Spontaneous ∂erivation

If you’re a blogger, you’ve probably heard about the Federal Trade Commission deciding to come down on blogs without paid editors and whether they got a free copy of things they review. (For more information, see this interview with Richard Cleland of the FTC.)

I’m not that worried about disclosing whether I got free copies of stuff I reviewed on my blog (answer is: generally no, because eArcs are very rare) rather than for Tor.com. I’m not even upset that edited blogs don’t need to comply.

I just wonder if this means that non-professional bloggers will stop receiving free products. That, really, is the question.

At some point (before December 1st) I will finish editing the S∂ reviews and note whether they were products I paid for, received via Hugo packet (which is a variant of “paid for”), free products, or were Tor.com reviews (not covered by FTC law).

I am so rarely satisfied with them. Most of them suck.

But I need to do something fairly mechanical at the moment. Because I am so often wrong about what triggers me that I should start betting against myself.

Update: Well, that really didn’t work. Back to the simpler plugin, which sucks at categories, but oh well.

Well, they always are. That’s the lovely thing about script kiddies.

So here are two specific attacks I’m running across in my logs:

http://www.spontaneousderivation.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/spec-22.jpg
&imgrefurl=http://holmes.spontaneousderivation.com/page/2/&usg=__oXqahCshP1XcZZqnIAJHIBmna8s=
&h=258&w=180&sz=14&hl=de&start=6&tbnid=IgIMoSnmg_6FuM:&

God knows where the hell this is coming from, but it’s streamed in 9 times on a low-traffic blog over the last few days. I think it’s some sort of specific plugin attack.

The second type:

http://www.spontaneousderivation.com/page/2/
&usg=__oXqahCshP1XcZZqnIAJHIBmna8s=&h=258&w=180&sz=14&hl=de&start=6
&tbnid=IgIMoSnmg_6FuM:&tbnh=112&tbnw=78&prev=/
images%3Fq%3DSpeckled%2BBand%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Dde%26sa%3

And this is just a typical ramming nonsense at the server and see if it trips over itself and opens access.

Seal up with the WordPress release, I suspect, or you shall seriously regret….

Off to sleep now. Not operating at great efficiently right now.

It’s temporary, but it’s always nice to see a statistics graph that looks like this.

Much of this is directed at HTML for Dummies, Part 1. It’s got parts two and three but I never got further, which makes me feel a bit sad.

But at least I didn’t do anything flamboyantly stupid to get the hits. :)

Hello and welcome (and also welcome back if you’ve been here before!).

This site is a bit of a mixed bag at times. At the moment there are days when I post about new SF/F books in the Kindle store, days when I post thoughts about stuff I’ve read, days when I post about personal stuff that I don’t mind people reading because why else would I put them here (lots of it is traumatic, though the heavy has been more light of late), and days when it’s nothing but videos and linkspam.

This site in the past had a lot of articles about blogging, a few of which got stumbled like crazy.

To this day you’ll find that my most popular post is on the Sherlock Holmes sister site, which made it into Wikipedia as a footnote.

I am such a geek at times.

If you’ve decided to work with your own Wordpress installation, rather than Wordpress.com, there are some simple plugins and steps it would be wise to take care of.

I’m going to focus on the few plugins you’ll actually need (and that will probably end up in a version of Wordpress some day, but at the moment they aren’t). These suggestions tend to be (a) simple and (b) extremely stable. They’re least likely of most comparable plugin selections to break on Wordpress upgrades due to their very direct (yet adequate) approaches to the jobs they do.

Note: This article isn’t for Wordpress.com users, since Wordpress.com has fixed plugins.

WP-DBManager

This is the simplest and least problematic of the various WordPress backup plugins out there. It’s never gone wrong for me and has never eaten up all the space at my hosting provider, and it always reliably emails me an archive of the backup to GMail, thus giving me a reliably backed up list of archives.¹

While WP-DBManager is limited to a backup of the database, and doesn’t include all your Wordpress files (such as plugin files or theme files), nevertheless this is the most important part of backing up, since plugins can be reinstalled but plugin settings, which are part of your database, will already be saved.

