Let's (not) Play

My friend MahoganyPoet has been doing Let's Play videos on Youtube. Let's Play videos are a whole booming genre where you can watch someone else play video games. Which - okay. So video games are basically the only form of storytelling that one can actually be bad at: a Let's Play lets you take a passive role. That's why I like them! I didn't grow up with a video game console, and skills such that I don't die horribly and/or kill all my teammates aren't ones I've developed (or, really, tried to develop) as an adult. Let's Play videos can also let other players see how to get past tricky bits or see alternate endings to the one they got, and they let you listen to or watch entertaining people. MP's official job title is 'youtube personality.'*

Her first move is to close Skype to minimize noisy interruptions and to make sure the computer's running cool: the games + Avus4U recording software take a lot of RAM and if the computer heats up too much the game might freeze and crash, losing her place in the game.

Conveniently, this also lets her feed me cheese and fancy crackers.

MP has what she jokingly refers to as the most professional studio setup in the world - a couple monitors, a game controller hooked up to the computer, a freestanding microphone with directional settings and one of those spitguard screen things, and headphones so the game music doesn't get caught on mic. Her recording software already catches the noise from the game, so a microphone pickup would be out of sync, and probably not as clear.

She plays the game, Child of Light, fullscreen on one of her monitors, while the other one shows what's being picked up by the recording software.

I'm only able to see about a quarter of the screen from behind her, and moving might get picked up by the mic and would also take me away from the crackers and cheese, so I mostly know what's going on by what she says, and will pick up the action when I'm watching the video later. She accidentally summoned an ogre, which she hadn't intended to during this episode, which prompted her to pause, sign off on the video, and then start a new video so she could finish with the ogre and save the fish people.

It's not quite the same as watching someone play video games directly and snarking at them, which made it difficult to refrain from snarking when sitting directly behind MP and listening to her commentary, but the videos are cool and progress pretty linearly through the story.

Mahogany Poet can be found on Twitter and, of course, on Youtube.

*Seriously, it's her job: turn off Adblock for Youtube.

Piracy and books

I spend a lot of time talking to writers.

I spend a lot of time specifically talking to indie writers who make all their own publishing decisions.

It's pretty great!

But one frustrating part of it are some of the myths that get perpetuated, like that free stuff hurts sales. This can take the form of distrust of and unhappiness with Creative Commons licensing, but on the whole tends to take the form of aggressive anti-piracy stances.

And, hey, I'm not super enthusiastic about piracy, because intellectual property is important and it's important to respect it and the people who create the things one likes. But the thing about piracy is that it's not actually lost sales.

You heard me right.

The people who are pirating your books either never would have bought them or are going to like it and either buy a copy or consider buying future works of yours.

Okay, let me talk about examples from my own life. Four books I have pirated are the 50 Shades trilogy by E L James and Sunshine by Robin McKinley.

50 Shades I wrote about here: to say I was unimpressed is a dramatic understatement. I also knew, going in, that it was going to be probably-enraging Twilight fanfiction, and made a deliberate decision to not support the author. That was never going to be a sale. I was never going to purchase anything written by her. It does not affect her sales numbers in the least.

Sunshine* was the opposite story: I love it, and have purchased two paperback copies of the novel, both of which have gone missing. It's also not available as an ebook through legitimate channels. So nor was that a lost sale: I'd already purchased it, and was unlikely to purchase it a third time in the same form.

Piracy can actually increase sales, but hey, if you don't want in on that, the best way to discourage piracy of your particular works is to make legal downloads ubiquitous. Make DRM-free purchase of your works for multiple platforms easy, and I can guarantee at least some people will find hitting the 'buy' button more appealing than piracy.

*Ms. McKinley, if you happen to see this and be unhappy with someone pirating your work, I'd be more than happy to Paypal you your royalties.

Differences between Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org

Wordpress.com hosts blogs: wordpress.org is where you get the wordpress software to upload onto your own server (or that of a friend, family member, or someone you pay to host your stuff). It's important to differentiate, because they're both fantastic, and they're easily confused, because the interface is similar. They have their own breakdown of differences, but this aims to be more descriptive.

Wordpress.com is nice because you don't have to mess around with a server or, necessarily, with getting your own domain.

Wordpress software is nice because you can do anything you want. Cue maniacal cackling off into the distance.

But more concrete comparisons:

Access:
The first thing you did was take out that little Meta toolbar on the side, right? It looks unprofessional and sloppy, though some people dislike it more than others (I hate it).

.com: go to your site/wp-admin or wordpress.com or someone's site where they left up the Meta toolbar. It doesn't matter which, since you can navigate the whole back end of Wordpress after the one login.
Software: go to your site/wp/wp-admin. That's pretty much the only option.

Appearance:
Themes govern most of how your blog appears. Themes are a collection of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that tell things to align left or align right or show up purple.

