Site news…

Hello and welcome to the new blog!

Things are still under construction around here, but I wanted to give an update on what’s been happeing since leaving my previous host (that shalt not be named…).

• All content from the old site has been imported. I say that, but my post count is out by 8 entries somewhere and I don’t know if they were corrupt on the old site or got lost in the transition. However, since going through ~3000 posts to find 8 isn’t going to happen any time soon, I’ll just have to live with it.
• New theme! I like it better than the old theme and it has some improvements right up front. The most noticeable is the featured image support, but almost as important is the category tags on the front page as well.
• Featured images! Because the new theme supports the use of featured images, I’ve updated all posts to have them (well, almost all, there are ones like my posts about mcstories.com that don’t, I’ll get to those later).
• Categories! I have been terrible at using categories in the past, using them primarily to signal a series of related posts, that changes with the new site. No more “Uncategorized” posts going forward, each and every post will have a category associated with it. Go on over to the “Tags” page in the main menu for more details about this.
• Tags! Speaking of the tags page, I’m actually going to start using tags and categories differently, you can see details on that on the Tags page for that too.
• Tags! Again! And even more tags! My old tags page was a static list of tags that I used commonly. I’ve revamped this page to now be dynamic and include descriptions! No more finding tags that I forgot to add to the list! There is a post count for each tag included and I’ll be working on better descriptions for each of the tags in the next while.
• Status page update! I’ve also made the status page dynamic, pulling the list of upcoming posts directly from the WordPress queue. This list also included the new use of the categories tag to indicate what the caption is going to be about.
• Stories page! Amazingly enough, my old blog didn’t contain any of my short stories, just my captions. I’ve corrected this by adding a new Stories page which contains a dynamic list of all my short stories. You can sort by name, series, and date. There is a link to the story on my blog which includes a table of contents for each story and improved formating.
• Cookie warning! Boo! Yes there is a cookie warning at the bottom of the blog now as the analytics package I use sets a cookie to identify returning visitors. Sorry about that.

There are still a few things left to do and ideas I may implement as well:

• Update the old posts with category and tags. This is a huge job, so it will probably fall in to the “when I’m REEEEAAAALLLLLYYYY bored” category.
• Update the rest of the future posts with tags. I’ve already added categories to all the future posts, and tagged everything up to the end of February. I expect to spend an hour or two a week on this until I get it done, which is lots of time to stay ahead of the posting schedule.
• Comments. WordPress supports comments and I’ll probably enable them at some point, but that means dealing with spam, so I’ll be taking a careful approach with this.
• Front end adult warning. I might add a popup warning for adult content, not sure how I feel about this yet.

And that’s everything so far.

I want to thank everyone who reached out over the last little while asking about what happened and what was next. I turns out I wasn’t just shouting in to the void after all 😉

I will be writing another post in a little while about the actual mechanics of how I moved to my new host, as a few people had asked about that as well.