Seasonal Plume revamp
I was busy on two things since last night, all the way until this morning:
- reorganizing my messy and long-untouched Writing folder, and
- installing and customizing WordPress on this domain!
I feel pretty good about how both turned out, too.
The Revamp
I’d been meaning to set up a blog here for some time already, but just couldn’t really decide on what tool to use, or even if I should go ahead with it. For one thing, I haven’t “blogged” in a long time — for me, the difference between “journaling” and “blogging” is significant enough. I’ve been doing more “bloggish” entries for a while, but… well, yeah. Plus I liked my livejournal. Well, most of the time.
However, recently I’ve had one of my many sporadic (seasonal?) compulsions to go back to my writing. I’ve long meant for Seasonal Plume to be my “literary” domain (since the domain name itself is literary in nature) and have been fashioning it as such for quite a while now, but it’s never really been concrete, I suppose. But now I realized this is a good way to actually immerse myself again into the world of (fiction) writing, which I all but left once I went into college.
This is my first time using an actual blogging tool, and I’m still learning my way around WordPress, so pardon any eventual mess you might come across (please tell me about it, though!). It’s not yet fully fleshed out as well — nothing yet by way of domain/site information, and links, and various other sundry stuff. I suppose that happens when you focus too much on, er, aesthetics—which I certainly ended up focusing on, though the results aren’t exactly the way I’d like them to be. But, omgAJAX! This is sooo shiny, and I can feel AJAX will be competing with my writing for my attention, as I’ve always wanted to learn but couldn’t start; but the spiffiness is fabulous. The AJAXy stuff you see here is due mostly to script.aculo.us and 5ThirtyOne (his WordPress Foliage Mod was the base of this layout!).
A question: what plugins should I get? Especially for spam protection? I love spam (the food kind) but hate spam (the mail kind). But there are too many spam plugins for my brain to take in with only two hours’ sleep without overloading.
Writing Folder Reorganization
This was what I was doing before I got it into my head to get obsessed with putting up my site as a WordPress blog in less than a day. :P I haven’t touched any of those files in a long time! I’m done, but I think I need to read or scan them and check if I’ve placed them into correct folders. I moved the Writing folder into my root, and within in I have four more folders: Scraps, In Progress, Finished, and Published.
The one with the least content is Published, obviously—but I placed in it the stuff I once submitted to (the now gone) Aming Katha and BNext. I think I might have to move the articles I’ve written for the school newspaper during high school there, too. The one with the most—it’s a toss-up between Scraps and In Progress. There were a lot of short stories that I dumped into the Scraps folder, as they’re too maudlin to be placed anywhere else! I unearthed a lot of poetry, as well, most of them rather “off”.
The hardest ones to categories were the ones between “In Progress” and “Finished”. Take, for example, Chimerage, which I wrote in high school. It should actually be under “Published”, but since publishing it in the school newspaper, it’s gone through yet another rewriting. I have another “version” of the story which I had then marked as “Finished”, but looking back at it, I feel like rewriting it again. Although I think it’s coming close to the point that I have to just let it go, or change it a lot from how it was when it was published in the MHCS Beat. The latter option, I’m not too keen on; I feel like I should just move on and stop obsessing about the childhood story. Haha!
In any case, I found a lot of material, but most of them are scattered all over the place. I feel quite overwhelmed already, just thinking of trying to organize them all into some sembrance of order. Or just delete the bulk—a lot of them are quite, quite embarrassing!
