Yes, it’s that new website that I’ve been mentioning for months and months now. I actually started soliciting feedback on the DeepGenre blog way back in December (see my piece “What Works on an Author Website?”). And now you can see the results here. You might also want to take the opportunity to poke around the redesigned Infoquake and MultiReal websites.

It’s likely that I’ll be doing some continuous tweaking to the site over the next few weeks, both to improve functionality and to fix problems. I haven’t looked at the sites on IE6 in over a month, and I’m sure they look absolutely horrendous. I’ve never tried to view them on a Mac. Plus I keep stumbling across broken images all over the place, which is entirely WordPress’s fault, and has nothing whatsoever to do with my shoddy organizational skills and inability to follow directions or standard programming practices.

In the meantime, here are some of the highlights of the new website:

• New home page (here) with consolidated information about me and links to the important parts of the site. It also features the John Steinbeck quote from East of Eden that I’m strongly favoring as the epigraph for the beginning of Geosynchron.
• Frequently asked questions page (here) with what I hope are frequently asked questions, along with the frequently given answers.
• Easy-to-find social networking icons at the bottom of every blog post that are, frankly, a crass attempt to garner more attention and traffic from social networking websites like StumbleUpon, Digg, and the like. (Thanks to the fabulous Sociable plugin which makes managing these icons easy as pie.)
• Subscribe by email functionality on the blog, courtesy of the Subscribe2 plugin. Look in the left sidebar and sign up if you’d like to receive emails whenever I post a new article on the blog. Does it actually work? Well, er, I don’t know. I haven’t thoroughly tested it yet, so let me know if you have trouble.
• Notify me of follow-up comments functionality on every entry of the blog, to try to encourage continuing discussion. Does this feature actually work? Not sure about that either, but let’s hope so. Courtesy of the Subscribe to Comments plugin.
• Random entries in the left sidebar, in an attempt to get people to sample the bountiful harvest of archived blog posts. Courtesy of my own damn PHP programming skills (which is probably why it occasionally breaks and shows nothing).
• List of top 15 tags in the left sidebar. Just move your mouse over the “Tags” headline to see it. Yeah, okay, so it’s not a particularly intuitive navigation scheme, but I’m working on it.
• Revised “Best of the Blog” page (here) updated to include some of the stuff I’ve written here in the past year.

New things to note on the Infoquake and MultiReal websites:

• Complete excerpt of MultiReal is online. The Pyr PDF sampler contains chapters 1-5; the excerpt on the MultiReal website also contains chapters 6, 7, and 8. And considering chapter 6 is set on the virtual sex network known as the Sigh, you know you want to read that chapter. (But don’t get too excited, it’s not particularly explicit.) No word from Josef K. Foley about artwork yet, but word is his wife is expecting twins, so he’s got his hands full.
• Buy Now pages give the discriminating SF consumer a bevvy of choices of where to purchase their copies of Infoquake and MultiReal.
• Consolidated RSS feed for Book News pulls all of the Infoquake and MultiReal-related entries from my blog into one place. (You’ll notice that my home page now automatically displays the latest book news as well.)
• New podcasts will be coming shortly. I’ve already recorded chapter 1 of MultiReal (though Audacity is giving me fits so I haven’t posted it yet). Plus I intend to go back and finish recording chapters 5, 6, and 7 of Infoquake as well. So keep an eye on the audio pages for Infoquake and MultiReal.
• Web exclusives pages that currently house the first drafts of Infoquake‘s chapter 1, the essay “Why I Wrote Infoquake,” and links to blog posts about Infoquake and MultiReal. I’ll be posting first drafts of MultiReal‘s chapter 1 at some point — and that’s going to be interesting, considering I have about a dozen entirely different openings for the book that are currently just gathering digital dust on my hard drive.

I would be remiss if I didn’t give a shout-out to the Inline Posts plugin for WordPress as well. This miraculous plugin is what allows me to mirror the contents of several pages throughout the site without actually having to maintain duplicates of them. It’s worth checking out.

And now, I crave feedback. What do you think? Positive and negative comments welcome.

