Under Construction
The Redesign
Note: In January of 2009, I gave all my sites an overhaul.
Q: Why did you redesign all your sites?
A: This was one of the things on the top of my oft-ignored to-do list for a long time. I’ve had different sites for my various stories and I tried to give them each different designs that suited each of them individually, but a web designer I am not and making even one clean, usable site strains my capabilities.
On the other hand, the advantages of having a simplified site design that’s unified across all my little properties seem to be obvious, so… here we are. All my pages are now “branded”, so to speak. I expect this will make it easier for people who start reading one series to fall into the others.
This all simplifies site maintenance for me, which has been a big problem in the past. No matter how many stories or blogs I’m trying to manage, having one single design with very little variation means I’ll spend less time dealing with site issues and can upgrade things far more easily.
Q: Why did you get rid of comments?
A:
Like everything else I do, it’s an experiment. We’ll see how it goes.
There are multiple reasons, but what it comes down to is this: by taking them off the page, I’m giving myself one less huge thing to preoccupy myself with.
The comments take up more than ten times as much space as the stories, which makes backing up, restoring, and moving the sites more cumbersome than it needs to be. They slow down page loading and contribute to bogging down the server, limiting growth. And over time, number of people commenting and the diversity of opinions they represent has dwindled quite a bit.
I’m not trying to stifle conversation so much as outsource it. There are already forums out there with threads devoted to discussing Tales of MU, and Pope Lizbet started a Livejournal community for Tales of MU, and people are already blogging their reactions to the stories. I’d love to see more of that. Of course, I also have an official forum.
Q: So you’re trying to censor criticism?
Yeah, no. You’re an idiot, Hypothetical Questioner. You honestly think that by encouraging people to put their reactions to the stories elsewhere, on the parts of the internet I don’t own and can’t edit or screen, I’m engaging in censorship?
From the beginning, I tried to have a hands-off approach to comments, responding to what I disagreed with and only deleting outright spam. That only really worked when there were far fewer readers and I wasn’t so ambitious in my plans. I’m not a community moderator at heart. I certainly can’t be one at the same time I’m trying to be a writer.
So, I’ll keep writing stories, and other people can manage fan communities. People can still email me and they can still join the forum — the fact that these things both require an additional investment of time and mouse clicks helps cut down the “noise” a bit.