So what’s the deal with the new site?

Well, COLDANDALONE.COM has gone through many changes over the years as it has developed from a god-awful clutch of pages on free Tripod space to a more mature database-backed, custom-built site but the demands of my work and home life has meant that I’ve not had the time and energy to develop it as fully as I would like to which has meant, inevitably, the site stagnating. There’s no denying that my output (and therefore news about my output) has slowed dramatically over the last few years, in part due to the arrival of my daughter but also because I’m focusing on longer works such as Pretty Little Things To Fill Up The Void, Molly, Katja From The Punk Band, Guerra and more however that doesn’t mean that i can’t make this site more interesting for people like you to come to and spend time on.

For those of you who don’t already know, my day job is web design and since we are a tiny (though busy) studio, this means that i have to keep up to date on the latest techniques and technologies and one thing which is becoming more and more in demand is the ability for people to easily update their own websites without any web design knowledge. Hence over the last few months I’ve been learning the ropes of version 1.5 of the Joomla! open source content management system and the need for a new version of COLDANDALONE.COM coincided with the need to learn how to best exploit this great system. It was therefore a great opportunity for me to redevelop my own site, harnessing the power of Joomla! and its community, and at the same time learn some new skills for my day job.

The result is what you see before you now and I have to be honest that this is just the first, rather simplistic, attempt at getting it all online. I’m not entirely happy with the design and know I could load a lot more content onto the site, however after almost 2 months of creaking development (squeezed in between other large sites and projects), but fortunately Joomla! is flexible enough that I can develop things on the fly without too much effort and that is certainly what I intend to do.

So what’s changed? Well I’ve refreshed a lot of the content that had become outdated and I’ve honed down certain areas as well. I’ve also dropped the old Wordpress blog in favour or the more Joomla-friendly myBlog component so that’s effectively starting from scratch. (I did consider importing the old WP posts but didn’t think it was worth it).

And what’s coming? Hopefully more story excerpts, more free downloads, a Fetishcore-dedicated page or area of the site, polls and other neat little functions that should make the site more interesting and more. I want the site to be more worthwhile for fans of my work to come to and lets face it all authors love to get feedback on their work – so if you have any thoughts or comments on the site or my work, feel free to contact me or leave a comment on the site.

I hope I can continue to make COLDANDALONE.COM one of the better author sites out there and am open to any suggestions or comments that you all might have.

Thanks for your support.