A Book

This website is due an overhaul, I can see it, you can see it and it will get one, but not today, this is my second consecutive post in the website news about the 100 in 100 blog.

No, I'm not planning on a round 2, the blog I created last year where I did 100 short stories and poems of 100 words in length in 100 days is now a book:

100 in 100

The Link above will take you to it's page on Goodreads where there are links to Amazon should you want a copy.

I also created a page on the website quite optimistically called books in the hope that maybe I can now make more and grow this page with my other books, whatever they may be.

So why would you want a copy of the book? Can't you just read it all on the blog?

Well yes, sort of, I guess I have wasted everyone's time, primarily my own, never mind. Although if you are interested, there are 1 or 2 reasons the book may be better than the blog:

• Editing - The blog was by it's very concept kind of a rush, when I started making the book version, I found that it was riddled with errors, spelling, punctuation, grammatical. I edited it and I gave proof copies out to some of my most trusted friends and family so the finished product has... less mistakes. Think of the blog as draft 1.
• Bonus Stories / Poems - I wrote 10 new ones which aren't on the blog at all and never will be.
• Pictures - I had the idea for the book earlier this year, but first I decided that the stories should be illustrated, that way, they could have a page each and it could actually be a decent sized book, so there are 112 drawings (which are also not available anywhere else).
• It's made of paper - Who doesn't love a real book?

If you live in the UK, there is a giveaway for this book starting tomorrow on Goodreads:

Goodreads Book Giveaway

100 in 100

by James Manders

Giveaway ends October 16, 2017.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

So get your entries in for that.

100 in 100

I feel I should own up to something, something I have kept pretty much to myself up until this point, but I think I should admit what I have been up to.

It is this:

Which is now visible on the other writings page.

So, what is it? It's a blog of course, what else could it be? I only seem to know how to express myself via the medium of blog and obviously I have started a new one, there are already so many, what's one more?

So what is this one? What prompted me to make a new one? and why keep it a secret?

I started this back in July, on the 18th to be more precise, I decided I wanted to try and do something every day for a little bit, so naturally it became a challenge.

I realise 100 days is hardly a long time, several blogs exist where people will write every day for years, but when I started this, my most frequently written blog was the travel blog, which has about 2 a year, so 100 consecutive days is an eternity.

So, it was 100 blogs in 100 days, but for some reason I wanted to add another layer to the challenge, so I decided that each post had to be exactly 100 words long too. So really it should be called 100 in 100 in 100, but it isn't.

So why am I only announcing it now 97 days in? Because 97 days ago I hadn't written anything and I had no idea if I would make it to the end, what if someone actually read it? I wasn't sure I could take the pressure, If I failed with no-one watching, I could just pretend it never happened and let the blog remain in it's state of obscurity.

I should never have worried, anyone who I have spoken to about my challenge will know I have been somewhat obsessed with this and somehow I have managed to do every day up until now and although I haven't finished yet, at this point it is looking very likely that I will succeed.

The very first thing I wrote was the about page (which by the way is also 100 words long) where I said the posts could be anything, but very early on, I realised I wanted to do them all as creative writing, so they all became short stories or poems.

I started off really easy, but after about the 1st 7 or so, I completely ran out of ideas and getting past the 1st 20, I already felt like I was scraping the barrel. I thought as I got used to it, it would get easier but it has just gotten harder and harder, not the writing part, once I had an idea, it was easy to write 100 words. The ideas were becoming harder and harder to come by though. I started off using some random word generators and then began checking websites for writing prompts, I didn't usually actually follow the prompts, but I found that occasionally they did have a word in them that would give me an idea.

I thought that getting them to stop at exactly 100 words might be difficult too, but that part was incredibly easy, it was just a matter of some simple editing, deleting some superfluous words or even sentences or conflating the odd "they are" to a "they're" or on the odd occasion where I'm happy with the story at a few words under the 100, doing the reverse.

I'll admit something though, I didn't write every day, I would often write a couple of days ahead if I knew it was going to be difficult to do them, such as when I went on holiday I managed to write the whole weeks worth beforehand.

