You ever worked with Wordpress? If yes, you know my pain. We give you this theme for free but you gotta pay up the nose for anything that looks reasonable. You need a cookie banner? Here's a simple one, but you've got to ensure the legality of your banner text and website. Does it drop a cookie then ask if that's alright? Or does it ask first? (Hint: One of those is not GDPR compliant.)
No cookies, no content delivery networks outside Europe, no fuss, just licened images with proper attributions to their creators, some html with some human-written text, simple CSS and a hope that my HTML skills haven't atrophied too much.
Years ago I wrote a GDPR cookie whitepaper for my company because many of our customers were just doing it wrong and risking big fines. Am I going to get fined if my cookie drops on your computer before you've said 'yes'? Probably not. But why do I need cookies? To track your actions on my website? Why? I had Google Analytics on my old website and I was happy if I got one or two views in a week, so what does that bring me? Maintenance headaches.
Now, three websites, three landing pages with three different purposes. This one for me, one for Shudder and one for my self-published stuff Arcworld. Since I'm really hoping that I find traditional publishing for my new books, I've had to push the Arcworld stuff to the side to let it atrophy. I can't just kill it, but I'm not as proud of it as I once was. Not that it's bad. It's just not Shudder, or even Download / Upload, for that matter. I'll get back to Arcworld eventually, once I retire. There are still so many cool stories there rattling around in my head.
The cool thing is that I still have a blog that's easy to maintain, where I can upload my sporadic ramblings. All I have to do is create a new directory, drop a good hero.jpeg and post.md (with some special formatting) into the directory, run a python script and it generates the HTML. Gotta use my programming skills somehow, huh? (Although I'm usually building complex SQL queries and mashing dataframes for some good Streamlit and Plotly presentation layer rather than HTML.)
Enjoy. From now on you'll get my long-form thoughts here and sometimes replicated on Medium, for my articles over there certainly got more traffic than my old website ever did.
P.S. If anyone's curious as to the inspiration for Shudder's website URL, it was inspired by the Machines of Loving Grace song Killing in the Name Of. Hence, killingname. Thought it fit for horror. Besides, shudder.com wasn't available (although I do like their logo a lot!).
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Image by warpaintcobra licensed from Adobe Stock