Right when I was ready to sit down and dive into another month of focusing on writing, I opened up my website to post about it and discovered several posts I’d had scheduled to go out while we were traveling had failed to post. Rudely enough, it failed to send me a notification, or I would have discovered the issue earlier. That’s always a risk with technology; all it takes is one automatic update when you’re away from home and can’t supervise it, and suddenly nothing works right anymore.
One troublesome side effect of this is that as I fix things and the posts start going out, now much later than they should have been, the site will be sending repeated notifications to people. I hate that sort of annoyance in my inbox and I cringe to think of others dealing with it, but there’s not much I can do.
It does mean it’s time for a maintenance week, though, which is annoying because it takes away from my writing time. I’m in the process of restructuring a lot of my site’s back end, streamlining how it uses images and correcting issues that kept it from notifying me that something was amiss, and hopefully the end result will be something that works a little more like it’s supposed to. Being able to schedule things (like the chapters for Exercise in Frustration) lets me keep updates rolling out at a steady pace instead of dumping them all at once like it’s done this week.
But while I’m babysitting files, it’s a lot of time at my PC. I usually do all my writing from my laptop, at a different desk, because that desk doesn’t cause as much back/shoulder pain. It’s not large enough for a full desktop setup, so it’s not like I can switch, and that means my PC doesn’t get used as often.
It is, however, the machine I use for making a lot of graphics and things–and one of the things I made is a printable reading journal. I made it for myself, because I wanted one but couldn’t find one I liked that didn’t cost a small fortune, and when we come out the other side of maintenance, I’ll have a shiny new section of the site where newsletter subscribers to get their own copy of that reading journal… as well as a few extra thank-you bonuses. I just need a little more time to get it set up right now.
So, in short, sorry for the deluge of apparent updates as overdue posts go live this week, and there will be a treat to make up for it soon!
Just as soon as I get all the rest of this fixing sorted out.