Archives for 08/28/2013

And… here we are on my shiny new website!

As promised in days of yore (see also: two days ago) I’ve rolled all my stuff under one umbrella, known as StefanGagne.com, or Stefan Gagne’s Fiction Factory. All the web novels, all the crusty old stuff, the blog, everything. What’s more, redirections are in place so any old bookmarks or links will drop you in my new home, nice and tidy.

What’s changed? Not a heck of a lot, but we have a few major new features.

• User avatars are now random characters from my writing! If you’d prefer to establish your own avatar, Gravatar.com will sort you out. You can still post anonymously!
• In the future, the VIP Club will have expanded capability… user accounts and profiles, multiple projects, and more.
• Now you can leave feedback directly on story pages, rather than on the blog!

Since I just opened the doors, there’s still dust everywhere and not all the features are in place. VIP Club isn’t working yet, notably, but it should be soon. City of Angles story pages need some template adjustments. Also I’ll be rearranging GUI elements and so on, making things 20% cooler as I go.

This should be the last major migration of my content, now that I’m not spread across a variety of servers and hostnames. It’s all StefanGagne.com from here on out. Welcome to my home. Put your feet up and relax.

Big changes are coming. In the “Winter is coming” sense of impending gravitas.

I’m migrating ALL my content to StefanGagne.com. Due to a DNS issue that just points back to pixelscapes at the moment, but in the future it’ll point to a singular website which houses my blog and my writing projects and any future endeavours. That’ll also free up pixelscapes so my sister can use it (since it was her site to begin with and I kinda took it over bit by bit).

Why this transition? Well…

• Everything under one tentpole. No hopping back and forth between pixelscapes and wordpress.com or any other side-site I have.
• All my old content will migrate over. All my story websites, and even blog posts going back ten years and more. Nothing’s lost in the process.
• It’ll be far more professional; everything’s under one URL which is, well, my name.
• Nicer design and no intrusive advertising on the blog!
• I can organize up the content using the power of WordPress, which lets me keep my legacy sites as-is but add new abilities to future sites.
• City of Angles will now have DIRECT commenting right at the bottom of every chapter!
• The City of Angles VIP Club (and all future VIP clubs and maybe ebook sales) will be handled by software, without any messy manual process.

It’s gonna be better all-around, really. A move I should’ve made long ago.

What does this mean for you? It means updating bookmarks, although I plan to automatically forward the old URLs to the new ones. It means re-subscribing through a new system if you’re using email updates to follow my blog. New RSS feed URL, too, if you’re using that. But once that initial relocation speed bump is passed, we’ll be sittin’ pretty at a new permanent home.

Because of this transition and the work involved, I’ll be skipping the next City of Angles update. (I’m also finishing up the book and Kickstarter items, which takes time.) Also, the VIP Club is currently unavailable and might not be available at launch, but we’ll have that running as soon as possible.

Thanks for your patience. I think you’re really gonna dig this. I don’t have an ETA for when the switchover will happen, since I’m at the mercy of various tech companies, but once it happens you should get automagically forwarded to our new home. Can’t wait to see you there!