After the rejection letter and self-doubt, I decided to focus on the two major writing projects for now (my weekly serial and the commissions) and switch over to working on Author Intrusion. I've been meaning to do it for a while, mainly because I think it will help with producing better words and identifying my blind spots. And, if I'm lucky, it will also help me figure out what's "wrong" with Flight of the Scions.

In the process of winding down my writing, I'm getting through the list of things I should have done over the last eight months. One of them was getting some of the websites cleaned up. Writing and programming are fun, but there is always the little tasks that come along with it that aren't quite as much fun as writing: writing up the grammars for the conlangs, writing documentation, putting up examples, and all of that. There is a lot involved with programming and putting up a presence (and I'm not even doing it "right") and it is about time for spring cleaning, as it were.

One of the big things there was updating websites. I have a variety of websites, but due to historical reasons, most of them were on different platforms. My mfgames.com site was on DokuWiki. Previously, d.moonfire.us was a mix of WordPress blog with DokuWiki, but I changed it to use WordPress exclusively as a CMS. The portal site, brokentypewriterpress.com was a static page which had an interesting idea but didn't quite work out in the end. I also had a static PHP site for photography.moonfire.us (Fluffy's photography site) and a few others.

I decided to move all of them to WordPress to make my life easier. And, if I'm going to have 6+ WordPress sites, the WordPress Multisite seemed like a Good Thing(tm). And after a bit of research, it looked like exactly what I wanted. A single place to update, a single place to manage.

Likewise, I was consdering finding a better way to upload documentation and not have to write heavy markup document (DocBook) for that documentation. When I found there was a good Markdown plugin for WordPress, I realized I had everything I (thought) I needed. Using Markdown also means I can post easier to Google+ and Diaspora until those two networks get around to having cross-posters with WordPress.

So, after a bit of research, I started with the simple, one page site: brokentypewriterpress.com. That took almost a day to get working. Moonfire Games came easier, and then I got into the big one, d.moonfire.us. Unlike the others, my site had the blog and my fiction. And, with multisite, you have to export and reimport sites. Following directions didn't work because I have local customizations as a plugin. WordPress has a strange idea of putting taxonomies in themes, which doesn't work if you change themes. So I put them into a custom theme, but then disabled that theme when recommended by the directions. Oops.

At this point, everything seems to be working on brokentypewriterpress.com, d.moonfire.us, and mfgames.com. Moonfire Photography will come a bit later, I promised it early this week. I have a few other sites that have to be migrated, but I'm hoping it will all be worth it in the end.