Thursday, December 26, 2013
"Meta-Blogging 101": I start restructuring, with two new Wordpress blogs
I am gradually restructuring my websites to guide the
visitor’s focus on two major areas. This
activity is commensurate with the process to publish my “Do Ask. Do Tell III”,
which I discussed on my Books blog on Dec. 12.
The first of these is “primary content navigation”, which is
best followed from a single link on my main site, here.
The various books and essay collections that I view as
primary content (going back to 1996) can be tracked to footnotes. Newer materials (the “III” book above will be
maintained with a new “Do Ask, Do Tell Footnotes” blog, which I have created
today with Wordpress, with “Blue Host”, primary link here.
The general concept is that one should be able to navigate
through my writings and drill down to detailed supporting notes, and that these
notes on newer materials will be maintained on this blog. Most issues of concern to me have been
addressed in one of my books or primary issues, so this view of navigating my
work should take the visitor through most of my issues in quite a lot of detail. I have one post to introduce the blog, and
the domain is here.
The other blog will give me the ability to correlate books,
movies, television series, musical works, and various other live performance
events by issue topic. Starting in
January 2014, many films or books that are heavily topical (as to political or
social issues) will be reviewed here instead of on Blogger. A webpage will be provided (on doaskdotell)
to enable to visitor to easily correlate posts by topic or label among the various
blogs and sites. I expect to cover the “treatments”
of my own new media projects (music and video, and “the novel”) on this blog,
also, link here.
Since I have so many
different domains and sites, I find it is necessary to organize material “logically”
rather than physically (much like a database, especially the old IMS mainframe
product). There is no one vendor that is
optimal in all parameters (stability, speed, ease of use, reputation, etc) at
all times in all circumstances, and different services and vendors have
opposing strengths and weaknesses. So I
find I need to take this approach.
I spent a couple hours today setting this up on Wordpress
with the BlueHost service (in Utah).
There are some teething problems, and there is a learning curve, because
Wordpress (as implemented by webhosts) has quite a different look and feel than
Blogger. For example, on the “Notes”
blog, the first post title doesn’t appear because of some issue with the WP “aside”
feature which I don’t get right now. It looks like I have to download the stats
package from the “Jetpack” plugin set (link).
I will have more details on how to use this once I have done
a couple of “meat and potato” postings and ironed out some issues. I’ll spread a little good cheer about this on
Twitter, Facebook and Google-plus soon, too.
Over time, I expect fewer “small” postings on Blogger, and
more use of the “Book Navigation” concept to cover all the issues. One reason is, frankly, pressure to work
better with the commercial side of the media industry which does have to make
money, even from me.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment