Digital Moves & New Routines

By Jamie DeBree 2024/01/31 Admin, Weekly News

As you may have guessed, I’m still trying to get my new routines settled. This means that for the past two weeks, I’ve been doing my “50 words per day” during the times I’d normally be writing a blog post.

It takes awhile to establish new routines, so I expect (hope) this will get better going forward. I’m writing a lot more regularly now, and my “50” words often come in at 150 – 250 per day once I get going, which is exactly what I was hoping for with that resolution.

The other thing that took some time and focus last week was a site hosting issue. My old web host (A Small Orange) was bought years ago by one of the huge conglomerate services, and I’ve been wanting to move my sites to an independent host for several years now as the service and support through that big conglomerate has gotten increasingly worse. I’ve just been too lazy to pull the trigger, as I’m currently running four active and a couple inactive sites, plus email with special configuration for the majority of my domains. Needless to say, the thought of moving all that was a very daunting thing.

The old host gave me an annoying shove when they raised their price around $7 per month. I was already paying nearly $40 per month, so that was excellent motivation to find a new host. I spent several hours last week researching web hosting and potential hosts, going back and forth, and finally settled on GreekGeeks, which is an independent hosting company that seems to be proud of its independent status (so less likely to “sell out”, hopefully), and also had more good reviews than bad when it comes to customer service.

GreenGeeks isn’t the cheapest host out there, but I’m a “get what you pay for” believer, so I wasn’t looking for cheap, just less expensive. They have a good deal running right now, so I bought a year’s worth of hosting for $60, which is over $20 less than one more *month* would be with my old host. After that, it triples to right at $200 per year, but it’s still $300 less than I’d pay with the old host. Win!

The best part though (so far), is the free migration service. I requested it and figured they’d move one site, and I’d have to do the others plus my email accounts manually. But they have some sort of very cool tool, and one hour after I requested the migration, I got an email saying it was done, and telling me to repoint my nameservers. I did, and everything just…worked! I do use WordPress and cpanel, so obviously the tool is specific to that, but that saved me *hours* of work…had I known that was possible, I’d have switched hosting a long time ago.

So, here we are on the new host, the sites are running well, and now since I’m thinking about the technical bits, I’m thinking it’s a good time to update my templates. I have one picked out for my author blogs, and just need to purchase it. I was kind of at a loss for the main BSB site though, because I also want to install WooCommerce and set up my own web store, so I want a theme that will work well with that. Hmm.

Then while browsing the GreenGeeks blog, I found this article, specifically on WordPress themes for selling books! Huzzah! There are two of these I really like…can you guess which ones? Which one is your favorite?

I have vacation time that I need to use up from the day job (use it or lose it!), so I’ve scheduled one day off per week for the next four weeks, and I’ll be working on these template updates, the store setup, and some publishing tasks that should (if all goes well) result in some new stories coming out this quarter, as well as the newsletters picking up again.

So that’s what’s going on, and why blogging is kind of sporadic at the moment. There are good things to come though, methinks. I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching, and making decisions on what I want to prioritize and spend time/focus on, and it’s time to get back to treating writing as a business, rather than a hobby.

In the past, I’ve thought I needed to have wide blocks of time in which to do things, and sometimes that’s still true (the template changes, for one), but increasingly I’ve been focusing on making the most of smaller blocks of time to get “a little bit” done every day. For right now, that’s working, so I’m rolling with it for more than just writing.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by what I’ve been writing during my daily micro-sprints, and some of those have been for the Magpie stories. So that’s encouraging, and I’m excited to get some of these little bits polished up and available to buy in several formats, hopefully from my own store on my own site as well as everywhere else.

Thanks for staying tuned, so to speak!

Tagged on: blogs, bookstore, changes, publishing, technology, themes, web hosts, web sites, writing