reviews and phone calls by the likes of Kristin Nelson, Sara Megibow, Jo Volpe and a whole lot more. If you have some monies to spare, stop by these places and add your voice to the awesome (and get some awesome opportunities in exchange).

Brenda Novak's Annual Auction for the Cure for Diabetes where you can bid on for a critique and phone call with Kristin Nelson or Sara Megibow while giving money for diabetes research (and not the I ate too much and now I have diabetes but the I was born with this mess and it totally sucks diabetes).

Do the Write Thing where you can bid on a critique and phone call with Jo Volpe or a review by the slushmaster at Pyr publishing while raising money for the Red Cross general fund to help aid efforts as a result of the southern tornadoes (technically donations to the general fund cannot be directed to a specific cause).

All 4 Alabama where you can bid on a critique and phone call with Sara Megibow (lord she's going to be busy) while adopting small southern communities that could use the money for their disaster relief. This goes directly to local organizations of the auction's choosing.


On a side note, all of you go bid. People have been starting with timid bids on really awesome people, so I've been bidding what I thought should be the "base line." While some people agreed and outbid me, others are being more tepid. If I win all the auctions I've bid on, I'll be out much more money than I've budgeted. So all of you go do a good thing, both for your fellow man and for me. :D

It's a Start

Thanks to Ted Cross and Liz Poole for pointing out that it wasn't just people not being able to find comments but that comments weren't working. Seems there was a change in Blogger's comment form since this template was made that prevented comments from working. That has been fixed.

What hasn't been fixed is adding a link to the front page. JavaScript is my weakest popular programming language so I'm still working on which expression to modify. (Similarly, I don't like author names displaying after their comments, but my fixes for that aren't working, which sucks.)

I'm at work and can't devote too much time to fixing this, but wanted to get things operational. While I wouldn't necessarily expect you to go out and learn JavaScript, I strongly recommend you all learn at least basic HTML. You will all have blogs and/or websites and you should not be imprisoned by your own technology. You shouldn't have to hire someone or beg for help every time you want to make a tweak or add on a little something here or there.

It may seem overwhelming, but go to W3 Schools and browse around their instructions on programming languages, specifically HTML. You'll pick up the fundamentals. Remember, you are the master of your fate. And that means you're the master of your blog too. Don't let the machines keep you down!

How to Comment

So this new template I'm using doesn't put the comment link on the front page. You have to click on 0 Comments and then click on comment. I will fix it when I have some free time. I notice that I've received NO comments since I made the switch. Thing is, other than that and a few other minor quibbles, I like this template, so I'm going to stick with it. So if you don't mind, in the short term, taking the extra step to comment. I miss hearing from my peoples. :'(

Websites

Taken from Roni Loren's website this has to be the wittiest comic panel I've seen in awhile.



Roni is redesigning her site and like so many authors is not a web designer. I am not either. I work in media, but I am a project manager. I hire people to design content for me. This means I have more coding skill than the average mope, but I don't build from scratch1. I can modify html, xml, css, php, etc, but to varying degrees. This is why my website is hosted by webs.com. They're templates and design package worked for me when I first built my website.

Now Lori and a number of other people I know simply use a blog as their website. This is doable. I've seen it done well. More often than not, it looks like a blog and I think authors should have genuine websites that are designed with a web presence mindset and not a journaling mindset. You are selling yourself and you need to provide information beyond your daily posting and a brief "about" paragraph. This is possible in blogs like Blogspot that allows multiple pages, but all those pages are built in a blog design style as well and I'm just not a fan. That is why I have this blog but also my website. Once I have actual books to sell, the Inkwell page will not just be a collection of everything I've written but an actual splash of commercial awesome.

The problem with webs is that it is not keeping pace with the evolution of media. Its HTML features and abilities are limited and the pages are constrained to custom formatting only if I use tables2 which makes mobile viewing look like crap.

I've thought about moving, but that means revising my website and taking valuable time away from writing while not having anything new to offer. It also means paying someone else. The sites I'm seeing that offer me more what I want to create have a higher monthly cost. I'm frustrated that I can't use iframes3 on my page, but not so frustrated that I'll double my monthly hosting page.

What about you? Do you have a website or just your blog? What made you choose one or the other and where you decided to host it?