.com: There are a variety of free themes, and even more paid ones, and you can almost definitely find one you love. Typically from there you can also select background color or image and header image. If you buy an upgrade, you can also edit the CSS. You don't get access to the CSS files themselves, though, so you are overwriting blind. If you are pretty confident, that's fine, whatever. If you are mostly used to editing and not building and have never bothered to look at the source code for various pages, when Wordpress updates and breaks your theme you will spend several hours drinking and frantically trying to correct the website, while text boxes float around seemingly arbitrarily and look completely different on the three screens you eventually end up looking through because you are trying to fix the header and you've changed the alignment and indent and mandatory margin but you don't actually have access to the files and it doesn't occur to you to override the vertical alignment, and you then switch to a different theme that is not actually broken but does truly horrifying things to your submenus. When you eventually wake up, vodka having beaten panic at about three-thirty in the morning, Wordpress will have fixed it and you will spend the rest of the day in nihilistic despair.
Software: There are myriad themes and you can not only customize the background and header but also look at the CSS and pinpoint that this line of code here governs what color links default to and change just that to make everything violently orange. You will accidentally leave an extra space or digit or apostrophe somewhere and crash the server. Things will need to be reinstalled. You can take comfort in your own agency in the failure.

Seriously, though, themes and editing without messing with the CSS can get you a pretty customized website, and Wordpress is great about fixing their mistakes and errors that crash the server can be corrected.

Widgets:
If you're building a Wordpress site, you freaking love widgets. Widgets are awesome. The Text widget (which lets you insert arbitrary text and HTML) is how you get your Twitter feed or follow button up, and your tumblr follow button, and a lot of the other buttons social networking sites let you generate. But widgets let you do a heck of a lot more than that: they're your Facebook like box and your RSS feed and your contact info and your flickr link and your category cloud. Widgets are how you implement neat features without extensive background in coding.

.com: limited number, but they cover a lot, and the text widget with HTML adds additional functionality.
Software: widgets for the software are actually a feature of the plugins you can get. Plugins for the software are great, because you can get ones that tweet automatically every time you get a new post, or generate a new post every time you tweet, or do all manner of strange and unlikely things. The trick is that they are reviewed but not actively policed, so you need to make sure it actually does what it says it does, and isn't broken.

Akismet:
Akismet is a spam filter, and is how you filter all the comments that are lists of links to scams or are soliciting people to buy knock-off Gucci handbags on your bike site. You want a spam filter. Akismet's pretty good.
.com: it's already there.
Software: you need to install the plugin. It is a terrible amount of work. You have to click, like, three things.

Scalability:
What do you do when you suddenly get lots of traffic on your website?
.com: It absorbs the traffic, and doesn't cost you extra money.
Software: Your server might crash, or you might need more servers. This can cost more, and may or may not be able to respond quickly to a sudden surge.

Which you choose will depend on your comfort with code, your ability to acquire and comfort with self-hosting, and how much you like customizability. They're both excellent platforms, versatile enough for almost everyone.

Surveillance

Everyone's heard about the NSA tapping phones, right? That's not news.

Basically, they're following up on permissions they got in the Patriot Act, when we were all still going 'please take my liberty and give me security and screw Ben Franklin.'

This is a great post that talks about what such measures can lead to.

Which leads to my perennial post about anonymity. I have not posted about it nearly as much as I thought I had, given that I am persistently cranky about it. Anonymity is very hard to do, and true anonymity is something that has to be worked on persistently and in the face of people who would really prefer that you didn't. Things like The Onion Router and other things discussed in Cory Doctorow's Little Brother are good starts, and Cryptocat is a valuable tool, and encryption keys are completely fantastic.

But all of these things take effort, and are very different from posting 'down with the government' or whatever on your Facebook page. If you're going to go through the effort of anonymity, if you care about a cause enough to get active in protesting, posting on your Facebook or whatever about it is actually potentially dangerous to you and everyone who liked it out of abiding bitterness over parking tickets.

So if you care about something deeply? Talking casually about it on the internet is probably one of the last things you want to do. In light of the surveillance abilities of even reasonably democratic governments, making sure everything you say online would meet with the approval of a hyper-judemental theoretical grandmother is a safe bet.

Also, for writers, anonymity is almost always the enemy of publicity.

Wix and an SEO rant

I sometimes help people with websites: I've been doing so for the past few years. Mostly simple stuff, setting up pages for authors and editors and friends.

I usually use Wordpress, because it's simple, straightforward, and, while you can get more mileage from it if you know how to override the CSS and edit the HTML manually, you can get a perfectly functional, useful website without any of that knowledge. You can even get a decent website out of Wordpress if you don't feel comfortable poking around with all the settings. Having that low barrier of entry for use is really great, especially for people who want a website but not to live on the internet as they swear at code at 3 in the morning.

I've also worked in Joomla!, which was fine, but required more poking around before I could reliably make it do what I wanted it to. I don't usually recommend it for people, since it did require that experimentation.

The first site I set up for my mom was with Yola, which has convenient drag-and-drop boxes for doing stuff. The second, when she wanted to blog more, was Wordpress, because of the simpler comments features.

