I still want to sell my art as ecards, online. Today I found someone with a good plan, selling the cards with a paid membership to the site. Ojolie offers a free account, to send the ecards she offers without charge. But, I think, I would rather make the ecards a subscriber only thing. Art online is just too easy to rip off. At least I could get a year’s subscription before giving access to the art. Of course, I still don’t know what software to use. Something like a catalogue, but then it needs to send a png file, or pdf. I think I would include envelopes too, a bonus should people print the cards. So much to consider when you start to think about all the details.
Web Publishing
The posts in Web Publishing are usually things I have learned the hard way, or the long way around. I like to do things my own way. I look for better ideas, well, different ideas, later – if I need them. People should always pick and choose what advice they follow. But, I have more than 20 years of experience creating, building, and maintaining my own sites. I’ve learned a few things, in my own contrary, independent way.
There are 866 posts filed in Web Publishing (this is page 2 of 87).
Moved the Site to b2evolution
Just moved the site over from WordPress to b2evolution. People have asked me why, a few times. There are a few reasons. But, for now I am fixing glitches with moving to another CMS. I like b2 and I don’t think it will take me long to get to know how it works and where things are now. Meanwhile, images are mostly not working. Categories and tags did not make the import, not sure why. So I am manually going through my posts one by one to renovate a little. What usually happens when you move to a new place… you renovate to make it look more like the old place. 🙂 People are funny like that.
Making my life easier, I have added comments from the original post to this post. I have been moving my site content to Joomla. It’s a different set up from WordPress and b2evolution but I think it will be more active and user friendly. Still need to fix the images with posts (that was mangled by WordPress) and add my links which I will end up doing manually, one at a time. But, I hope this will end the project of moving from WordPress to some other CMS. It has been a longer adventure than I expected.
Here are the comments:
Comment from: Jane Gassner [Visitor]
I lost the entire archive of MidLifeBloggers.com and JaneGassner.com sometime during the holiday season. It was one of those, “you only have 24 hours to migrate” and for various reasons, I got in at the 25th hour. I couldn’t decide how upset I should/would be. MidLifeBloggers was a longterm venture that still got a lot of hits. JaneGassner.com, not so much. But MidLifeBloggers was old business, and I had said everything I wanted to about midlife and beyond. Jane Gassner had the potential to be new and, if not shiny, then gaining a slight glow about it after time. So I’m redoing JaneGassner.com but starting anew. It’s springtime, and perhaps that’s influencing me to not try to make it as it was. Considering that it wasn’t that successful, it’s probably a wise decision.
How Do People Find you Online?
Are you sure people can find you online? What if you change your Twitter account? What if a web service you rely on shuts down? What if… ?
Getting Back to Being an Effective Blogger, Again
This site is not dead but… I do need to find it again. Keeping focus and staying true to your own voice are not easy when you look around at other sites and start comparing yourself. If you can manage to do it constructively, that’s great. I’ve gotten sucked into my own wormhole of blog envy. Not envy, but self unsatisfaction. So, I need to pull myself out of it and get back to the basics, again. The key to sustainable blogging is showing up and showing up the next day too when you’re run out of stuff to say and feel like everyone is doing it better than you are.
Considering a Change from WordPress
Not for any special reason but, I am seriously considering changing my sites from WordPress. There are several reasons not to do this: transferring content, themes and plugins I have bought will no longer work, learning (and installing/ setting up) new software. But… I feel WordPress has lost individuals like myself. I’m not a web developer or designer. I don’t have clients to set sites up for. I just have my own sites and WordPress keeps feeling limited.
I am not so keen on changing. Though I do like change for the sake of change, sometimes. I don’t like being in a rut or following the pack.
It is not an easy decision to fully commit to. I’ve been looking at other software. I’m always interested in alternatives and options and new things when it comes to web publishing. But that’s more like window shopping than making a serious plan.
If you publish a site, with something other than WordPress (or Blogger/ Blogspot or other freebies which don’t run on your own domain) let me know. I’d like to set up Typo3 but so far it just will not install. Fancy installations are a hard limit for me. If I can’t even get the software set up I’m not confident in using it afterwards.