I did a "how to build your website" post a long time back. Maybe I'll bring it back as a redux. Incidentally, if you don't own [your name].com, go do that right now. Sure you may not need it for awhile, but the last thing you want is to need it and someone else has already taken it. Grab it for a year, save up, and then renew for nine. A domain name is different than hosting. It is much cheaper. Consider it on the same level of investment for your career as a computer.


1 Trick of the trade, designers rarely build from scratch either. They have templates or previous builds that they repurpose to save themselves time.

2 Mobile is the future and tables are the past. If you're using tables, your website is akin to something you would have seen nearly a decade ago. It certainly doesn't display well on a smart phone. It's time to consider mobile when you're making your web building decisions.

3 An iframe is the window you see in web pages when something is embedded, like a youtube video. It used to be an object tag < object >, but that had a lot of additional code required. iframes are quick, easy, and clean, so you can imagine my disappointment that I can't use them in my website.

GOO! (RE: He-Man)

I often site the original He-Man mini-comics that came with the toys as one of the largest influences of my writing career. It's very true. I was five when I was allowed to buy my first He-Man figure and those comics stirred a creativity in me that I had never known before.

...AND NOW THEY'RE ONLINE!!!!!!!!!!!

You must go read them all right now. Then you will want to write fantasy too!

The site is alphabetical. They're better in order of release. Here are the first four when He-Man was more Conan and less television cartoon product:

A Dollar Fifty in Late Charges at the Public Library

I have two degrees, English with a focus in creative writing and theatre with a focus in playwriting. When I finished college, I considered myself a playwright. With the exception of two classes, my English education had been crap1, 2. Of my required creative writing classes, I had the same professor for all but one and she was just there for the paycheck. I learned absolutely nothing from her other than, yes, there are bad teachers out there.

While I had dreamed of writing novels when I was younger, I found plays more fulfilling3. I planned on going to graduate school, and maybe teaching writing while writing plays of my own4. That derailed in the spring of 2000 when my college best friend asked me to move to St. Louis and help him with his business. There went grad school and St. Louis doesn't have a strong theatre community. A few oases in the desert, but nothing like Boston. A decade later and I'm back to pursuing fiction publication.

The thing is, I'd still like to get a higher degree. Not because I think it'll make me a better writer (my college classes certainly didn't), but because I said I was going to. I don't like that hanging over me. I told my college mentor on two separate occasions that I was going to go to grad school and here I am 11+ years later without a single graduate class under my belt.

I don't pursue that impulse. Time is a factor. Add in the strong desire to never have homework again. Then season that with I don't think graduate programs teach writers what they need to know. I run into a lot of writing graduate students. Most of them have rolled into the program directly out of college. They're 21, wet behind the ears, and no everything. As any old man will tell you, someone that young can't know everything. You have to get to our age before you know everything.

Joking aside, graduate writing students love to talk about the business though few of them have any experience with it other than submitting a short story or poem to an online magazine. A couple might have been published once or twice5, but they all know how the industry works. What kills me is when they start telling me how the industry works, they're so often totally and inextricably wrong.

Frankly, they'd all be better served by a week of intensive reading of blog archives by Kristin Nelson, Nathan Bransford, Moonrat, and the other heavy hitters of the publishing blogosphere. The thing I hear most often is that it's not how you write but who you know6. There are claims as to costs and midlist authoring and querying.

Oh the querying. I think college professors intentionally teach their students how to query wrong to diminish competition against their own works that they're still trying to get published. I can't figure out why else they would tell them to do the things they do. (One student talked about the importance of listing his MA at the top of the query so that the agent would know they're weren't just any writer, but someone truly talented. He did not appreciate it when I started laughing at him.)

I try to set them right. I try to pop those bubbles that I can. I tell them who to Google and what blogs to read. Listen, student, you seem like a nice person. I'm not trying to rain on your parade, but you're spending graduate level dollars on information that will net you nothing in return. You'd be better served getting a library card and signing onto the internets where they keep the truth. You're in for a rude awakening. Prepare yourself so you can be the first of your classmates to successfully navigate the rocky shoals of publishing.

This leads to the inevitable, what have you published? Me? Well, I have three completed manuscripts, two of which received full requests. I have a fourth I'm about to start querying, but I have not published a novel yet.

