things I’m planning

So, here are a few things I’m planning:

1. I need to understand WordPress (the software which runs this blog) better than I do. I figured out how to customize the sidebar (obviously), but there’s a lot more I need to know how to do. So, I ordered a book (one of the Visual Quickstart books, they’re usually good for what I need to do, and it’s the book recommended on the WordPress website).

2. I’ve just started to explore plugins, which are little additional programs which expand the functionality in some way (or mess it up, but there’s a solution if that happens). I have one which allows me to back up the database periodically. I have another which allows little parts of a message to be hidden until the reader presses a link, like this one here:

[SPOILER]And I have one which fixes “smart” quotes (as Microsoft calls them, they’re really typographic quotes) and makes them regular straight quotes. Which is not to imply that “straight” is necessarily better or anything, but I do prefer straight quotes.
[/SPOILER]

The ability to hide things like this is used to hide “spoilers” (if you’re writing movie reviews, for example), and I may use it in some of the character descriptions (like the ones listed over there on the right), so I don’t reveal too much, except to regular readers.

3. But this feature could also be useful in another way, since I’m planning to explore how much WordPress could be used to present the fiction itself. Once this draft of the new novel is done, I think I’ll leave it “as is” for a while. It’s never a good idea to start editing right after finishing the initial writing (at least for me). I find it’s better to let it sit for a while, in order to get some perspective. It’s a lot easier to edit something ruthlessly when it was written a while ago (preferably so long ago that you no longer remember writing it). Meanwhile, I want to learn more about WordPress (and more about PHP, since WordPress was written in PHP), and maybe write some shorter things. Probably another murder mystery, maybe more.

4. Oh, and I think I fixed all the internal links in the entries (links to other entries, including the character list in the sidebar), since each of those had to be changed manually. If you find any which are still wrong (which lead back to the old blog, and you’ll be able to tell the difference, since I changed the theme of that one back to newsportal), please let me know.