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things, they are a-changing
I recently decided that I needed to tidy up the professional side of my website, and, since I’m not blogging much anymore, came to a crisis of conscience: did I want to turn mizkit.com over to a professional-only website?
Mes amis, I did not.
So I registered Catie Murphy dot com (because CE Murphy dot com has been taken as long as I’ve been using that name, and I’m now also writing under Catie Murphy, which was available as a domain name :)), and have set up shop there.
It’s a very simple site with What’s Out Now, What’s Out Next, and All My Books, plus a few other useful links. I do not anticipate it ever becoming more complicated than that. In fairly short order I’ll have all the CE Murphy stuff removed from mizkit.com, at which point…I’ll have to decide what, exactly, I’m doing with it as a space, but that’s not this week’s problem.
In the meantime, I’m pretty pleased with Catie Murphy dot com, so do go check it out! :D
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new! shiny! website!
Thanks to the efforts of the magnificent Thirzah Brown, I have a beautiful new website! Equally excitingly, I have, through the good graces of a reader, acquired a comments moderator, which means the comments have been turned back on for the site! COME ONE! COME ALL! SPEAK TO ME! :)
This has all been in the works for quite a long time now, and I’m really delighted to see it go live. My needs for a website have changed over the years, with me gradually wanting a greater focus on the CE Murphy side of things on the main page of the site, without losing the more personal aspect that mizkit.com, specifically, means to me as an individual. There is, as there was previously, a CE Murphy-specific landing page, but the broad delivery of the main page is more business-oriented too. Basically: plenty of book information for the blog to snuggle up in. :)
A brief tour of the new page:
To your upper left, behind the “CE Murphy” (and frankly, I’m still debating whether that’s going to remain CE Murphy or return to The Essential Kit, with a tag line of “The Official CE Murphy Website” or something to that effect), we have the Miz Kit Productions logo that will be gracing the spine of my self-published books (thank you, Eleri Hamilton!). I’ve wanted to bring my Sassy Lady, as I call her, element back onto my webpage for a long long time, and I’m ridicuously chuffed that Thirzah found such a lovely way to bring her in organically.Beyond her we have (clickable!) book covers that will be primarily featuring The Backlist, because sweeping down to the right hand nav bar we have a gorgeous new Featured area, where (mostly) the newest books will be featured. I *love* the emphasis there, I’m just really, really happy with it. I think Thirzah did a beautiful job (and you can click the title bar for more Features!). It makes me feel like it’s delivering the book content in a big important way while also not totally dominating the page, which is just perfect.
Swooping back toward the left we obviously have the (COMMENTS ENABLED, WOOT!) blog, which we’re changing the landing-page structure of after I had a look at the site on a mobile device and had to scroll for fifteen years to find the secondary nav bar. There will be extended excerpts (around 250 words, rather than the oft-seen 100ish) on the main blog page, then a read-more link, so that the page continues to deliver content but doesn’t overwhelm. I’m also going to limit the number of posts on the main page to five, which will reduce the wordcount to about 1250 words instead of thousands, making it a much more friendly experience for mobile users. This makes me feel good about the site. :)
Then to bring it around full circle we’ve got my twitter feed (only one post from there at a time, is that enough? do i need 2 or 3? it may, i know, turn out i don’t need it at all, but right now it’s the Done Thing, so i’m Doing It :)) and then above it the much-neglected, all-important mailing list link. Honestly, with Facebook’s crappy reach and Twitter’s ephemeralism, the website and the mailing list are the best way to know what I’m doing professionally and I live in the eternal hope that I can make a community out of it all. Yay!
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shame, shame :)
After all the helpful answers yesterday about Kitsnaps photos, I forgot to set one to post this morning. You’re all certainly good for my ego, so shame on me. :)
But it’s okay, because my AWESOME WEB DESIGNER is telling me all kinds of nifty things that WordPress can do that I didn’t know about, and we are going to make Kitsnaps BIGGER! STRONGER! FASTER! Or something like that. This will be AWESOME. With AWESOMENESS on the side!
(Actually, now that you mention it, I may have been watching Kung Fu Panda* a lot lately. Why do you ask?)
Seriously, I feel slightly kid-in-a-candy-shop about this. I’ve wanted for years and years to make Kitsnaps a viable Thing, and with one year-long-or-so exception, have pretty much failed in that. I’d love to have a professional photographer aspect of the site/my career, even if I don’t pursue it with the singlemindedness that I’ve gone after writing, and this at least gives me a step toward that. I’m delighted.
I’m equally delighted to actually be hiring somebody who knows what they’re doing. It seems the last of my shame, shame, shame of being unable to do it myself anymore is evaporating in the face of working with someone who knows what she’s doing and has cool ideas that implement my wishes without me even knowing those wishes could be implemented. So I cast off the chains of my former career and embrace somebody else doing it now!
(It’ll probably be hardly more than another month or so before I stop gibbering gleefully about the website and things we’re doing with it. Honest. I’m just really happy to have it back, and full of squee over how things can be arranged with it.)
NEXT, THE WOOOOOOOOOOOORLD!
*Legends of AWESOMENESS. And things.
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The Story of Mizkit’s Downtime
Is too much. I sum up.
Stupidity. Rampant, rampant stupidity.
The slightly longer version is that due to Reasons, I believed that mizkit.com was registered through one domain registrar when she was in fact registered through another. When her time was up, I paid the bill at Registar One, only to find out too late that I should’ve been paying it at Registrar Two. By that time, Registrar One, who are a bunch of f*ckers (do not, for the love of god, use Jumpline) had set up mizkit.com as an ad farm run by one of their partners–a partner which they repeatedly informed me they couldn’t affect anything with.
Anyway, the site name went to auction, my friends Fred and Laura *completely saved my ass* on it, because I was paralyzed with grief and rage over the whole thing, and after three full months of nonsense I (re: Laura) was able to get mizkit back up on a different server which is now her forever home.
I’d had thoughts of relaunching with a new design, but upon her resurrection, I discovered that the reason I haven’t redesigned mizkit.com in three years is not just exhaustion or laziness, but that I really, really love the design elements here. So I canned the design I had in the wings and am trying to do something else with the same Chance image. There are modern web design functions I really want to incorporate, so there *will* be a redesign coming soon, but for the moment I’m just going to be incredibly, incredibly grateful I’ve got my web home back. I’ve been mizkit online for 20 years. I was *destroyed* when I thought I’d lost her, and I’m so, so glad to have her back.
Wee clickable mockup of the possible redesign behind the break.
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redesign done
I believe I’ve now converted all the pages on CEMurphy.Net to WordPress, which means the redesign is more or less done. It’s not as done as I want it to be, of course, but if you’d like to go poke at it and see if you can find any pages that don’t match, that would be great.
One thing I’d like feedback on–should I reinstate the right column Out Now material? The header banner covers it now, but that only brings up one item at a time, whereas the right column could have all of it. Maybe below the Twitter feed but above the tags?
While converting IMMORTAL BELOVED (the Highlander novel I wrote about 15 years ago, which is now available in PDF, epub, mobi and HTML versions), I also rediscovered CENTENARIAN, the first chapter of a book that doesn’t exist.
Oh. Also. Not website related, but holy beans, guys. Kyle Cassidy keeps sending me new, wonderful, amazing photos of Gary. If it doesn’t completely break the bank, the limited edition of NO DOMINION is *totally* going to be illustrated!
– write the PRSI letter
– finish the tree house
– vacuum
– sign my name 1000 times
– answer faith’s email
– go to bed early. for the love of god, go to bed early.