This, obviously, is Blogger, and I like it for the stripped down simplicity. I don't need it to do anything fancy or have particular page features, because it's a blog and it blogs and that is all I require of it. I like the clean back end with clear labeling and the option to compose both pages and posts either in rich text or HTML. If someone doesn't want to do fancy things with the appearance of their site and prioritizes the blogging over the static pages, Blogger is a great option.

Today I got to mess around in Wix, which I hadn't before. I don't like that it automatically adds big banners advertising themselves to the bottom of every site. I don't like that on so much of the back end, clicking a link opens a new tab or window. I don't like that the font modification options aren't universal: you have to change them page by page. I don't like that everything is popups. The ability to create an online store is pretty neat. The fact that all elements need to be moved around by hand instead of, oh, going into a neat sidebar, is fucking maddening. It also treats subpages as forms, making links to particular subpages look sloppy. Also, when you view page source (to see wtf is up with the fonts), it treats every subpage as part of the same page, so you are looking at every single element. I'm used to looking at the source for Wordpress, which is full of stuff that governs margins or whatever: endless lines of repetitive whatever, but that doesn't look anywhere near as sloppy. Wix also gives the options to add SEO keywords to pages, which, I guess, could make sense with image-heavy galleries, but is also reflective of a five-years-out-of-date approach to SEO.

Here's the secret to SEO: write about the shit you want to write about. People who are interested in that shit will find your website. If you are an artist who takes commissions, having a blog post that talks about different art styles will bring in people who search for those art styles. They will find you and give you money.  Would keyword stuffing with sex and kittens and whatever be of benefit to you?

It might get you more hits, but is that of benefit to you? You want people to buy art from you. Unless you specialize in like cat pinups or something, you are not attracting people who are interested in what you're doing, you're just getting people who will click things.

Blogger's statistics section shows search keywords that have lead to my blog. Let's look at some of the top ones of all time:

authorsrefuge.blogspot.com
kishotenketsu
laura bradford interview
eileen young
laura bradford author
adam schreckenberger
amazing spreadsheets
is the kobo vox backlit

So, the first one is people forgetting that this is a .ca blog, and the third, fifth, and sixth are because of interviews I did with people more popular than me. Those all make sense as people who would appreciate the content here.

I've only talked about kishotenketsu once, but people continue to be interested in it, which is great. It's something I was really interested in, so people also interested in it might be interested in other things I talk about here.

Fourth is my name. Excellent. SEO is doing its job.

Amazing spreadsheets is probably because of my 'spreadsheets are amazing' tag.

And the question 'is the kobo vox backlit' probably leads directly to my review of the Kobo Vox, which includes the information that it's backlit and other details about it.

Search engines are designed to take people to what they're looking for. So use common terminology (if you're talking about books, don't call them bound stories or something like that) and correct spelling and provide regular new content, and that is your SEO.

If you're not getting as many hits as you'd like, make sure your website is attached to your profile on every site you're on and post more.

Back to Wix: you can't even configure a Facebook like box to go to a page you've already created. It does some auto-suggestion bullshit.

In conclusion: Wix sucks and I hate it. Only real benefit is the webstore, but that's what eBay and Etsy are for. 2/10, would set fire to again.

Writing Software

Another frequent topic of debate is the technology used to write. Most frequently I see pen and paper vs computer, but not nearly enough do I see comparisons of the writing software available.

Microsoft Word and Notepad are the most obvious tools, since they come bundled with a Windows package on almost any PC you can buy commercially. But if you've had to wipe your hard drive and have lost your discs or are more interested in freeware in general, there's OpenOffice. It has a lot of the same features as Word, except it can save in more formats. The default format isn't Word, and Track Changes is hard to translate to another machine that doesn't run OpenOffice, but it's free, not particularly buggy, and has lots of online support. Probably not best for absolute computer beginners, but if you can google "how do I ___ in OpenOffice" and aren't particularly set in your ways with Word, it's a nice way to go. And if you feel bad about using freeware, you can just donate: a substantial donation at OpenOffice.org can still be cheaper than Word.

But what if you're frequently switching between machines, and can't keep track of a flash drive to save your life? What if you're collaborating on a project with six people and can't keep track of the latest version? What if, like me, you don't want your hard work tied to your hardware? Then there's Google Docs. Available anywhere there's internet, they have a few fewer formatting capabilities than some software, but are free and perfect for collaboration. There's a bit of a learning curve for using it, but it's been well worth it for me.

Then there are the writing-specific softwares, like Dramatica and StoryWeaver. The only one of these that I've tried is yWriter5 (which everyone will be shocked to find is freeware). I found it interesting, the way it encourages planning and structure and pre-writing, but didn't find that it gave me any appreciable advantage that couldn't be filled by a spreadsheet. For people with large, sprawling worlds and huge casts of characters, it might provide more of an advantage.

Like every other aspect of writing, it's a matter of finding those tools that work for you.