Experiment

So I’m still figuring out this whole online presence thing. Everyone has their opinions about it–how often to tweet, what to say on your blog, how to work a Pinterest page (that one mystifies me still). But my problem is a little more fundamental–I’m having trouble with getting my blog to update at all.

I like my web site provider. It’s really easy to build a web site, they have lots of nice themes, and it’s overall been a very simple process to learn how to do everything and link to where people can buy my books. Good experience, if a little spendy. But then I ran into two problems.

One is the issue of putting up free downloads–short fiction, etc.–for people to read. My husband the Plot Whisperer insisted that they be something people could actually download instead of having to read them on the computer screen. I had to admit he was right. But the site provider didn’t have any way to upload files like that; it was read online or nothing. So we went through all manner of gymnastics to get it to work, and the truth is, if I can’t do it myself, it’s not going to happen. And this was so far beyond my abilities it might as well not exist. So that was the first thing.

The second thing was that the blog wasn’t pushing updates through quickly or, in some cases, at all. And when it did, it truncated the posts in news readers so they cut off sometimes mid-word. That was unattractive and annoying.

So this is me trying different blog software to see what happens. It’s already solved the one problem of not being able to put up downloads–that was easy, as easy as the other one was hard. Let’s see what happens with this post.