My website got some TLC today. I've been shunning it for months because Wordpress.com crapped all over its page & post editors, loading them down with sludge-slow fancified features that glitch unpredictably and ZOMG SO SLOW I would lose my train of thought before the damned "write post" page loads. So I stopped using it at all, not even copying public posts from my Patreon.

(Patreon. Where I post writing updates & excerpts from work in progress, detail my wilder kitchen adventures & share pictures of my yard & cat. Get you some of that action for only $1 a month.)

And now, back to the regular post.

Ignoring my own author site wasn't a tenable longterm solution, but it got me through the winter blahs. Now that I'm disentangled from Twitter & comfortable ignoring Facebook except for the legacy author page I maintain because I should have *presence,* I decided to see what kind of compromises I could make.

Yesterday I added a plug-in to my site & figured out how to use it to automatically cross-post blog items written here to my wandering.shop account (aka Mastodon)

Today I did many more "update & tidy" tasks on the blog & other pages:

• Axed a bunch of old tags I prolly never should've created in the first place.
• Consolidated post categories. (I only have categories because I hate the concept of "uncategorized" AS a category, but they got out of hand.)
• Updated all the instances of my old book covers with the new covers. (I think. Maybe.)
• Dug around the post editor until I found where the word & character counts for posts are hiding now.
• Messed around with other plugins to figured out what they did & whether I wanted to keep them. (mostly yes)
• Discovered at least two places where the new website design has injected weird errors into my site menus and made a to-do list for fixing them.
• added mastodon to my social icons list AND to my share-this-post options. (at the top! At the bottom! All around the world)
• Found out that the metadata for the site & blog are customizable!

All those little things took a lot of time, but I feel much better now that they're done. Spring cleaning. It's a thing. I don't do it to my physical house, but my virtual one shiny now.