You’ll find its settings in its own Database menu item (not part of the normal Settings group).

You’re most interested in the DB Options sub-menu item.

On the DB Options page, the default settings for Paths is likely good, because most hosting providers provide sane default paths for the various executables, and the plugin will create directories it needs.

At the bottom of the DB Options page is the Automatic Scheduling section. You’re most interested in the frequency of automated backups (I suggest: Every 1 days, GZip yes) and the email address to send them to.

Simple Feed Copyright

This results in a copyright notice being added to each entry in your RSS feed. It’s hardcoded to say “Copyright © [current year] [Blog name]“, which is usually enough. It has no options to configure, and pretty much just works.

Secure Wordpress

This will harden your Wordpress installation somewhat, provide you with a few suggestions, and also can add a token for a Wordpress scanner to scan your installation and add even more suggestions, although the latter currently requires you to edit your theme file’s header.php.

Its settings are available under the Settings menu, with menu item name “Secure WP”.

Its directions are very clear, which is nice. My suggestions for ticked items are below.

Explanations:

Error-Messages

This helps fight brute-force password crackers that rely on error messages to tell whether they’ve gotten in or not, and whether it’s the user name or the password that’s wrong.

WordPress Version

Many Wordpress attacks look for specific Wordpress versions in order to efficiently apply their cracking/hacking. This hides your Wordpress version, providing it as simply a random number—by default, the version of your installation appears both in your blog’s HTML code AND in your RSS feed. “Not in admin” simply means that there isn’t a way to turn it off in the normal admin section of a Wordpress blog.

index.html

Hides what plugins you’re specifically using from attackers. Again, helps prevent targeted attacks.

Really Simple Discovery

Wordpress inserts extra information, by default, into the HTML of your blog, so that external blogging tools (MarsEdit, Ecto, Windows Live Writer, ScribeFire, etc) can determine your blog type.

If you’re not using these tools, check the box to turn to turn this off. (I use these tools right now, so it’s not off for me.)

Windows Live Writer

Windows Live Writer likes a special link that Wordpress automatically generates, which allows it to know how to access your blog so that it can, for instance, add new posts, edit categories, delete posts, etc.

If you’re not using Windows Live Writer, check the box to turn this off.

Core Update, Plugin Update, Theme Update

For non-admin users, turns off access to these pretty much admin-level features. Really only useful if you have non-admin accounts for some reason.

WP Scanner

Allows you to temporarily add information to your blog, if you edit your theme, so that the wpscan tool has permission to scan your blog and find exploits.

General Headers and Footers

Easily injects additional HTML code in your header and footer of your entire blog. In other words, useful for tracking Javascript code, such as for Mint (add to Header section) or Google Analytics (add to Footer section).

Once installed, settings are available under Settings &rarrow; General Header, even though it does both headers and footers.

WPTouch

With this plugin installed, your iPhone visitors (and, I think Android) will have a very nice, iPhone-orientated interface to your website. Given that the iPhone can save bookmarks to the Home Screen as app-like items, this more or less eliminates the need for an iPhone app specific to your web serial.²

The options are long, but very simple and illustrated and explained (!) which is something of a rarity in the Wordpress plugin world.

I suggest adding an icon of your own, and selecting particular pages for the iPhone readers to see (they all default to off), and then the rest generally takes care of itself automatically.

While WPTouch is generally very stable, and the plugin authors handle upgrades relatively well for a complex plugin, it’s less stable than the rest. But I think it’s nice enough for a mention as a very-nice-to-have plugin for a web serial.

1. And with GMail filters, I can just reroute them into a folder and have them skip the inbox, although I like simply seeing them in my inbox and manually archiving them myself, just to make sure that a backup was made at all. [↩]
2. A nasty detail of the iPhone App Store is that it randomly censors applications that can display naughty words. An iPhone-friendly website view, on the other hand, avoids the App Store. This is the main reason why there are so many ebook reading apps in the App Store that are hard-coded for specific books, with words censored as appropriate. [↩]

Last time I talked about the advantages and disadvantages of a Wordpress.com blog versus an individual Wordpress install as a platform for your web serial.

