- Finished The Book Ring. Finished the front page and also fixed the Members page. Also decided to redo everything in WordPress because I am able to do a lot more with it in less time and it looks better. The Book Ring isn’t “done” done yet. I intend to add more features and they will be voted on by members. I’d really love for it to be a more interactive bookish community for the small web than just a webring. 🙂 I have also moved the structuring of it to my website here on TheCozy.Cat and it is hosted as an iframe on Marigold Town and Neocities. I did this for a couple of reasons; first one being to make updating the site faster and easier. I’m a lot faster with WordPress and my processes here than I am coding from scratch, and I think I’m able to deliver a way better user experience with WordPress. So this is the first and most important reason why Neocities and Marigold Town sites have been made into iframes. The second reason is website security. I guess over the years as I’ve delved into privacy, and “owning” my own content, it’s become important to me that my website be the sole provider of the things that I make and that when it comes to social media and my other platforms, that my content be distributed outwards as copies but my domain remains the primary source. Especially on the small web, other sites being around long term is never guaranteed and things can become inactive, so I feel like it’s extra security so I don’t lose all my hard work if one day Neocities ever gets shut down, or Marigold town ever gets shut down, The Book Ring will remain. But I honor my partnership with Marigold Town despite this change, I still want it to be their library and I love the theme Alexandra has done with her web hosting project and still want to participate and support others in this small web community by directing traffic there. You’ll still see links that direct you to Marigold Town through The Book Ring, and The Book Ring will continue to be advertised as Marigold Town’s library on my part.
- Updated my Book Nook in the cottage section of my website. Made some layout changes to the about tab and also decided to change all the featured images to the actual book covers and I think it looks a lot nicer and more consistent. Also decided to add a little banner for Book Outlet at the bottom of each of my reviews. They give anyone who signs up through my referral link a discount on their next book order, and I also get a discount on my next book order when I sign up so it’s a win-win. I need to fund my book addiction somehow and I’m too cheap to pay full price for new/popular books in this economy. xD
- Wrote a few book reviews. Trying to get caught up on all the books I’ve neglected writing reviews for, which I’ll probably do over the next few days. I want to try and get in the habit of reviewing every book I read. Sometimes I get so caught up in reading for fun I get lazy about writing the reviews after, but reviews help me continue to get free arcs to read so this is really something I need to start keeping up with on a regular basis.
- Updated some broken links throughout the site.
- Complete overhaul of the Free Speech Webring. It is now hosted here on TheCozy.Cat, but also remains on Neocities as an iframe. The old widget no longer works and has been replaced with a new widget and I have reached out to the members via e-mail and Neocities. If you’re a member and haven’t received an email about this from me, check your spam folder. If you haven’t received any emails or been contacted via Neocities, please resubmit your applications as I did lose a few member’s emails during my web hosting transfer a few months ago and wasn’t able to reach via Neocities. Anyways, this overhaul was necessary as I really wanted to streamline this webring with The Book Ring (they’re both hosted the same way now in the same place). I also wanted to host this webring from my site for the same reasons I switched The Book Ring over; I work a lot faster with WordPress, WordPress offers more flexibility and capabilities than what I’m able to code from scratch right now, provides web security peace of mind over my hard work, and overall I feel like it now provides a more polished user experience and I feel really proud of it! 🙂 It also opens up the door for expansion down the road.
Anyways, that’s all the changes for this week so far. I’m out of my seasonal slump for now so lots of tinkering will be happening around here again! Hope you’re all having a wonderful 2024 so far. 🙂
