Sorry, Maintenance Day …

I’m behind on some reviews, but I’m also behind on some site maintenance, so I’m working on cleaning out dead links, deleting superfluous plugins, that kind of thing. I’m also making sure that the pages with essays and posts are up to date.

Thanks to my real job, I’ve learned a lot about HTML over the last couple of years and can now see a lot of things I’ve done wrong, so I’m going back and repairing mistakes and improving the internal links.

I do have some reviews coming up. I was unable to get to them over the weekend, and a lightning storm shut me down early yesterday. Should have some interesting stuff up in the near future, though.

One thing I’m trying to figure out: Every time I link Crunchyroll, WordPress thinks the link is broken and strikes it out. I don’t know what’s causing this, and since I link that site frequently (considering my blog’s focus and all), it’s kind of annoying. Crunchyroll is pretty good about keeping its pages live even when it removes content, so pretty much none of those links should actually be dead, but go figure. Anyway, if you see me link Crunchyroll and the link has a strikethrough, it’s probably actually a good link. Just FYI.

Under Maintenance

I see there’s been a fair amount of traffic (for me) in the last hour or so. If you’re watching the site constantly breaking and unbreaking right in front of your eyes … sorry about that. I’m running maintenance and trying to figure out how many extraneous things I can remove without destroying anything.

Brief Maintenance Update

Pardon the brief update, but I’m currently working to strip a lot of JavaScript and CSS out of the site, which is time-consuming, though it should in the end make this ridiculously heavy site much lighter. Please notify me if you see that anything is broken.

Maintenance Update

I’ve mentioned before that I’m aware this site is too clunky and heavy. That’s partly WordPress’s fault, but as with all things WordPress, they have apps for that.

I’m still tweaking, but I’ve installed several new plugins for caching, lazy load, image compression, and stripping of unnecessary code. It’s improved the site’s speed considerably, though I’m still registering as sluggish on Google’s Speed Insights. However, my ad-blocker now shows less than half as many trackers as I had previously, which is a considerable improvement. Getting rid of those has been a goal of mine.

I’m aware that many or most of my readers use mobile devices, so I will likely install an AMP version of the site in the near future (and for those who don’t know, AMP is Google’s stripped-down, mobile-friendly version of HTML, which WordPress supports via a simple plugin); the only reason I’ve delayed this is that my comment system, Disqus, supports AMP but requires extensive setup to make it work. It will take me some time to figure it all out.

An Interview (and Some Other Business)

Fiona of the blog Author Interviews graciously interviewed me, and you can go read the results.

Here’s a snippet:

Fiona: Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?

I am wary of messages in fiction. Many years ago, I was tangentially involved with several authors in the Christian Booksellers’ Association; there are some talented storytellers in that set, but I got a sense that they tended to elevate message over entertainment, often to the detriment of their work. I drifted away from them, I think, because of a difference in artistic vision. In the broader publishing industry, we are now seeing something similar to what I saw in CBA, what with the heavy emphasis on social justice or inclusiveness or whatever you want to call it, where message is emphasized to the point that craftsmanship gets neglected.

The reader is free to find any message or none in Jake and the Dynamo. I am sure some of my opinions crept into the text, and anyone who wants to try to tease them out may do so. But the only messages I had firmly in mind were along the lines of, “magical girls are awesome,” and “being a teenager sucks sometimes.”

In regards to other business, I am soon leaving to join Family for a Christmas vacation. I’ll be taking my computer, of course, but my plan is to spend as much of my spare time writing as possible. I am ambitiously hoping to have a complete rough of the second volume of Jake and the Dynamo by the time my Christmas break is over.

While I am at it, I’d also like to do some maintenance on the blog. I habitually use an ad blocker, and it shows an embarrassingly high amount of blocked content on my own site, for reasons I know not. I’m going to try uninstalling and reinstalling the plugins and then deciding which ones I can remove, to see if I can cut down on this blog’s code, which is much heavier than it has a right to be.

I’ve also been gradually learning about HTML and CSS, mostly for my job, and I’d like to try my hand at possibly adding some schema.org markup, which I know Google search likes. There are plugins for that, of course—but they probably stand a good chance of adding yet more trackers.

I’d like the code on this blog to be better than it is, but the WYSIWYG editor doesn’t do everything I’d like, and adding the code by hand takes so dang much time.

The Days of Hiatus

I hate (ahem) to pause the party, because my traffic indicates that our ongoing series of hate—burning hate—for Cardcaptor Sakura is my most popular posting, ever. As they say, hate sells. However, I’m sending my computer in for some maintenance, so I’m going to be offline for a few days.

As anyone reading Jake and the Dynamo knows, hating someone passionately takes a lot of energy. I therefore give you permission to love, honor, and obey Cardcaptor Sakura at least until the weekend.

The hate will continue once morale has improved.