Home For Fiction – Blog

You might recall that some time ago I completely revamped the main site of Home for Fiction. In the same post I mentioned how one day, if I’d only find the motivation and energy, I’d completely redo the blog, too. Turns out, anger is great motivation. You’re reading a brand new Home for Fiction blog.

Where the anger (and motivation) came from? Before I tell you, know this: The whole process took about a week. It would’ve likely taken even less if it hadn’t happened during the holidays. That’s right; it took me about a week to go from “fuck this shit!” to coding my blog from scratch. Here’s how – and why anger, with certain constraints, can be useful.

The Nasty Surprise of Losing Control of Your Content

As you have perhaps noticed elsewhere on the blog – especially if you’re a regular visitor – I absolutely loathe ads, pop-ups, subscribe-to-our-newsletters, and overall anything that gets in the way, aesthetically and content-wise.

Indeed as you can see, for instance, in my post on ads and corporate masters, I explicitly mention how the visitors will never see pop-ups on Home for Fiction.

Imagine my surprise when, one morning, I woke up and saw a friggin’ “Subscribe to Home for Fiction” interstitial blocking the entire view of my mobile page.

I certainly didn’t put it there.

I quickly realized it was put there by the ubiquitous (and “official”, WordPress-made) Jetpack plugin. They never asked for my permission, they never informed me about the new bug feature. It just came with some update.

The first step was to find the setting where I could disable it (which wasn’t as straightforward as you’d think). Immediately after, I realized I had mentally crossed the Rubicon.

Anger Offers Motivation if You Can Recognize the Dynamics

My blood was boiling, I was absolutely livid. I was ready to start jumping on the keyboard like a gorilla. But of course, anger as motivation is only good if you can recognize the underlying dynamics.

You see, anger is what I’d refer to as a secondary, symptomatic expression. It virtually always covers something else. Sometimes we’re angry because we’re sad, sometimes we’re angry because we’re scared.

In my case, I was angry because my artistic control was compromised.

This also helped me realize what I needed to do to get it back, which was of course to completely remove everything from the Home for Fiction blog that I didn’t put there. Well, OK, minus the core WordPress files. But everything else had to go: all the plugins and the theme I’d been using since day one, seven years ago.

I’ll spare you too many technical details, but what I did was to export the blog files and database to my computer, effectively recreating the blog on my local server using Xampp. Then I removed all plugins – I only kept Yoast – and started coding a new theme, at the same time recreating manually, line by line, all the styles and functionality of the now absent plugins.

Anger Is Great for Motivation, if You Know How

As I mentioned in the post about revamping the main site, all this is of course possible because I know some coding (and I know how to find out about what I don’t know – learning how to learn is important).

When you know how to do something yourself, nothing else comes close to giving you what you want.

How the Blog Differs

Put simply, the blog – like the main site – is now 100% as I want it. I now understand how it works to the last line, and I can tweak it to the last detail. As a result, because it’s only meant for my own needs, it’s super fast, super effective, and lacks all the useless – to me – functionality.

Here’s what PageSpeed Insights has to say about the change:

If you’re a web developer, you don’t need me to tell you how difficult it is to get such ratings on WordPress running on a shared Bluehost server. If you’re not a developer, what these numbers say is that the blog is lightning-fast, perfectly accessible, follows best developing practices, and has great discoverability.

To be clear, I don’t care about numbers; but I do care about the experience. I want Home for Fiction to be functionally and aesthetically pleasing.

From the reader’s perspective, not much has changed. The most obvious difference is that there is no side bar anymore. I kept the random page symbol (the dice) and the search bar, though they are now at the bottom of the page.

Now the only focus is on the content, as it should be.

There are also some other minor modifications, such as that embedded YouTube videos now lie behind a facade – a banner displaying the thumbnail of the video, a “play” sign, and a short text indicating that you need to click the facade to display the actual YouTube video. The same also applies to Bandcamp players. It’s faster and smoother this way. It also gives you full control in terms of third-party content, as it stops YouTube and Bandcamp from loading their content automatically on page load.

Anger As Motivation: Powerful, but Needs Caution

In the end, anger as motivation is powerful, but I need to stress it: It only works if you recognize what it’s hiding. Someone focusing on the great evil of being misled, wronged, or whatever, and wasting their energy being angry, won’t achieve anything. Simply put, human history is full of stories about people who became angry and died on the hill of their ideological obstinacy.

Another important element is what kind of focus and priorities are involved. To put it simply, revamping the Home for Fiction blog would’ve been far more complicated if I cared about monetization, analytics, newsletters, and such. Removing Jetpack also removes the ability to send newsletters, as well as stats/analytics (which I had disabled even before this incident).

Overall, it all boils down to what kind of interactions do we want?

I want an internet that offers intelligent, useful content. No pop-ups, no subscribe-to-my-newsletter-pretty-pleases, no ads, no banners. The less the things that get in the way of content, the better.