Blog housekeeping update

by Sunita

Energized by the wonderful discussion that took place below my whine-and-complain post about the state of book talk today, I’ve made some changes and updates to my blog.

Format

I’ve finally stopped being a cheapskate and upgraded from the basic WordPress blog. I’m unthreading comments to see if that makes talking easier. We always preferred that at DA and quite a few multi-author blogs don’t thread their comments, so let’s give it a try. Sadly, we lose the reply button unless I move the blog out of WordPress. Which I may do, but for the time being we’ll have to muddle along.

The URL for this blog is now https://readerwriterville.com. The wordpress.com one will still redirect to the site, of course.

I’ve enabled Markdown for comments. If you don’t know what Markdown is you don’t have to use it, but if you do then you can substitute it for html codes for bold, italics, underlines, etc. It’s also easier if you want to embed links (it takes fewer keystrokes than html). I’m using Markdown to write my posts as well as some other stuff and I’ll post about that at some point. Feel free to hit me up with questions, although I’m a newbie.

I have a feeling I’m going to be playing around with the theme for a while. If I’m going to blog more I want to be able to have different kinds of posts, and I want to make sure that the theme is readable across platforms and renders comfortably and easily. Please let me know if the current theme (this one or future ones if I change it) is difficult to read or download. I don’t love the theme you’re looking at now, but it is versatile and it lets me have everything I want visible on the page. I’m especially interested in knowing if it takes a long time to load on less powerful computers and phones.

Blogroll

On the sidebar you’ll find links to the blogs I follow in my RSS feed reader. I’m always looking for new blogs, and I imagine other readers are too, so if you have ones you particularly like please tell me about them. I’m happy to add them to the blogroll, too. The more we support each other the more our small obscure blogs can thrive. And feel free to tell me about your own blog if I don’t have it listed. Self-nominations are a good thing!

Reader Feedback

One of the things that tends to keep me from blogging more is that I worry too much about whether people will find what I write interesting, and also with respect to more personal, introspective, or ranty posts, whether it’s TMI. I realize this is not entirely rational, I’m blogging after all which is about putting words into the public sphere, but it’s hard for me to stop thinking that way. I hesitated before writing up my whine-and-complain post, and then I hesitated about publishing it. Because, whine-and-complain, who needs it? But it generated a great discussion, which I did not anticipate but which made me so happy.

So I’m asking you, readers, what kinds of posts would you like to see? What would you like to talk about? What would you like me to talk about? More reviews? Links posts? Deals I’ve found on books I know something about? I’m thinking I should post my GR reviews here more regularly, as I had originally intended to. Would it be worth me reposting my reviews here over the next few weeks/months? I’m not asking whether you would comment, just if you would find them interesting reading, assuming you aren’t on GR. I might start writing a bit on what I’m working on in terms of my research. Mostly notes and thinking-out-loud posts, but that’s worthwhile for me because it lets me work things out before I turn them into academicese (not a word but you know what I mean). Would that be of any interest? Anything that you come up with is fair game if it’s something I think I can opine about (and you know I can pretty much opine about anything).

Thanks for coming back every time I rediscover my blogging mojo. You guys are the best. And that includes you, lurkers. 😉