Update 4/17/08 at 8:58 PM: Okay, so I’ve now heard from a few people that the comments form doesn’t work, which is why none of you are giving feedback. I just assumed you all hated me. Now I know that you don’t — unless the comments form doesn’t work and you hate me. Off to fix it now…

I’ve taken the opportunity of moving the blog to make a number of changes, which I list below:

• Infoquake site is now on WordPress. The Infoquake website is now running on good ol’ WordPress (as opposed to ColdFusion, which is what I originally created the site in). This means it will be a heck of a lot easier for me to maintain, and will allow me to install nifty plug-ins and the like. Plus once I do the redesign in 2008, all I’ll need to do is modify the skin and I’m good to go — no need to reprogram the whole thing. But the coolest thing about moving to WordPress? I can use the IMM-Glossary plugin to give me automatic popup definitions for the terms in the book. Go look at the excerpt page and run your mouse over one of the words with the dotted underlines to see it in action. (Or just look at the screen cap to the right.)
• The John Barth Information Center is also now on WordPress. Some of you may or may not realize that I’ve maintained a fan website devoted to the Postmodernist author John Barth for the past, oh, 12 or 13 years. (Go ahead, search Google for “John Barth” and see what comes up just below the Wikipedia article. I’ll wait.) This site is now running WordPress too, and seeing as I’ve been such a horrible steward of the site, I’m hoping to open it up to other John Barth fans to write, administer, comment, and manage.
• All my personal websites are now running on LAMP. Yes, I do frequently defend Microsoft and have not always been keen on open source software. But I’ve decided to move to an all-open source LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) environment, because a) it’s cheaper, and b) WordPress runs better that way.
• Cleaner permalinks. If you look at your browser address bar, you’ll notice that the “/blog” is gone. As is the “index.php” and the date-based URL. Why? Well, it’s cleaner, that’s why. Whereas the old WordPress installation had permalinks in the form www.davidlouisedelman.com/blog/index.php/year/month/day/title/, the new installation shows permalinks in the form www.davidlouisedelman.com/category/title/. Much easier to read, and much more search engine-friendly. (Yet thanks to the magic of John Godley’s Redirection plug-in, you can still follow old links to the new pages. Really, this thing is a miracle — regular expression-based redirection, just like in Apache, but you don’t have to leave WordPress or mess with .htaccess files. Plus 404 logging, and more.)
• My old book reviews and interviews are now part of the blog. If you take a look at the full archives page, you’ll notice that I now have blog entries dating back to 1994. No, I wasn’t the most prescient individual in the world, I’ve simply moved all of my old book reviews and author interviews from the mid-90s into WordPress. This means they’re accessible through the search and the archives and get the benefits of tagging and all that WordPress-y goodness. You can read my Baltimore City Paper interviews with Tim O’Brien, Nicholson Baker, and Stephen Hunter here — still three of the most popular pages on the website — and more.
• I’ve licensed the pieces on this blog with Creative Commons. The pieces on this blog now come with an Attribution-Share Alike Creative Commons license. Which means you’re free to copy them and remix them in any fashion you’d like, as long as you attribute the original to me and share your copies and remixes yourself. I really have no idea what this is going to do for me; I figure that it will either a) help, or at least b) not cost me anything.

So far the transition to Bluehost has been pretty smooth… with one very important, and very souring, exception. Go to the Bluehost home page and try to log in to the Control Panel in the top right. It doesn’t matter if you have an account, type in a bogus domain and a bogus password like 1234. What do you see? If you’re at all savvy about website security, you’ll see the problem right away. The password you typed is sitting right in the query string of the URL. (See below.)

Why is this a big deal? Well, your ultra-secret password to all your web files, the one you typed behind asterisks, is now sitting right there for anyone to see. It’s also sitting in plain text in your browser history. It’s also been passed through dozens of routers on the Internet in plain text where any doofus can copy it down. It’s also sitting in plain text in Bluehost’s log files.

This is the kind of bonehead security mistake that they teach you in Webmastering 101, not long after they disabuse you of the notion that your computer comes with a built-in cup holder. Bluehost’s response when I opened a customer service ticket about this? Hey, there’s a secure login — just type the Bluehost URL with a leading “https://” instead of an “http://”. Shit, my ESP must be on the fritz, because your mental telepathy telegram warning me that your standard account login is insecure failed to come through.

This kind of carelessness doesn’t exactly make me feel secure about my choice of ISP. But I’ve learned the hard way that all web hosting companies suck.

Oh, and the last irritating factor? WordPress doesn’t let you migrate post excerpts. I’ve been very careful to create bite-sized summaries for every post I’ve written, so you can browse through the article list in the categories and have some idea what you’re about to read. No more. The excerpts are all gone, seemingly for good. (Sniff.)