For the curious reader of science fiction (scifi) and fantasy
If you subscribe to this blog, you might have missed notifications for the last umpty-ump posts. In which case, you might have missed a whole run of The Ponce Chronicles, which I know you don’t want to miss out on. (Something was broken, but now it’s fixed–I think.) Here’s a good place to come into the story, if you want to catch up:
In any case, I hope you’ll get the proper notification of all my future can’t-miss posts.
One of the pesky things about having an author website is that you have to maintain the thing and keep it current. A couple of years ago, I wrenched mine out of the 1990s and into the ever-shifting “present” by abandoning the simple html pages that I mostly understood, and adopting a WordPress platform that I only kinda sorta understood. The thing is that the old version was not mobile friendly, which meant it was hard to read on a smartphone. The WordPress version is uber-friendly, and let’s face it, looks a lot better and is easier to read on anything except maybe an Atari or Apple II.
What I didn’t do, though, was make it a “secure” site, meaning among other things, having an “https” URL instead of “http” and having that “[padlock] Secure” thingy at the beginning of the address bar. I don’t do any commerce from my site, so I didn’t think it was necessary. But in this, as in so many other things, I was mistaken. Google really wants you to have a secure site, and you can take a hit in the search results by not having one. So… all right, all right, all right, I’ll do it already.
The process seemed pretty daunting at first, but it turned out I only had to make a couple of small changes in my WordPress dashboard, and another on my hosting server control panel, to make my pages appear as “https.” Getting the padlock, though—that was another matter. A tech support call to InMotion, my hosting company, netted the information that every image that appears on my website has to have an address that begins with src=”https instead of src=”http. That’s a lot of images! (A website called WhyNoPadlock.com was very helpful in diagnosing the issue, by the way.)
At first, I thought this meant I would have to upload all the images again and place each one back onto each page. Aaahh!!! But that turned out to be unnecessary. What I did have to do was edit each website page in code view and type in the “s” everywhere I found src=”http. That was it! Didn’t take more than five or six hours, tops. For some reason, it wasn’t needed on the blog posts.
In the course of doing this, I discovered that I had some pages way down on my menus that I’d never actually put the content into! Oops. (Workshops and TV Show, I’m lookin’ at you.) So I corrected that, too.
Bottom line: We’re done, we’re secure, we’re good to go! Condition Green throughout the ship!
My new, completely revamped website has gone live, replacing the old one at this same address:
Hah! You’re already here! Most of the previous content is still here, but presented in a much more readable way, especially information about my books. It’s a WordPress site, and fully responsive, which means it’s friendly for viewing on smartphones and tablets, as well as regular computers. I hope you like it! If you have any problems, please let me know. (There’s an email contact form under Meet the Author.)
Thanks and kudos to Abigail and Brian McMurray for their expert work in setting it up!
My blog is moving here to stay, as well. In fact, this will likely be my last regular post on the old site at Blogspot. (Sniff. G’bye, Blogspot!) I’ll be keeping the old blog alive as a backup archive, but all my posts from there have been ported over here, as well.
At the moment, the Subscribe to Posts function at the bottom of the page is acting a little wonky, but I hope to get that straightened out quickly. (The RSS feed should be fine.) I hope you’ll all subscribe! (But if it doesn’t work, give it a day or two.)
See you here often, I hope!
Over the last few months, I’ve been working away in odd moments on a new project. That project is a complete revamp of my website! Oh yes, this has been a long time coming. My current site (www.starrigger.net) has existed in essentially the same form since 1996. That’s a long time in dog years and people years, and in web years, it’s practically geologic.
Time for a change, you think?
Actually, what drove me to it, beyond a nagging feeling for the last ten years that it really was time, was the relatively new importance of making websites mobile-friendly. Google made it crystal clear: If your site isn’t mobile-friendly (meaning, easy to read on a smartphone), you can expect to see your search rankings suffer.
And so, my lovingly homebrewed-html website that has served me for so long, prepare to be put out to pasture. Or into the Wayback Machine, if you will. It’s not too late to take a final look—the new site isn’t live yet for public viewing—but it will be soon. The new one will be at the same URL, but will be on the WordPress platform, and will be way easier to browse on a phone, and for that matter, on a computer.
This blog will move to the new platform and will be at the same address as the website: www.starrigger.net. (The existing blog content will appear there, as well.)
Here’s a sneak preview:
Look for an announcement soon!