Briefly: for anyone who’s interested, I’m going to be experimenting with various new “looks” at a special subsite of this one. (I’ll make a bigger announcement when I’m ready to take this live.)
Currently, I’ve imported to the test site only posts and comments and so on from January 1 2011 through the “Admin: Cleaning Up Some RAMH Clutter” post of a week go. Thus, some links to older posts won’t work. Audio files won’t work, at all (although the little “play” widgets appear onscreen). And other stuff will be just plain weird until I fix it. (E.g., a lot of themes seem to have non-hierarchical/nested category lists. I hate that.) Remember that whatever you see there will be transient, until it’s not. :)
In the meantime, feel free to post any comments here if you see anything you like, or anything you don’t like. I probably won’t be paying much attention to comments over at the other place, especially since I haven’t set up reCaptcha or other anti-sp*m measures.
Jayne says
My you’ve been busy. I like the way, in your About page, you listed what you were required to learn for each book you have authored. It not only tells us a bit about what the story might be like, but also reminds readers (wondering Jeez, what took so long?) of how much work goes into writing a book .
Such a vast amount of information you had to soak in for each novel, it’s no wonder writing takes so much time and, to say the least, effort.
I like your subsite’s look. So, um, uncluttered. ;)
John says
Thanks for taking a look at it, Jayne!
That “what I had to learn…” routine was entirely unplanned. I did it for the description of the WIP and then the rhythm just continued.
You’re right about soaking in the information. That’s my preferred way to do research — as opposed to looking up everything on an ad hoc basis — which is another reason it takes so (too?) long!
marta says
It takes me a while to get used to change. I will have to look at the other place a few times before I know what I think.
Drives me crazy that I will like one thing about one theme and something else about another but can’t find one that has both. Or there is no theme to do what I really have in mind…
John says
marta: I’m currently remaking a Web site for someone else; one of my greatest frustrations there is that it — the main site — is not blog-based at all. So, forget themes. And then there’s the not-small matter of my not being an artist, and having only the vaguest of notions what makes something “look good” in the first place. Which makes it a… trial.
The new theme I seem to have settled on for RAMH is called Leviathan. It’s actually a so-called “child” theme, meaning that the designer has started with a very general-purpose master or parent theme (called Hybrid) and then spun off variations (like Leviathan) from that. I’ve tinkered with the color scheme, and with the fonts, and a little — just a little — with the layout itself. And added an “adjust text size” gimmick. (Leviathan has a wider content column than the one I use here, but I couldn’t decide how big to make the font. I know the formula for font size vs. line length, but I still couldn’t make up my mind. So I’m dumping the decision into site visitors’ laps, ha.)
Oh, and The Missus is going to help me with a new header image. The one I’ve been using here has a hat in it, all right, and also an implied “my,” but it’s sort of reaching, y’know? (And not in a “…to pick up my hat” way.)