I've already written number 98, which is tomorrow, so only 2 left to do. Hopefully I'll manage it since I've announced it now.

Barely Noticeable Additional Pages

This website has started to attract attention. As far as I am aware an additional 2 people have visited and read some of my blogs, that’s an increase in readership of somewhere in the region of 200%, with that influx in traffic, I thought it best to tidy a few things up, so here are the obligatory bullet points:

• There is a corndog shaped page, as if the main website wasn't pointless enough, there is a collection of silly sub-domains mostly created for a single daft joke, that are now all in 1 incredibly pointless place.
• There is a 2nd more expanded reading page with extra added reviews for the previous 15 books
• The Write this for me section has the About and Rachael News bits in their own pages now.

And now, the post-amble.

The pages from write this for me were harder to make than they should have been, I discovered a while ago that there were rss feeds for other pages on both my blogger and my tumblr blogs (why can't I just stick to one blogging platform? Or 1 blog for that matter, why do I need so many?), obviously I can't just copy and paste the content, that would require 2 changes to be made if I decided to update any of them.

On tumblr every additional page gets its own rss feed, so including the content in a page is incredibly simple, you just set the feed limit to 1 and tell it to include the description where required (like so: FAQs, Feedback & About), but on blogger, you get a single feed with all of the pages listed in the order they were made, it probably makes more sense that way, but I didn't know what to do with that, the most recent page is easy enough, but how do i make the other one?

I tried finding ways to start reading a feed from the 2nd one, to start from the bottom and to paginate the page so I could direct straight to page 2. None of these attempts were successful. In the end I used an If pregmatch function to check the link and only display the description for the matching page, I was sure I had tried it before, but I must have missed something as it worked 2nd time. And now, just to buck the trend I have established with this blog, I'm actually going to include the code, just in-case someone accidentally finds this post while having the same quandary as I had at some point in the future, as they will be really annoyed at the omission if not, I know I would have been:

if (preg_match('/about/',$link))
    echo $description;

I'll assume the fellow amateur website maker will have already figured out how to include the rss feeds and will know to change the item names and the match bit between the /'s.

The resulting pages work fine now: About and Rachael News, that’s all of the extra pages properly integrated into the site now.

The 2nd reading page was made because I wanted to fill out my reading diary for a 6 book challenge I had done with work while I was in work and I thought I would use the reviews I had already written on Goodreads, I couldn't get on Goodreads, but I could my website... I think I still did it at home anyway though.

I haven't just been writing the reviews for no reason, I set myself a few challenges at the start of the year, I didn't write them down and I probably didn't even verbalise them, but here is a quick run down of what they are and how I'm doing:

1. Read 25 books - I've finished 12, so a little behind, but it's not impossible to catch up.
2. Write a review of all these books - All 12 so far
3. Utilize all the blogs - I wrote one in the corndog blog over the weekend and wrote one in write this for me yesterday, I have done all 1 of my trips abroad in my travel blog and the other blog has been well served with content, there isn't really any good yardstick to measure this one by, so its a bit of a rubbish aim, but yes, I'm probably winning.
4. Have poetry on all the blogs - I didn't used to write poetry on the blogs, but I quite like it nowadays, it can be fun to write and if it's not too complicated, easy to write, the corndog blog has this one, write this for me has this one, the other blog has become the main home of poetry in my little blogging world, with My Stuff, The "Friend Zone" and The farmers Eavis, so the only one missing (as this one doesn't really count) is the travel blog, I have part of an idea actually, but I can't really make it work at the moment, so... maybe.
5. Finish Losing Time - I'm on the 2nd draft, so it's not impossible, but I am quite lazy.

Considering there are only minor changes, I have had quite a lot to say, much to the interest of no-one, this stuff down here is almost completely secret, only the top bit will be on the website and not even Rachael will read this blog, however stupid the other ones are, she thinks this is themost pointless, she asks:
"Why do you write this blog?"
"To write about the website."
"But you haven't made any changes'"
"I have..."
"Oh, only you would notice that."

