About the New Website Design

You might notice something different.

Yes, it’s that new website that I’ve been mentioning for months and months now. I actually started soliciting feedback on the DeepGenre blog way back in December (see my piece “What Works on an Author Website?”). And now you can see the results here. You might also want to take the opportunity to poke around the redesigned Infoquake and MultiReal websites.

It’s likely that I’ll be doing some continuous tweaking to the site over the next few weeks, both to improve functionality and to fix problems. I haven’t looked at the sites on IE6 in over a month, and I’m sure they look absolutely horrendous. I’ve never tried to view them on a Mac. Plus I keep stumbling across broken images all over the place, which is entirely WordPress’s fault, and has nothing whatsoever to do with my shoddy organizational skills and inability to follow directions or standard programming practices.

In the meantime, here are some of the highlights of the new website:

• New home page (here) with consolidated information about me and links to the important parts of the site. It also features the John Steinbeck quote from East of Eden that I’m strongly favoring as the epigraph for the beginning of Geosynchron.
• Frequently asked questions page (here) with what I hope are frequently asked questions, along with the frequently given answers.
• Easy-to-find social networking icons at the bottom of every blog post that are, frankly, a crass attempt to garner more attention and traffic from social networking websites like StumbleUpon, Digg, and the like. (Thanks to the fabulous Sociable plugin which makes managing these icons easy as pie.)
• Subscribe by email functionality on the blog, courtesy of the Subscribe2 plugin. Look in the left sidebar and sign up if you’d like to receive emails whenever I post a new article on the blog. Does it actually work? Well, er, I don’t know. I haven’t thoroughly tested it yet, so let me know if you have trouble.
• Notify me of follow-up comments functionality on every entry of the blog, to try to encourage continuing discussion. Does this feature actually work? Not sure about that either, but let’s hope so. Courtesy of the Subscribe to Comments plugin.
• Random entries in the left sidebar, in an attempt to get people to sample the bountiful harvest of archived blog posts. Courtesy of my own damn PHP programming skills (which is probably why it occasionally breaks and shows nothing).
• List of top 15 tags in the left sidebar. Just move your mouse over the “Tags” headline to see it. Yeah, okay, so it’s not a particularly intuitive navigation scheme, but I’m working on it.
• Revised “Best of the Blog” page (here) updated to include some of the stuff I’ve written here in the past year.

New things to note on the Infoquake and MultiReal websites:

• Complete excerpt of MultiReal is online. The Pyr PDF sampler contains chapters 1-5; the excerpt on the MultiReal website also contains chapters 6, 7, and 8. And considering chapter 6 is set on the virtual sex network known as the Sigh, you know you want to read that chapter. (But don’t get too excited, it’s not particularly explicit.) No word from Josef K. Foley about artwork yet, but word is his wife is expecting twins, so he’s got his hands full.
• Buy Now pages give the discriminating SF consumer a bevvy of choices of where to purchase their copies of Infoquake and MultiReal.
• Consolidated RSS feed for Book News pulls all of the Infoquake and MultiReal-related entries from my blog into one place. (You’ll notice that my home page now automatically displays the latest book news as well.)
• New podcasts will be coming shortly. I’ve already recorded chapter 1 of MultiReal (though Audacity is giving me fits so I haven’t posted it yet). Plus I intend to go back and finish recording chapters 5, 6, and 7 of Infoquake as well. So keep an eye on the audio pages for Infoquake and MultiReal.
• Web exclusives pages that currently house the first drafts of Infoquake‘s chapter 1, the essay “Why I Wrote Infoquake,” and links to blog posts about Infoquake and MultiReal. I’ll be posting first drafts of MultiReal‘s chapter 1 at some point — and that’s going to be interesting, considering I have about a dozen entirely different openings for the book that are currently just gathering digital dust on my hard drive.

I would be remiss if I didn’t give a shout-out to the Inline Posts plugin for WordPress as well. This miraculous plugin is what allows me to mirror the contents of several pages throughout the site without actually having to maintain duplicates of them. It’s worth checking out.

And now, I crave feedback. What do you think? Positive and negative comments welcome.

Update 4/17/08 at 8:58 PM: Okay, so I’ve now heard from a few people that the comments form doesn’t work, which is why none of you are giving feedback. I just assumed you all hated me. Now I know that you don’t — unless the comments form doesn’t work and you hate me. Off to fix it now…