This time I’m focusing on the basic settings and plugins a web serial would need/want, with special discussion of a Wordpress.com versus an individual Wordpress install. Web serials have somewhat different needs from a normal blog.

If you’re planning on your own Wordpress installation, this article assumes that either you or your web hosting has already set up your Wordpress install.

Both Wordpress.com and Individual Installations

Basic Settings

On the left-hand menu of the dashboard for your particular blog, there’s a link to basic settings. It’ll take you to the settings page, and also expand the sub-menu items for Settings.

You’re automatically put into General Settings first. On the side menu under Settings will now display various links to the settings pages, the most important of which we’ll discuss below individually.

From here, I’m going to focus on the necessary options, and leave the other options for you to play with.

Don’t forget to click the save button at the bottom of each settings page to save your settings.

General Settings

Important fields: Blog Title, Tagline, Language, Email address, and Time Zone.

Reading Settings

Important fields: “For each article in a feed”

This is the most important RSS feed setting, I think.

If you select “Full Text”, your readers can easily read your story in their RSS feed, and you can also add your blog to Amazon’s Kindle website for subscription via Kindle. However, this a) opens you up to people who scrape RSS content, which is bad enough for a blog, but in some ways I think is worse for a web serial, b) you’ll miss out on people visiting your site, which is where your extra menus and possible ads and possible donation buttons are, c) you’ll have less control over how your story is displayed for people who read via RSS feeds (doesn’t matter for 99% of serials).

If you select “Summary”, you may annoy people who read only through RSS, and you won’t be able to use Amazon’s Kindle subscriptions. However, you also avoid the disadvantages above.

When in doubt, go with Summary; you can change it later if you want to.

(And yes, I personally prefer full text for RSS feeds, and know plenty of other people do. But while it’s very reader-friendly, it’s less writer-friendly, and most readers will visit your site directly. Plus a Summary RSS feed will still provide direct links to your individual posts.)

Discussion Settings

Important fields: “Default article settings”

I’m going to go against popular wisdom for blogs again, and suggest you turn off commenting by default. Mostly because this avoids inadvertant spoilers and avoids needing to a) moderate people, and b) kick out spam.

If you still want to host discussion separately, you can create a special post that allows comments specifically, or you can use a forum of some sort.

Appearance Settings

This is a whole ‘nother section of your Wordpress administration, and it’s the easiest and most fun to play with. Select a theme, and select and rearrange widgets with drag-and-drop, and so on. Some themes allow you to set a Customer Header, which also appears in the Appearance sub-menu if your theme happens to support it (some don’t).

Most themes have a sane set of default widgets, but I suggest that you have the following:

• a Text widget, with a short blurb about your serial; it can accept arbitrary HTML, so you can include images and links. This is a good place to put a link to the very first entry of your serial so that people can follow happily along.
• a Recent Posts widget, for that omnipresent access to your most recent post.
• an Archives widget.
• another Text widget, with Paypal donation/subscription links.

Wordpress.com Only

Removing Related Links From Posts

On Wordpress.com, by default your posts will have an automatically generated section at the end with random “related” links that hit other blogs.

For web serials, this can be distracting. Really distracting. Turning this option off will lose you the possibility of getting your links randomly generated on other Wordpress.com blog posts, but I think such links are terrible for a web serial anyways.

You can turn this off via a sub-section under Appearances, called “Extras”.

Straight-up HTML is in some ways the simplest way to kit up a little website. But on the other hand, it’s also the hardest, especially if you’re

• Making regular updates,
• Live web statistics,
• Automatic UTF-8 encoding so that typographical quotes and dashes look professional on multiple browsers,
• Automatic RSS feed generation with UTF-8 encoding,
• iPhone-special and even Android-special views of your website (and the iPhone is getting rather popular amongst SF readers),

and so on.

So a blogging platform is nice to have. Wordpress¹ is one of the easiest and nicest, and even has a free site a la Blogger.com where you can set up multiple free blogs with many of the most necessary features above, though not all of them (the last, iPhone views, in particular).

