hrj

Originally published at Alpennia.com. You can comment here or there.

There's something about adding new bells and whistles to the website that makes me go all gooey inside. And unlike the early development worksessions, when we'd sweat over complex problems that might mean we could make progess next time, now we're tidying up a lot of little to-do items and it feels like we're getting all sorts of things done. So here's what this weekend's work session accomplished (excluding the scary under-the-hood stuff that my web designers took care of):

• Added a page listing all my various publication series
• Tweaked the automated comment filtering system. I'm not yet trusting it to throw away spam comments entirely unreviewed, but now obvious non-spam comments shouldn't have to wait on manual approval. It would be lovely to test it some more with actual reader comments! I get plenty of data in how well it identifies spam, alas, but not so much of the other. Now that there should be no delays for manual approval, it's even possible we might get conversations going.
• Set up comments to request an e-mail address (non-public) so I won't have to panic after future giveaways when I don't hear back from my winners immediately!
• Set up automatic cross-posting of the blog to LiveJournal. Yay! There are a couple of awkward aspects to this. If I want to add cut-tags to very long posts (like the Civil War Diaries), I'll have to follow up manually. And the Lesbian Historic Motif posts will be a teaser and link, because they have an odd internal structure. In essence, they're a blog post "envelope" with the LHMP content embedded in it. And it simply isn't practical to try to send it to LJ as a single unit, so all that will be sent is the "envelope". This means that people who want to follow the LHMP need to click through to the Alpennia site if they're reading elsewhere. Sorry, but that's how I gain some of the other functionality.
• We fixed several minor issues with the RSS feed, like, giving it a more informative name than "blog"! We also changed it to feed the full content rather than a teaser-and-link. (Although I believe it will have the same issue as the LJ cross-post, i.e., LHMP material will only have the "envelope" and the reader will need to click through.)
• Fixed an assortment of curious problems (some e-book links that didn't display properly, not having pager navigation on the tag-search pages).

And here are the things that are in progress and/or should go live sometime soon:

• Pretty much every page associated with the LHMP will have a set of links for the four tag indexes. This is an easy way to explore the content by topic rather than by publication. My dream version includes the possibility of using time-period and geographic tags to do filtering, but that's not possible with the current set-up so it's set aside for now.
• A similar purpose is served by the "tag essays" that I'm in the middle of drawing up. These not only include thematic lists of tags, but explain the logic behind them and give tips for using them. The tag essays will eventually be added to the LHMP drop-down menu.

It looks like the current webiste to-do list has two clumps of remaining tasks: an assortment of items related to social media (buttons for following me, and buttons for sharing posts), and a whole bunch of notes of the form "Make X prettier." And then I can sit back and just enjoy the site for a while.