At least, it will be an interesting month – or however long it takes me to either change or decide not to rock the boat.
Has WordPress Jumped the Shark?
I think WordPress is in danger of “jumping the shark”, becoming too complicated and loaded with too many features. Google has mostly forgotten all about Blogger, but it may become a better alternative for a lot of people who just want a simple business site. WordPress seems to be something for people who want to spend time and money on a fancy site with a lot of features. How many businesses really need all of that? Not many.
Gallery is Uploaded
I have my gallery up. It’s a mess, lots of duplicated images. I will get to work on tidying it up and more importantly, re-doing images for size. Now I can really see how they didn’t work when I tried CafePress, Zazzle, etc. I’m going to work on creating my art in bigger sizes, dimensionally and artistically. Sort of a meeting in the middle between making bigger pictures and creating them as bigger images using software. (I know what I mean).
Let me know what you think about the gallery.
Note, there are no text files. The software does not upload anything not an image file. I’m not really keen on giving free access to my text files anyway. So, I will likely upload them in a directory of their own and limit access. I doubt most people will care. Then I still have all the set up and art to do for the email postcards, which are on yet another sub-link I haven’t posted yet.
I made an ad campaign on Project Wonderful today too. I don’t know what traffic that may bring. It’s likely not the best ad, for SEO, or anything else. But, it’s alive and I will see how it goes.
From the Endless Bucket of SEO Comment Spam
I know you have seen this same post in your comment spam. Sometimes I read them before flushing them. This one bugs me. It assumes we are all writing for SEO. As if writing were just a formula of HTML. Writing, making sense, having a voice or something to write about means nothing. You could write gibberish as long as you throw in keyword gibberish and use bold and italics and various sizes of headers.
Stuff like this makes us all seem worthless.
Stuff like this makes it seem it really is all about money.
Stuff like this is why people don’t read and have the attention span of a potato chip.
Don’t become part of the problem. Keep writing for human readers. Let Google find you because someone actually read your work and thought you were great. Anything less is too shallow to be sustainable.
Alltop in Decay
Looking at Alltop, the Writing section which my site is a part of, is sad. I was so pleased and proud to be one of the sites asked to join originally. But, now that is tarnished as Alltop seems to be yet another website which has been sold and left to fall into linkrot.
On this Writing category page there are three sites which obviously are no longer active. Two are the same site, a double listing, even. No one seems to be looking, fixing or caring what happens the Alltop.
I’m sad to see another site crumble in the dust of making a buck.
I don’t blame site owners. If you put all of that into getting a site off the ground and were successful you might play with your laurels a bit and then be happy to take a great offer. Money enough to let you sit on your laurels and not have to work so hard again, if ever.
I know, in part, why people buy a site which has gotten big and I can understand that they don’t have the stamina or passion or whatever to keep it from falling apart. But, why do some of them deliberately buy a site and then abandon it?
It happens far too often.
I like photographing abandoned houses because they are sad, lonely and maybe I wonder about the story behind them too – they mystery. It doesn’t seem the same with abandoned sites. They fall apart in the wrong way. There is no romance to it, just decay.
#NoCommentNoShare
Because I am fed up with sites which expect me to register for another site, like Disqus, before I can leave a comment I am no longer going to share links to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc for any site which I can not comment on.
I have not been blocked or banned from Disqus. I just do not want to register for an account. For years we have given our email and name to sites in order to comment. That was more than enough. Trusting sites to collect our email addresses and not sell them was much more than enough to ask when I only wanted to comment on a blog post. To ask, or expect more is too much!
Disqus allows guest comments. If the site owner chooses to enable the feature – you can leave a comment without having to login or register with Disqus. So, it is fully the fault of the site owner if people can not comment. The site owner uses Disqus to track people. They want to track everyone so they can’t let people comment unless they become a number.
Well no more for me! I deleted my account at Disqus last year when I was fed up. Now I’m taking it a step farther and putting the blame right on site owners. So, any site which expects me to register in order to comment I will not be forwarding or sharing links on any of my accounts: Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Scoop.it and etc.