This is a test, this is a test, this is a test. This is me playing with the new “Gutenberg” editor that comes with WordPress 5.0, and yep, this is sure different.
Gutenberg is oriented around the concept of “blocks”. It keeps offering me things to do to various types of them, including paragraphs and shortcodes. I’m not sure yet if I like this experience yet. But at least there’s a plugin I can install to restore the classic editor if I decide to get rid of this.
For now, anyway, I’ve got this version of WordPress installed on my personal network of sites (which includes both annathepiper.org and angelahighland.com). Assuming nothing obviously explodes, I’ll be rolling it around to the other sites hosted on murkworks.net this weekend.
I have a tendency to let projects get away from me if I’m not careful, and lately this has tackled me again as I’ve found myself trying to spin off two separate WordPress sites on my network–one for doing indie SDET work, and another for photos. The first was motivated by me getting laid off recently from my long-running day job. The second was brought on by Flickr announcing that they were going to start limiting free users to 1,000 photos and/or videos on their site, which made me think that I might want to move a lot of my Flickr content here.
Both of these projects were nice in theory. But in actual practice, I discovered that having too many WordPress sites to keep track of is annoying for me.
I also discovered that while I liked the idea of a standalone photos.annathepiper.org, this meant that I couldn’t easily get at the photo galleries I wanted to put on it. Say, from pages on the main annathepiper.org site, or old posts. So I’m opting to do the photos thing here instead. And while I think I like the theory of having a standalone dev site on my WordPress network as well, again, I think it’s a bit too much fracturing of how much I need to keep track of with WordPress.
So I’ll be pulling the few posts I put on both of those sites into the main blog on annathepiper.org, as well as the photo gallery plugin I’ve been playing with.
Y’all may also notice that I’ve changed the theme here to WordPress’s Twenty Seventeen theme, since I got tired of looking at Twenty Fifteen, which I wasn’t ever really happy with anyway. And I’ve put up one of my favorite pics as the header. This is my stuffed mammoth Jean-Claude, next to Andre Brunet’s guitar, as taken at Camp Violon Trad in 2017. <3
I’ve taken down the previous menu I had up, as I think about what new things I want to add to it instead. A lot of my older content on this site is stuff I don’t really want to get rid of. But I also don’t want a gigantic menu either!
Anyway. Hopefully this may lead me to actually play with this site more. Let’s see if it does!
(EDITING TO ADD: Hi Dreamwidth people! If you’re seeing this post there, this is of course me talking about rearranging things on my annathepiper.org site, not on Dreamwidth. But the extra bonus of me doing more with annathepiper.org is that you get to see it, too!)
Point of interest in case anybody wanders by here, since I don’t update this site very often (most of my activity is over on angelahighland.com):
I’ve done a bit of under-the-hood site maintenance, due to a couple of plugins I have been using on this site being deprecated and/or outright vanishing off of the WordPress.org plugins repository.
This has impacted three things here on the site:
One, my Contact page no longer has a form on it. But I do mention my email on that page, so if you really want to get in touch with me, you can do that.
Two, I have swapped over to using a different Flickr plugin to show stuff from Flickr. This impacts a small number of old posts here, but also my Great Big Sea Pictures. Visually, things should only look slightly different, but work the same general way: click on a thumbnail, it’ll take you over to the actual picture on Flickr.
And three, I’ve done some rejiggering of the custom code on my Roleplay Logs archive. Way back in ye olden times before this site was hosted on WordPress, I whipped up custom PHP to organize those logs and show you all the various sets of them. When I pulled the site into a WordPress install, this necessitated me taking that PHP code and making a custom plugin out of it.
The problem with this: WordPress doesn’t natively let you run PHP on posts or pages, so I’d been using another plugin to allow for the execution of that PHP on the pages in question.
However, since that plugin vanished off of WordPress.org, I felt it was appropriate to rejigger the code so that the actual site pages would no longer need PHP in them directly.
This has meant I got to teach myself how to do shortcodes today! Which basically means I still have the pages calling the logs PHP, but there’s an intervening layer now between “page” and “PHP code”. I.e., a shortcode, a short string that basically tells WordPress “okay now go find the code in the plugin that handles this shortcode, and do the right thing as a result”.
So that’s fun. :)
Anybody notice anything looking wacky, do please let me know!
I don’t often post to this site (which would be annathepiper.org for those of you reading this on LJ and Dreamwidth) anymore, but wanted to stick a post up to make a note that I had to do some overhauling of how my RP logs archive works. That, for those of you who haven’t visited this site in a while, is this page over here. Updates to WordPress as well as the operating system on our server required me to make sure that the PHP I’ve been using to organize my logs database was working correctly.
Which I’ve done. But since I’ve also been in a mind to revisit the logs archive in general, thanks to getting caught up on the current EQ storyline and chatting with Dara and our friend James (a.k.a. Flashfire from our days on Two Moons), I found a few logs that had broken links. Those have now been fixed. I also added one new log from 2004, Meeting Akira, in which I was playing Ynderra of Lostholt meeting Akira of the Cat Elves.
The other logs I tweaked, as well as that log, can be seen as recent updates on my New Logs page.
I’ve still got a pretty sizable backlog of RP logs I never posted from assorted MUSHes. I may amuse myself with posting more.
I had a couple different people hitting my site today looking for sheet music to La Bottine Souriante tunes–specifically, “Hommage à Philippe Brunea” and “Valse d’hiver”.
Since I am not actually a sheet music site, I direct interested parties to these links:
Failing either of those, TheSession.org may be able to help you. I’ve periodically found Quebec tunes there, though I use it as a tertiary resource.
