This here entry over on LiveJournal got me to thinking about my various blogs, journals, and assorted chunks of social media, and how I use, or don’t use, them as I ought. I’ve come to some conclusions. To wit: I’m just too damn rigid about what goes where, and have things set up so I end up doing a lot of additional work every time I write something.

I’m just too damn rigid about what goes where. Now, when I started this, the idea was… hey, stop that snickering! I wasn’t talking about… hey!

Sigh. Right. What I meant was that, when I started this blog, I thought I had it all figured out. The stuff about writing, genre, conventions, and so on would go here. Non-writing stuff and whatnot would go to my Dreamwidth journal and my Livejournal. A place for everything and everything in its place.

Except… I worked at doing regular entries on this blog, but let things on LJ and DW go slack. I’d put up videos and funny pictures there, just so it wouldn’t look entirely like Uncle Gary’s Self-Promotogasm Hour over there, but never managed those substantive ‘non-writing’ entries. It always felt like Extra Work. So it never got done.

Now, conclusions part deux: (I) have things set up so I end up doing a lot of additional work every time I write something. I write a blog entry, then I go and post a link to it on Dreamwidth (which gets picked up by Livejournal). Then I go post a link to it on Tumblr, and then Twitter, and then Google+. (Facebook picks it up automagically through NetworkedBlogs.) So posting a single blog becomes an event. Even if it’s a frakking links post. Events always feel like Extra Work. I’m not into Extra Work.

So, two problems, but with one solution. I just write one blog, featuring both writerly and non-writerly stuff, and set things up so it automagically cross-posts to my Livejournal, my Dreamwidth journal, and my Tumblr (which I couldn’t do before, but can now that my site’s converted to WordPress). More varied and interesting (at least to me) things for me to write on, less work to spread it about, and more on my LJ, Dreamwidth, and Tumblr that looks like actual content instead of filler. People who are interested can read and comment wherever they want, not just on my main site. Starting, oh, right now.

Now if Google+ will get off its high horse and open up its API so I can automate that, I’ll be freakin’ golden.

You’d like me when I’m golden.

(I’m also testing out new catch-phrases. That one may need some work.)

***

Gary W. Olson is the author of the dark fantasy novel Brutal Light. His blog originates here.

Good morning, everyone, just wanted to briefly announce that the new GaryWOlson.com is now up and active (and actually has been since Saturday afternoon, when I did the switch from Joomla to WordPress). All the pages and blog entries have been transferred over, and all the old URLs have been redirected to the new ones. The RSS feed was also redirected to the new one (https://www.garywolson.com/feed/), so if RSS is how you keep up with this blog, you won’t need to make any changes (unless you want to, I mean).

I’ve also taken the opportunity to implement a couple new features. It’s now possible to subscribe to my blog entries via e-mail (not to be confused with subscribing to my newsletter, which will still be a no-more-than-once-a-month-and-usually-less affair), and the box for doing that is on the left column of my website pages. It’s also possible to use Google Translate to shift everything into another language entirely, though I won’t be able to vouch for how accurate it is.

Now that this is out of the way, I can finally get back to trying to wring the rest of the first draft of The Morpheist out of my brainmeats…

***Gary W. Olson is the author of the dark fantasy novel Brutal Light and several previously published and forthcoming short stories. He can be found via his website, his blog, on Facebook, on Twitter, and in many other far-flung places on the Internet.

Last weekend, I made brief mention of some “site maintainance” that was going to happen over the weekend–namely, me upgrading this website’s current Joomla version (1.5) to the more current 2.5. Unfortunately, I discovered that the component I use for blogging won’t work wth 2.5, and doesn’t currently have a 2.5 upgrade. So, I could either wait for them to eventually produce one, or I could do what I was strongly considering anyway, which is to scrap Joomla entirely and rebuild this site as a WordPress site. As the title of this entry reveals, I decided to go ahead with option two.

So this week I’ve been building a test version of the site in a super-seekrit subdomain, mainly so I can make some necessary design choices, see how things look, fix issues with links and image displays and such. When that’s done, which should be soon, I’ll export all those posts and pages, scrap this site, install wordpress, and import the lot again. I expect to be doing this sometime over Memorial Day weekend, so if you drop by and things are looking funky, or altogether absent, that’s why. I’m doing as much prep work as possible in advance, so hopefully this downtime will be minimal.

Though all the URLs to all the things will be changing, I’ll be setting up redirects so that anyone coming to the site from someplace else using old links will get directed to the correct content in its new location. The RSS feed for the site will also be changing (to https://www.garywolson.com/feed/), though I think WordPress is smart enough to recognize the old feed address and deliver accordingly. (Clicking it now will only send you to an error page. I knew you were wondering.) Hopefully this won’t result in you who follow this blog directly via RSS being flooded by entries. I’ll be temporarily disabling the syndications to Facebook (NetworkedBlogs), LiveJournal, Dreamwidth, Amazon, and GoodReads, just in case.

See you on the other side!

***Gary W. Olson is the author of the dark fantasy novel Brutal Light and several previously published and forthcoming short stories. He can be found via his website, his blog A Taste of Strange, as @gwox on Twitter, and in many other far-flung places on the Internet.

I’ve set up syndication for the RSS feed for A Taste of Strange on Dreamwidth, and syndicaton for the RSS feed for A Taste of Strange on LiveJournal. This is probably of most interest to readers with Dreamwidth and/or LiveJournal accounts, who can subscribe to the feed in either or both places and have these entries show up on their reading/friends pages.