And that seals the advice of my fate. If I don't have the bookshelf to prove myself a better source than their instructors, they'd rather believe what they already believe. Don't take my word on it! Just go to these blogs. Look through the archives!

They never do, of course. They have homework, after all. This irks me only a little, but I probably would have done the same in their situation. I feel bad for the older students, though. The ones that aren't still claimed as a dependent by their parents, but have a spouse and kids and a job on top of their school work. They're draining the family funds for an experience they think will ready them for publishing.

Writing readies you for publishing. Reading readies you for publishing. Information readies you for publishing. You can get all this without a graduate program. You don't need to spend 150 grand for an MFA, only a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library.


1 Folklore and Advanced Writing: Poetry, in case you were wondering (and no, I'm not a poet).

2 My Shakespeare English class (as opposed to my Shakespeare theatre class I took the semester before) was so atrocious and factually inaccurate ("all Shakespearean plays are tragicomedy") that I complained about the professor to the department. My grade was then dropped from an A to a B.

3 There was a play my senior year that--while pretentious--had a woman scream while the lights were out. No movie, audio recording, or any other medium of delivery had ever evoked such a strong response from me. She reached into my stomach and tore out my intestines. I almost came out of my seat it was so powerful.

4 You think it's hard to get a book published, try the theatre. The people that make a living in that art are not only incredibly talented but wicked lucky as well.

5 This demographic is obviously changing as more and more young authors are published as undergraduates and even teens. Hannah Moskowitz had a good blog post on what it's like being a published author as an undergraduate.

6 Knowing the right person can open a lot of doors, don't get me wrong. It can be maddening for those of us who don't. But in the end, if your writing isn't up to snuff, you better know the owner of the publishing company or it doesn't really matter.

Subscribe by Email

So after an incredibly verbose fall, the last couple months have been virtually silent in comparison. As I've mentioned before, I work in publishing. My managers finally acknowledged they weren't giving me enough work so I'm moving to a list1 that is changing its business strategy. Thus lots of meetings, lots of new work, and of course I'm still responsible for my old position until they hire someone new2.

While the work has been satisfying, it's made it hard to post here. It's also made it hard to keep up with other people's blogs (and commenting doesn't work so well on my smart phone, so I can't even do it on the train). I was griping the other day that the thing I miss most about LiveJournal is that it notifies you when someone replies to a comment you've made. I hate repeatedly checking the comments of a blog when my last comment remains the last one. I just want to know that someone has replied. Why don't you do that, Blogger?!?!

What's that? It does? D'OH! So next to the comment box, there's a link that says "Subscribe by Email." By default, this is turned off, but simply click it and you'll get an email any time someone responds after you (don't do this on very popular blogs or you'll get hundreds of emails and go insane). I always forget to do it because it's not included in the comment box and there isn't an option to turn it on as the default. Still, it's a habit I should get into. Commenting on a blog is okay, but I enjoy genuine conversation, a back and forth between participants3. At some point or another, you just stop checking to see if there's new


1 A list is like a genre in publishing. An editor and a project manager will have a list (or sometimes multiple lists) they call their own. In this case, I managed media content for Developmental Psychology (a big money maker, but the content is pretty much the same). I am moving over to Political Science, which has a much more diverse publishing set. It also publishes all its content at the same time, so that'll be a fun challenge.

2 And they haven't even posted the position yet. D'oh!

3 Who's old enough to remember the early chatrooms of the early intertubes? I spent many an hour my freshman year in Chathouse, marveling at this thing called the internet and the hot girl in New Jersey who liked me. ;)4

4 16 years later and we're still friends on Facebook. How do ya like them apples?

Measuring Progress

On my website, I have a page named the Queue where I list all the ideas I plan on pursuing to completion. This includes novels, short stories, plays, etc. My current wip will have a general word count (I don't update it every day) and those works I've finished will be struck through with a final word count (usually of the first draft).

I modified it today and removed the word count on everything except my current work in progress. I only work on one story at a time and with the exception of HOSNR, all of them would be restarted when I get to them. So having a word count there--especially a word count that hasn't changed in years--makes me look like I'm scatterbrained and/or unable to finish work I start on.

So it's all gone. Now, only 7Sac has a word count. I think the page looks much better, cleaner, more focused. It's a laser! bzzzzrrrzzzzzzzz!!!!!