Tuesday, July 10, 2018
Some exciting blog and Web site news
For the past few weeks, I've had a consultant and his team working on setting up a dedicated Web site for me, and for the publishing company I set up earlier this year. We hope to go live by the end of this month, although it may happen a little sooner than that, if all goes well.
The new Web site will incorporate this blog, plus more detailed pages for my books, by genre, by series, and by individual title. I won't do direct sales from it, due to all the complications of sales taxes and other regulations for fifty different US states (not to mention foreign sales); those will still happen through Amazon.com for the foreseeable future. I'll try to write more about current projects on which I'm working, forthcoming books and stories and series, collaborations with other authors, and so on.
It's going to be a bit tricky timing the switch-over. What will probably happen is that I'll give you three days' warning. This blog will go dormant for those three days, with existing posts all still available, but no new ones being made. During that period, the blog archive here will be ported over to the new site, we'll test the URL and other features, and direct the existing blog URL to the new server. We'll hopefully be ready to go live on the third or fourth day, again depending on progress. I'll post an announcement about that here, and at the new site. I hope to do this as seamlessly as possible, with no interruptions or difficulties apart from the three-day hiatus period. Ideally, if you come to this URL as usual, you should be redirected to the new site without any problem, and you can then update your bookmark(s) to the new URL at your convenience.
There's a lot to get right, but that's why I've hired experts in the field, rather than try to do it all myself. I can handle basic HTML, but not all the complex bits and pieces of porting, converting and redirecting. I know my limitations! I've also got to set up e-mail accounts, spam filtering, a comment system (ditto on the spam), and all that stuff. I daresay the first few days and weeks of operation may be a bit fraught as we tie everything together, but we'll do our best.
Wish us luck as we prepare for the move. I hope you'll enjoy the new site.
Peter
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5 comments:
I pray it all goes smoothly. Looking forward to the new site.
Hey Peter;
We are looking forward to the move and the new website. Congratulations!!! from a long time visitor to your blog.
Interesting comment on sales tax...
A lot can be done by server side spam filtering but I never felt I could get it close enough to getting all the spam without also hitting some good mail.
I started using a program called MailWasher from a small company in New Zealand and found it did an outstanding job of filtering incoming spam as well as garbage like misdirected bounce messages, really handy when you get 8000 plus per day because a spammer is using your addresses. It also offers a safe preview of your mail without being subject to malware in them.
Mail Washer also has the ability to feed identified spam back to Spam Cop to get the sources added to the Spam Cop blacklist. I found the quick submission method the most effective for me, it targets the spam sources but avoids the time consuming confirmation process needed to use the full submission method that also targets spammed websites.
Both have free options that are pretty good, the paid ones add things that
https://www.mailwasher.net
https://www.spamcop.net
Please remember to include a RSS link.
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