You may or may not be able to find tunes composed by specific Quebec artists. I’ve found things composed by André Brunet (who in fact has a few of his tunes available in PDF form here, along with tunes by a couple of other people), and a couple of things composed by Olivier Demers (“Gigue à trois”, which is on the Montreal session tunebook site) and the guys in Genticorum (again on the Montreal site, but a couple on TheSession.org as well–notably for them I’ve found “Violon guérisseur” and “Valse de poeles”, the first on the Montreal session site and the second on TheSession.org).
I will also note that the lovely people at the core of the session I go to, La Famille Leger, have a collection of accordion-friendly tunes right over here. I note also that I am NOT an accordion player, but as I am a flautist, stuff that’s easily playable in D is very friendly to my flutes.
Happy tunes hunting, my fellow instrumentalists!
This is my official post to note that as of the beginning of the new year, I’ll be doing the majority of my posting on my other blog, which is about to shift primary domains from angelakorrati.com to angelahighland.com. This is to consolidate my posting activity, and to make it easier for people who are reading my books to keep up with what I post about.
Annathepiper.org will stay online, but future posts here will probably be much more infrequent. If I post here, it’ll be likely to be about maintenance of content here such as occasional updates to my old MUSH log archive, or other seriously niche things on my part.
For the majority of my book and music and fangirly content, though, please go visit angelahighland.com!
First and foremost, re: that poll I had up for y’all the other day, I have reached a formal decision. For reasons I still can’t tell you about yet (but which I will be doing ASAP), y’all should look for the name of Angela Highland to be coming into play on this site in the near future, probably later this summer. I’ve already bought the domain name angelahighland.com, which as of right now redirects on my servers to angelakorrati.com, so nobody has to worry yet about changing any bookmarks. Stand by for further news on this as I can give it.
Meanwhile, given that Faerie Blood has gone out in ebook form to Kickstarter backers and the print copies are Very Very Nigh, I have taken the liberty of updating Faerie Blood’s official page with updated information about it. The beautiful new cover is there, as well as links to the four sample chapters I provided to Kickstarter backers. I’ve refreshed the data about my offer to hand-sell ebook copies to people until I can deploy for general release. And I’ve put in a bit about what to expect for how to get the print copies as well. This page will be updated again as soon as the book becomes generally available, so keep an eye on that link as well as my update posts!
On a related note, I’ve also updated the sidebar to properly reflect the Very Very Nigh-ness of the release of the Second Edition, and also just because I wanted to give the new cover some prominence on the front page of the site!
Lastly, I updated my In Progress page with a couple of tweaks to the information on Lament of the Dove, as well as adding Mirror’s Gate since it wasn’t in there before.
And now, I CAN share with you the first of the Things I Haven’t Been Able to Tell You About Yet because important pieces of paper have been signed. Here we go, drumroll if you please:
I have an agent! I have accepted literary representation from Miriam Kriss at the Irene Goodman Literary Agency, who will be working with me on the Other Thing I Can’t Tell You About Yet but will be ASAP! Miriam came to me highly recommended, and I was very, very fortunate to get a chance to query her. Y’all may take it as read that I am MASSIVELY EXCITED, to levels I normally reserve for imminent Great Big Sea and Le Vent du Nord concerts!
Watch this space for more revelations as I can share them, in between updates about deploying all the Kickstarter goodies! This, O Internets, is shaping up to be one HELL of a summer!
Did some work this afternoon and evening during the Super Bowl to clean up various bits of annathepiper.org as well as the journals it mirrors out to. This included:
Deleting my InsaneJournal account; don’t really need it since I’m on both JournalFen and Dreamwidth, and nobody ever answers my posts on IJ
Un-mirroring a lot of older posts from annathepiper.org off of LJ, DW, and JF
Changed my theme on LJ just because I was tired of looking at the old one
Finally bought a paid account on Dreamwidth, just because of their general awesomeness
Updated my sidebar links a bit on JF just to link off to the other sections of my little web of journals
And, on annathepiper.org, fixed some broken links by instituting a WordPress plugin contact form on my re-instated Contact page; also, re-instated my long-missing Nethack page, which is mostly there to commemorate my still one and only Ascension
Slowly re-instating a bunch of old missing content on annathepiper.org as well, just for giggles and because I can. The GBS, TOFOG, Filk, and Sonnets sections are on the way back eventually.
So just because I can, I’ve been waking up old broken parts of this web site (annathepiper.org, for those of you reading this on LJ or DW), bits that were never properly integrated into WordPress. Since I’ve got a handy link-checking plugin installed, this has been a lot easier than I thought it would be; I’ve just had to go through and fix a lot of broken links, and in some cases, restore content that’s been absent for some time.
Right now, this primarily means reinstating my Great Big Sea page, and a couple of its child pages as well–most notably, the Pictures page, since I found a nifty plugin that lets WordPress easily talk to Flickr. And I do still have several lovely collections of pictures from various Great Big Sea shows which some kind folks had given me permission to post (mamishka and fredpdx, I’m lookin’ at you!). You can see a nice example of the plugin in action, not to mention some nice pics of Great Big Sea in Vancouver from 2003, here.
I’ve also reinstated the Sitemap, the Credits page (with proper updated references to nifty plugins and things I’m using these days), and the Journal section (although this is primarily a pointer off to my LJ and a place to link to posts I wrote before I ever had a proper blog).
I must sing the praises of JournalPress, a WordPress plugin that not only crossposts to LJ, it lets you crosspost to multiple LJ-type sites at once. So I’ve got it set up to dump posts out to both LJ and my JF account. Works like a charm.
If you’ve got a need to crosspost to multiple LJ-style sites off of WordPress, you might check the plugin out. And if you do, be sure to thank the author for her hard work!
