Refresh

There’s something to be said for change — a clean slate, a palate well cleansed, a lick of digital paint to brighten up my scriptorium and make it looks less like a dungeon of yore.

After more than six months spent coding someone else’s dream instead of writing stories and blogging, I need and deserve a change. And, what better way than to tend the neglected garden of my beloved scriptorium?

So, I’ve ripped off the Band-Aid and shelved my website’s previous custom design in favour of one of Ghost’s off-the-shelf themes. Rebasing off a stock theme instead of developing a new one from scratch means less work for me. Yes, I still need to make changes, but I’ll be doing that using ‘official’ methods, such as creating custom templates and injecting JavaScript and CSS into the theme’s header and footer using the appropriate facility in the admin console.

Stripping things back to basics, looking over my (self-hosted) analytics, and reconnecting with my subscribers and readers, I hope, will allow me to refocus. Presently, the layout is all blog-centric — the book pages and serialised instalments of Erastes and the Codex of Destiny are still available, albeit removed from the navigation menu. This omission is temporary until I can write the templates needed to surface them once again.

I’m not in a rush, however, and before I commit, I’m canvassing feedback — including yours, should you care to provide it. I wear too many hats — fantasy author, blogger, technical writer, software developer — and write whatever the hell takes my fancy. But this scattergun approach means my website is a mishmash of creative, technical and personal content.

The other thing I’ve done is to convert my fledging Lonely Tables Games website (which is about solo table-top RPGs) into a static site powered by Hugo. I had to do this because running three Ghost installations on a single core, 1 GB virtual private server created far too much instability. But it means LTG lost its native newsletter system, so I’m using this site to send newsletters on its behalf, thanks to Ghost’s nifty support for multiple newsletters.

So tell me what you think and what you’d like added or emphasised. This time, you can do so with Ghost’s native comment feature. Yes, after years of third-party drudgery, I can now thankfully reinstate comments without a single external dependency!