Already a self-professed terrible blogger, I'm actually just a little bit worse when it comes to the tending and upkeep of my
website. It's been close to two years since I've spent any significant time checking things out over there. A lot of that had to do with technology, and how increasingly difficult it was trying to get things done on an eight-year-old, Windows XP Dell laptop, while trying to juggle Photoshop,
KompoZer, Firefox,
FileZilla and multiple working files with one
gigabyte of increasingly twitchy RAM. An ill-advised Adobe Flash upgrade could render the computer dysfunctional for hours. The crashes were frequent and epic; productive work not so much.
I finally upgraded my hardware a couple of months ago - I got a nice, brand spanking new Dell Inspiron 7000 with an i7 processor, eight gigs of RAM (soon to be upgraded to sixteen), a terabyte hard drive, and a high-definition touchscreen. I fear no software.
That settled, I went out in search of some new tools. I've replaced Photoshop Elements with
GIMP image manipulation software (a steep learning curve, but does seem to get the job done), and am now using
BlueGriffon as my web editor. So far, so good.
Newly fortified, I've gathered up my state-of-the-art technology team and started doing some tidying up over at
Anthony Lewis Books.com. I'm re-branding the logos (
Literary Comfort Food for a Fed Up Citizenry - what do you think?), fixing the broken links, updating and fine-tuning the SEO keywords, and trying to clean up some formatting issues that have been bugging me for years.
No major changes are planned at this point. The site is simple, clean and functional - no-pop bullshit, and no rollover ads promising you a free ebook that you're never going to read in exchange for your personal information so I can put you on a mailing list for a newsletter that I'm never going to write. And none of that seriously ill-considered, incredibly rude
"Are you sure you want to leave this page?" marketing suicide crap. You've got my books, each with their respective
synopsis, sample chapters, a few reviews, and links to Amazon. Fast and simple...
There's still work to be done, but a few pages a day will get me where I need to be. I'm also working on a new (seventh) novel, tentatively titled:
Free State. I'm only about six chapters in so there's not much to report except that it will likely include New Hampshire's
Free State Project in a prominent role.
As always, thanks for your support...
