Tuesday, October 21, 2014

New site! Announcing DVS Press

The time has come, at long last, to move beyond the confines of this site, beloved though it may be. If you are a regular reader, I thank you for visiting once again, but I would ask you to please visit my new site, DVS Press, at dvspress.com.

The need for something a bit more expansive has been one of slow building, but the moment has arrived. The new wordpress backbone gives me a lot more options for design and control, and will ultimately make the production of a quality site suited to my purposes an easier, more efficient endeavor. Wordpress has more expansive CSS support and control, which will allow me to go from writing of my content to publication without any extra effort. On this site, in order to get proper looking text and indents, I had to code all of my posts in html, an annoying if not laborious process. This was especially true in the publication of Muramasa, in which I elected to utilize many footnotes for vocabulary explanations. Every post with footnotes had to be coded in html with internal href tags and then saved. If I ever returned to edit the post, blogger would overwrite these references and code with, essentially, nonsense.

The short of it was that making functional documents was a labor of love. Now it will hardly be a labor at all. In fact, I can finally do all my writing in word, with my own formatting which makes ebook transitions easier, and copy-paste to my site and have the correct formatting there too.

I also think that you will enjoy the look and feel of the new site. I have left behind the dark theme of Prometheus for several reasons. The original justification for using light text on a dark background was for the reader's comfort, as staring into a computer screen displaying white pages can be tiring to the eyes. It's quite a bit like looking into light bulb for me, and so I often work with darkened backgrounds. However, analytic tools have shown me that better than 50% of my readership are accessing the site on mobile devices. Dark backgrounds become much less legible and comfortable in bright spaces, such as out-doors, a typical place to be looking at one's phone or a tablet. This compounds with my recent format change to 1,000 word updates, which for many means that the amount of time spent "looking into the lightbulb" is rather minimal. Additionally, dark-themes sites just seem denser and less appealing. The aesthetics of the new design I find more inviting. I hope you will too.

For a short while, I will be duplicating the content on Tears of Prometheus and dvspress.com. All previous content has already been migrated to the new host, but the extensive cataloging present on Prometheus hasn't been done there yet, so if you are looking for a particular article, this site will still be your best bet. I encourage you to stop over to the new site and take a look.

Happy reading!

-David V Stewart

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