The End of an Era

Okay, that may be a bit of an overstatement, but I have been in a transition mode lately with all my websites. The time has come, mostly due to technological changes, for me to revamp my whole system before it decides to revamp me first! My long-running e-tabitha website was created using FrontPage 98 on a Windows 98 computer, and the problems maintaining the site have begun to overwhelm me. From a second front, we have my site at Authors Den. There is no problem technically with AD, but I have clearly outgrown the site with my web presence in the last year or so. I was ready to dump AD a year ago, but Matt offered me a deal I couldn't refuse. Now I have to let it go simply because I can no longer adequately utilize Authors Den. My other sites are sucking up all my time these days. I want to send out a hearty thanks to AD for the web presence it helped me develop. As I have stated in at least one previous post, Authors Den is the best way I have found for a new author to develop a strong web presence.

My e-tabitha site has become much more of a technical nuisance. If you have been visiting the site regularly, I am sure you have noticed that changes and updates have dribbled off to practically nothing during 2008. As I developed the site into a bigger and bigger monster, it became increasingly obvious that it desperately needed a reorganization. The style and navigation of e-tabitha have both become more than a little haphazard. Due to the Windows/FrontPage 98 nightmare that I knew was in development, I have let e-tabitha sit idle and ignored for most of the past couple of years. I have already set up a pair of new websites at Blogger to replace the material at e-tabitha and continue my e-tabitha URL. After much deliberation, I decided to use Blogger for all my sites for the simplicity of operation this concept allows. Many of my problems with the old e-tabitha have stemmed from the operation of a FrontPage 98 site being so incongruous with that of a Blogger XP site. The whole thing has rattled my brain! Tiddlerosis is getting its own Blogger site and the new Nonfiction in a Fictional Style site at Blogger will have its URL changed to e-tabitha.com at the end of the year. (The name will stay the same, while the URL changes, the opposite of what has happened with iUBR/PODBRAM.) All the political and miscellaneous material will be moved to my Floyd M. Orr blog. This plan gives me about six weeks to split all the material from the old site into the new ones. I plan to begin 2009 with four Blogger sites, all with the same look and style, instead of one huge site that has been built in the same manner as Frankenstein's monster!

You can see from my recent rant that I have become quite disgusted with the changes B&N recently made to their website, so I shall write no more reviews to be posted at B&N. I shall continue to write reviews for Blogger News Network, where the readership is considerably larger than that of the B&N book pages, so writers still get a good deal when they submit to the PODBRAM dunking tank. Of course submissions still appear on Dianne Salerni's High Spirits review page and Malcolm Campbell's The March of Books review page, so we are still the best free, legitimate review site on the web! If any of the PODBRAM team members wish to post a review at B&N, that's fine with me. I'm just not going to personally waste my time with a site that has so callously diminished years of work that I have posted on their website.

Over the next few days, I shall post extensive articles here at PODBRAM that are presently on the Authors Den site. When my AD contract runs out in a couple of weeks, I intend to just ignore it and continue my work here at PODBRAM. Most of the pertinent articles I have written for Authors Den have already been linked from PODBRAM, but I want to re-post all of them now so that I can be certain that they remain available to all the PODBRAM readers. These articles will be split into two large posts at PODBRAM: Book Sales and Book Reviews. Look for them soon!