And you know what, she had me there, so I decided not to bother after all.

Horizontalisation

I told you I wouldn't stop messing around with it didn't I?

There hasn't been a 'website news' blog for quite some time so there are quite a few changes:

• New layout with links across the top and pages split into blog related sections.
• New pages showing bits from all the blogs including the about pages.
• New section in the Site part for 'Projects' into which Losing Time has been absorbed.
• New Reading page to show what I'm currently reading.
• The website has moved again (physically - the address remains the same)

I decided at some point that I should redesign my website, if only to prove my own assertion that it would be incredibly simple what with the php based design and it was, relatively.

On rotating the page, I realised I would have to trim the links, so I started by splitting the links into rows, the top one with 4 links to blogs, which now included the newer writethisforme blog and the 2nd one with links to pages within the site.

But then I decided It needed more pages than that apparently, so I turned the links at the top into sections of the website, each with a bit of the blog and pages relating to the blog in links, I found each of the pages in tumblr blogs has its own rss feed, making some of the pages quite easy to implement.

Then I decided to do some new pages, A reading page to show the book I'm reading and I think the last 15 books I read, I found that GoodReads has rss pages, so I could show the information quite easily. The original idea was that I could show all my reviews I wrote of books, especially since I decided to review all the ones I read this year, but then I decided not to, I think the books themselves is more than enough.

Losing Time is something else I have been working on, it had it's own section, but I thought it should form part of a wider projects section.  I had nothing really to put about the other projects, but they can come later if I do start work on any of them.

Regarding the move, I had an email telling me about UK based hosting from Hostinger and my website kept on going offline. When I tried moving though I was informed my website was already hosted, how do I move then? I silently ask my screen this question.

So I removed my name-servers and A records and set up a redirect to a temporary website address that came with the hosting package, then a few days later I tried adding my regular address again and success! It worked. So I'll stay here for a bit I think.

I left my sub-domains where they were for now though, they seemed less important than the already incredibly unimportant regular website that I only update for myself.

T-shirts

There have been a few minor and very boring changes to the website, which are:

1. There is a new Other Writings page for a couple of old projects and a new collaborative blog called Write This for Me
2. The floating RSS links box is gone, it was annoying and no-one really subscribes to RSS feeds anyway. There is now just one link in the little icon box on the top right to an RSS page with a frame.

But the most important news is:

I have some T-shirts!

Quite a few years ago when I first had this web address, I created a custom spreadshirt shop to sell items with corndogs printed on them, I thought that maybe if someone wanted an apron or a thong with a corndog on it, they could but it from me and I could make back about 50p of my biennial domain renewal fee.

Business has been... lets not try and sugar-coat this, I have sold a grand total of nothing.

I guess I never really believed that anyone would buy anything, the only people that visit my website are people I know and I feel as though the only reason any of them would buy a piece of corndog merchandise is as a gift to the one person they know that is apparently obsessed with corndogs. In case you haven't guessed, that person is me and their lovely surprise gift would be sort of ruined if I got a notification from spreadshirt telling me that I had made a sale. I have to make an assumption that spreadshirt notifies you of these things, as I said, I've never sold anything.

I'm not even going to embarrass myself by putting a link to it, its not linked to my main website or anything these days, if you want to find it, I'm sure I have given you enough clues to locate it with any semi-decent search engine.

The event I am completely failing to tell you about (because in all likelihood you already know) is that I decided that I should own some of my own branded stuff, so I visited my very own shop, perused the selections I had made available many years ago, decided that they were all crap and designed a couple of new T-shirts, completely failed to add either of them to my existing spreadshirt shop, then paid to have them sent to my house, which you can see above being modelled by a couple of members of the band.

So rather than allowing me to claw back some of the (admittedly very little) money I spend on this website, it has now cost me the additional price of 2 t-shirts. But hey, who doesn't want t-shirts with corndogs on? Oh right, that would be everyone.