Welcome to My New Blog

Well, there is story behind this. It goes a little like this:

Weebly, which had quite a while ago been bought out by SquareSpace, sent an email on the final weekend of April. On the 28th, in fact, informing me that they were increasing the price of their business service. It wasn’t a small increase. It was over twice as much. They happened to inform me on the same day that the price increase went into effect.

I had no time to make alternate arrangements.

I’m mildly pissed, but I have decided to see this as an opportunity. Time to start fresh. At a much lower price point. I did a quick search for a website builder, because coding is not my jam, and I’m busy and I don’t have the time for it in any case.  And well, here we are. Welcome to my new website. I’ve kept it much the same as the last one, but with a number of differences. There were, after all,  a number of things I wanted to change. I was getting itchy for change, and had lost my focus. Too many similar things in too many disparate places. I needed to revamp, and have needed it for a long while.

One of the major changes I needed to make was the shop. It was housed on my old site… and got me exactly nowhere. No one ordered anything from my shop. I was paying for years for this extra feature that was never used. It had to go. It was costing me money. For no reason. And so the shop is gone. But Sonia, I hear you say, there’s a shop tab in your bar. Why yes, yes there is. That’s because it now links to my Ko-Fi shop. The Ko-Fi shop, you’ll note, is incredibly sparse. There are exactly two items in there currently, and they are for my subscribers only (because Ko-Fi lets you do exclusives like that). That won’t last forever. Over the next few months, I’ll be slowly uploading my books so people can buy directly from me if they want.  In the meantime, there are purchase links for all on my books on their dedicated pages, just as in my previous website. Since there are easy ways to get all of my titles, I’m in no rush to get my Ko-Fi shop up and running for the public… which is a good thing as I haven’t much time.

You’ll also notice that the Shop tab has a drop down menu. That’s because Ko-Fi has this really neat Commissions  feature, where folks can request a commission from me. I aim to eventually offer fore-edge painting commissions as well as book rebinding commissions. First, I have to practice so that when people request a commission, I will have enough confidence in the quality of my work to feel good about taking said commissions. I marked it as ‘Coming Soon’ but it will be more like ‘Coming… Sometime.’ Again, I don’t have a lot of time, so it’s going to be a while before I feel comfortable with accepting commissions. But it is in the plan. So it’s there.

Another change you’ll note is that I’ve gotten rid of my art tab. I still create art, but since I have a Redbubble shop for my art prints and will be selling my originals (and maybe some other fun things like pins and stickers and stuff) on my Ko-Fi shop, there was no need for that link. Away it went. Let’s simplify my site, thank you very much. I will be posting any new artworks on my socials, but it’s not the main focus of my business, so it’s getting less attention.

Everything else is pretty much the same, just cleaned up and easily managed now. There’s a lot of work for me to do with this blog - which includes creating and scheduling drafts for the serial which is soon to start uploading here. I had done a bunch of it on Weebly, but the switch, which I feel was necessary, means I have to go through and do it again. That’s alright. It’s not hard work, just tedious.

Now, the whole domain thing is proving to be an issue. This website builder and host has, for the whole cost of one month with the new Weebly plan, included in the price a free domain. So, naturally I tried to transfer it over. However, my current domain provider was supposed to send the transfer code to me and has not. I am unable to transfer the domain over. As of now. I have a ticket open with them and will hopefully have it resolved soon. As of the writing of this (end of April), I had tried to at least forward the DNS but it was not successful. I’m going to try again, and hopefully I’ll have that up and running. If the domain transfer or DNS forwarding worked, you’ll have this blog post very soon. If not… it’ll have to wait until my domain expires with my current provider and hope against hope that I’ll be able to snap it up again with this site.

Edit to note: I now have the domain transferred and everything should be good to go now!

With the change of my domain provider, I’ve also lost my dedicated email. I’m not all that sad about it; I was getting an incredible amount of spam on it, for some reason, and it was clunky and old-looking in any case. It was also an added expense I was not really interested in. I now have a new email for my working stuff. It’s just a free gmail account, but I’m sure folks won’t mind too much. I’ll have to update a few places, like Can-Con, but most everyone has an alternate email for me, so it’s all good.

Right. So that’s where I am right now. I’ve shaken things up for myself and will hopefully be able to build up from here. With luck. Thanks for reading all of that. It was an unexpected, annoying change. But I do think it’s a good opportunity to start fresh. And so I am. Hopefully it works out for me.