The redesign of my business website was released on Black Friday.  The content that used to be on that website was moved to my author website for a shorter domain name, leaving an empty, neglected shell. Which was fine since I had no traffic for that website to care about.  For this website and the author website, the business website was a link in the copyright notice.  But the redesign had a significant impact for this website, which has always been an unholy mess since I started working with HTML in 1997.

First, a portfolio showcase for my brilliant game designing talent that went nowhere when I worked in the video game industry.  Second, an extended programming project when I took programming classes at San Jose City College from 2002 to 2007.  Third, a personal blog when I switched to the Joomla! 1.5 CMS in January 2008.  I have only one-third of the content from my legacy website converted over.  (A task that I hope to finish one of these days.)  When I developed my Show Twitpic module for Joomla, download and forum components were added.  If that wasn't bad enough, I've done some things wrong in setting up and maintaining Joomla for the long haul.

Nice mess, eh?

With my business website having no significant content, I did a clean installation of Joomla and selected the Demi template from PraiseJoomla to rebuild from the ground up.  Although none of my websites has a webcomic, the information on Webcomics was quite useful.  Especially the articles on tweaking an existing webcomic website for presenting a clean user interface.

The first half of this redesign was creating a generic business website presentation with graphic buttons and RSS feeds for the other websites, an about page, and a contact page.  The second half was removing the download and forum components for my Show Twitpic module from this website to add significant content to my business website.

The Show Twitpic module is still the only one available on the Joomla! Extension Directory to display pictures from Twipic.  My approach to software design is to develop something that everyone is not doing to create something unique.  While everyone is programming to display pictures from Flickr (which is easy to do), I made one for Twitpic (which is harder to do).  When I finished adding some significant new features in next month's update, I'm planning to branch out by creating a similar modules for Twitgoo and yFrog (which are both harder to do than Twitpic).  I'm also considering doing a component version to display pictures on a page rather than a box.

The biggest advantage of the redesign is figuring out the demographics for the blog and software.  I had known for a long time that I had a significant international audience for this website.   I couldn't tell for what exactly from the server log breakdowns presented in the website back end.

As a writer, a few of my recent acceptances had came from Canada and Great Britain.  Some American writers find more success internationally than they do at home.  If I have a significant number of international readers for my blog, I need to be more aggressive in submitting my works internationally.

As a programmer, I had to fixed bugs related to the presence of international characters in the Twitpic RSS feed.  If I have a significant number of international users for my software, I will need to figure out the localization issues that I been putting off since I have no clue if a foreign language is being presented correctly or not if they're using a non-Latin alphabet.

I also created a separate Twitter account for the business website (cdrassoc) to separate traffic from the shared blog/writer websites (cdreimer).  HootSuite allows me to figure out the demographics from the URLs in my Twitter postings that drive traffic to my websites.

This website is long overdue for a redesign.  Something I'll be thinking about very hard next month before I do anything.  Unlike my author and business websites, I got significant content to take into consideration.  I also need to finish converting the legacy content as well.  If I decide to go ahead with the redesign, New Year's weekend is probably when I'll shut the website down, tear everything down and put it back together like Frankenstein's monster.

Assuming, of course, I don't put it off for another year.

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This week I got a post card in the mail for the Prairie Schooner Book Prize Series that will be accepting contest submissions for a collection of short stories (150+ pages) and poetry (50+ pages) between January 15, 2010 and March 15, 2010.  The entry fee is $25.  The grand prize is $3,000 and publication through the University of Nebraska Press.  I'm planning to enter my short story collection.  This is a strong motivator to polish off all my short stories from the last four years that are languishing in the slush piles.

If you search the Internet for how to put together a short story collection, you won't find much information.  Most articles start off with the caveat that publishers won't accept a short story collection unless you're a well established author, and even then somewhat reluctantly.  Surprisingly, The Wall Street Journal reported that short story collections are breaking out this year and e-readers might make short stories a viable form again.   I found this article and the arrival of postcard to be most encouraging for my own short story collection.

Since I had four short-short stories accepted for an anthology that I wrote after looking at the submission requirements two months ago, I started looking at the submission requirements of various anthologies and publications to match up with short story ideas that I thought up or recycling the ones that I started but never finished, and letting the deadlines determine my writing priorities for the next three months.

My first non-fiction essay, "The Cabbage Patch Fight," about how my mother got a Cabbage Patch doll for my baby niece by punching out two other mothers in a Toy R Us brawl in the early 1980's, was accepted for publication in a special Christmas issue of Soft Whispers Magazine.  I originally threw this story idea out on the Editor Unleashed Forums since I didn't think I had the time to write anything new when I got my hands full with revising my first novel and a short story with a submission due date at the end of the month.  The editor wanted the story and I found the time to write.  This became my fifth accepted story in the last two months and I have seven stories appearing in the next six months.

I'm going to be busy during the holidays.  I'm wrapping up and putting aside my first novel after cutting 30,000 words from the 125,000-word rough draft and splitting the novel in two volumes.  I got four short stories I'm writing to submit to different anthologies.  I write on average eight short stories a year but I'm on track to write 13 or 14 short stories this year.  I'm revising my 20,000-word vampire novella for submission to an ebook publisher.  The New Year will begin with me polishing off the 27+ short stories in my collection to submit to Prairie Schooner by March 2010, and working on the next draft of volume one of my first novel.

Maybe I should find time to look for a job since I been unemployed for the last nine months.  Rejection slips and contributor copies don't pay the bills.  Which is why I put a PayPal donation button my author website (scroll down to bottom right).  If you got some spare change, please help out a busy writer trying to get ahead financially.  The grand prize is still a long ways off.

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