If you decide to set up your own Wordpress install, that’s not much harder (even John Scalzi, for quite some time, could keep up his own Wordpress install without a dedicated web elf, and he’s not the most technical of writers). You can even set it up as a subset of your author website, just for your serial(s).

The future installments of this little technical-advice-for-layman-writers series, in fact, will mostly focus on Wordpress as a platform.

So here are your two options, and their pros and cons: a) using Wordpress.com, or b) using your own Wordpress install.

Wordpress.com Advantages

For the busy writer, this is the fastest way to set up a blog, with minimum fuss, the most important features, and it’s free with possible pay-for-use upgrades if you like.

Pros:

• Someone else takes care of house-keeping the Wordpress software, some of the more useful plugins, the hardware, the security, the backups, and the DNS and web URLs.

• You can have your own blog addresses, ending in wordpress.com, for free. You can also have your very own domain with a paid upgrade, if you like to do so later (you can even have multiple domains point at a single blog).

• Easy set up (even easier than Blogger, I think).

• Features like live statistics, RSS feeds, commenting (which can be turned off) with spam protection, polls, etc.

• Themes you can choose from, many of which allow you to set the header image for your serial blog to give it an identity (and usually this is enough).

Cons:

• You can’t install your own plugins. This is actually nice in some ways, since it increases security, but can be limiting in other ways. For instance, no iPhone special view plugin.

• You can’t install your own themes without a pay-for upgrade.

• You can’t even edit the CSS or code of the existing themes without a pay-for upgrade.

• If you want to switch to your own hosting, it’s going to be difficult to pry domains and add redirection (no plugins, no theme editing) from the cold, cold hands of Wordpress.com. This is a rather big con.

Your Own Wordpress Install Advantages

Pros:

• Many hosting sites will install Wordpress for you, and even upgrade it (although Wordpress has added features like a one-click upgrade, which makes the already easy administration dead easy if you want to do that yourself). Some hosting companies is better at this than others.

  For instance, my hosting, EsoSoft, takes care of lotsa things like insane DNS crap, and debugging things that go wrong with my Wordpress install. Their prices are reasonable, their support is great, their hosting is reliable, there is no upload/download cap, and Smart Bitches, Trashy Books uses them—and they’re a fairly high-traffic review blog. Esosoft even went out of its way to add extra servers when SMTB got a much higher than usual traffic rate.

• You can install your own plugins (including all the ones that Wordpress.com provides).

• You can install and edit your own themes and their CSS.

• Ability to use your own domain without extra payment on top of the web hosting, naturally.

Cons:

• You still have more things to take care of than with a Wordpress.com blog, although most hosting sites will still take care of many of these things for you. Not backups or security usually, though that’s easy enough to fix.

• Unless you’re messing around with Wordpress Mu, multiple blog addresses will be annoying.

My Recommendation

If you desperately need free, use Wordpress.com.

If you can spare a little bit of money, EsoSoft and your own Wordpress install is a great place to be.

1. And yes, I was a Wordpress skeptic for many years. [↩]

I know a lot of writers use Livejournal for their blogs, but as many of you know, a dedicated location is best for your web serial. This can simply be a section on your author website, or even a separate website dedicated to your web serial(s). But it can also just be a category in your main blog, though I don’t suggest the latter so much….

It all depends on how you set it up, not where you host it specifically, or what software you use, or even if your web serial has its own web address.

Primarily, the following are the features that matter. They make it easy for existing readers to easily access your weekly chapters, and for new readers to jump on board!

Strong identification.

Even if this is just a section of your author website, it should be obvious to any reader, especially new ones, that this site/page/section is where to find your web serial. This is one of the main reasons why a dedicated location is best; not just for housekeeping, but so that people know where to go and know they’re there.

This is easiest to do with a dedicated site or a section of your website, and hardest to do if your serial is sharing the same blog as your life/writing/etc blog.

In many cases, what you need is a distinct banner. A friend can create this, or you can just use a large fancy font. It doesn’t matter, as long as it looks unique, even if it’s elegantly simple.

Easy access to the most recent chapter.

As your serial gets longer and longer, this becomes more necessary for your existing readers who visit your site. Most of your readers will be site visitors; this is true for any website, even blogs that are written for other bloggers who are quite familiar with RSS.

