A quick apology to anyone who is getting some of my old posts all over again. I’m trying to redo my blog and web site. If I knew MORE about redoing my blog and website, none of these things would be showing up in your reader. (And maybe they aren’t. Maybe nobody’s seeing this and everyone who gets this blog in a reader is assuming I’m still in airplane mode…)
If you’ve made it this far: I’ve been saying for ages I needed to make things a little spiffier around here, but haven’t actually followed through. I did start looking for blogs and websites I liked, and I fell in love with Katherine Applegate’s site for The One and Only Ivan — so much so that I contacted the site’s creator, thinking maybe I could pay him to help me with mine. (With what I don’t know… Monopoly money?) But the site’s creator turned out to be her incredibly talented son, who had too much homework to take on a new project for a virtual stranger. And my own son has another few years before he can take over as webmaster.
So I continued to look around, and procrastinate a little, and think someday I’d make it better. And then I got the Albert Whitman catalog for the fall. There was my book, looking nice and pretty! And there was my website, looking like it needed a little help. I asked pretty much every mom I came across to give me a brief tutorial in WordPress, and then Shannon Sullivan kindly agreed to help me out in exchange for bagels and two pairs of hand-me-down pants.
She gave me the courage to just play around a little more, and suggested some different themes. She also suggested that 3 in the morning was the appropriate time to work on this. Which I did. And I made a really nice site on wordpress. Only when I downloaded it to my domain I found some things didn’t work quite the way they were supposed to. (On wordpress, for instance, I could do a big beautiful banner. And on the download, for some reason, I could only make the one-column picture you see here.) And there was nobody I could call at 3 in the morning to help me out. Suffice it to say, I’m still working on it. Though there are other things that need to take priority, such as my revisions for my middle-grade novel. If it’s coming out in 2013 as planned, I should be in high gear. (If you see me on the internet, tell me to get back to work.)