Dragoness Eclectic's Journal

I updated the home page of my umbrella site, The Republic of New Home, to actually point at live pages, instead of the same old dead links it has pointed to since 2002. No guarantees that the pages pointed to are current or anything radical like that, but at least they load instead of giving you a 404 error.

Yes, I really do have a website and it's not utterly dead. Just woefully out-of-date.

One out-of-date page is my Palm E-docs page. Alas, the Palm is no longer the mainstream ebook reader, and the venerable Aportis-Doc format isn't exactly an industry standard anymore. As for the proprietary iSilo format--has anyone even heard of it anymore?

These days the most-used formats are MobiPocket, HTML, PDF, and EPub, as far as I can tell. I personally loathe PDFs for reading, so I'm not going to go to the trouble of making them or hosting them. HTML is not so much an E-book format as a standard markup format that can be easily converted to any format you want. Besides, it's handy for reading on your computer.

So, my thoughts are that my old Palm E-Docs page will turn into a new E-Books page, and Palm-DOC and iSilo versions of my fanfics will be replaced or updated with:

* zipped HTML for offline reading (already exist, but need updating)
* MobiPocket (useable on Kindle, and easily converted to other formats)
* EPUB (useable on Sony E-Reader and several others)

Have I missed any major formats that people need to read on the device of their choice? Please let me know.

I've moved my new, incomplete website to my main page, replacing the old, horribly out-of-date and unmaintained Lair. The new site still needs pages finished, and desperately needs to be attacked with a stylesheet; I find the old styles. I used for a decade look a bit clunky now. It's at the same location as ever... just look to the right at my sidebar for the link.

First priority is to get all the content back up, minus the old stuff I don't want, and then I can jazz it up. Sign-ups for mailing lists are going away; I won't bother with that any more, I've got an LJ for notifying people of developments. In fact, my LJ feed is featured on the front page of my website.

This version of my site does have one page the old site didn't: my Transformers fanfiction page.

I finally got back to overhauling my website--it's only been about 6-7 years since I touched it. For the interested, here's the temporary location of the new site: http://www.republicofnewhome.org/lair3/

The only new pages so far are the home page and the Transformers Fanfics page. The rest is "In Progress" and has links to the old versions of the pages so you can find the content.

After poking at Wordpress for a year or so, I decided that the blog/CMS was overkill for what I wanted to do. PHP templates, in the form of SMARTY, turned out to allow the right balance of "I want to hack HTML code" and "I want to automate the repetitive bits".

I got to hack PHP code, too, and that's all good clean fun.

Anyway, take a look, let me know what works and doesn't--keeping in mind that the above two pages are the only new ones. So far. Will be updating as I make progress.