Links in each chapter leading to the next one (and the previous one).

Otherwise it’s difficult for people to find the next chapter, even if a chapter list is provided.

(Added; Kate reminded me of this important point.)

Omnipresent link to the first chapter.

This should appear either as part of that horizontal menu so often seen on websites, or as something on the side, or even as an automated part of every chapter. It should be easy to see and obvious as to its function. New readers will be able to on-board easily; even if you include a monthly archive box on the side, getting to the very first entry can still involve a lot of clicking and paging.

RSS feed

This allows people with RSS readers to subscribe to your story and get new updates. This feed can simply provide a link to the new chapter, or it can go further and provide the full text—just make sure that, if you do provide a full text feed, that you include your copyright information either in each entry or as part of the RSS feed’s meta information.

Just about any blogging platform makes this easier, of course.

Organized archive of chapters.

Aka, table of contents. Whether this is a recent-to-oldest list, or an oldest-to-recent list, doesn’t matter (especially if you have easy access to the most recent chapter and omnipresent link to the first chapter). But sometimes readers will want to find something they really liked in the past, or they want to discuss it with someone else, and so it will also help if your listing of chapters includes a description or a name.

I tend to think a descriptive name is best, since it allows a quick scanning of a LOT of chapters; for examples of evocative, fun, and concise chapter names, see web comics like Sluggy Freelance or Girl Genius.

For the above reasons, it’s often best for your archive of chapters to not be automatically generated, unless your archive generator is for some reason really smart, or is a web elf.

A reasonable about page.

About pages are important, as all writers know, and the omnipresent link is fairly obvious. Here are useful things to put in your About page for your web serial:

• Quick intro blurb about what the story is about.
• Quick introduction of the main character(s) and possibly the world/location. New readers like these very much, as it gives them quick grounding.
• Author blurb about yourself.

An other works page.

List your other works, including Amazon/B&N/Webscriptions/Fictionwise/Paypal links.

(It’s actually kind of amazing how in ebooks publishers often forget to include a link to this part.)

Link to author website front page.

Even if your serial is part of your website.

I think that’s about it.

Setting up an easy way for people to donate money is one of the most important things, after the writing, for a web serial to bring in money. Obviously. Creating a Paypal donation button is all good and well, and many people do this.

However, if possible, a writer should also set up a Paypal subscription button for readers to use. This allows the reader to easily donate small amounts regularly without fuss, especially if they themselves are already Paypal members (which many people are). Writers can even offer multiple subscription options, any recurring amount weekly, monthly, even bi-monthly.

Here’s how to most easily do so, with screenshots. You can click on screenshots to enlarge them.

Getting There

After logging into your account on Paypal, go to the Merchant Services tab. Under Create Buttons, you’ll see a Subscribe link to click. Here’s a screenshot:

After this, Paypal presents you with a number of steps. I’m listing them here with screenshots with the most basic options (optional stuff mostly left out) to easily get off the ground. This example is for a monthly subscription.

Paypal’s “Step 1″ Section

1. Name Your Subscription: Something descriptive, like “Monthly Subscription”. You don’t need the inventory tag.

2. Subscription Pricing and Timing: Here’s where you can set up options for subscribers. The important fields are outlined in red. Everything else in this section you can leave as defaults.

Paypal’s “Step 2″ Section

You can leave this section at its defaults.

Paypal’s “Step 3″ Section

Make Shipping Address Optional: You don’t need the shipping address unless you’re planning on sending something in the mail to your subscribers (unlikely and unnecessary :) ), so switch this option to “No”:

Create Button

Click the “Save Changes” button, as per the usual with creating Paypal buttons, and you’re done! Now all you need to do is add your button to your site with an appropriate description at the top.

Suggested Subscription Cycles

I suggest monthly or bi-monthly. Weekly will result in amounts too small, and monthly/bi-monthly is just right if you’re updating one to a few times a week.

If you get established, you can have 1-year subscriptions for a suitable amount. You can even include “lifetime” subscriptions (a 99-year subscription, for instance).