January 8, 2024
Anger as Motivation: Revamping the 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.
4 Comments
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What you’ve done, learning or not (I might be able to learn if I gave it ANY priority – I used to program CRAYs), is a choice of how to spend your time, and I don’t care enough about the WordPress blogs I maintain (ie, supply content for) to do anything more than pay so I don’t have ads – because their ads are icky and horrid.
At what I charge for ONE HOUR of my time (currently $1,500.00), it’s much easier to upgrade the blog, which comes with the freedom from ads, than to spend hours of my time on the process.
Artistic control is going to the fiction, because everything in my life the last two years conspired to soak up my tiny amount of usable time every day in something other (tax problem which should NOT have been mine) than finishing my mainstream – and hopefully legacy – trilogy.
But I admire those who do their own, and do it efficiently, so kudos to you, and I wish I could. It vexes me.
The older I get, the more things get in the way of what I want to do, and the more I have draconian choices.
I literally cannot afford anger – because that puts adrenaline into my bloodstream, and my liver takes DAYS to get rid of it. I’m not going to waste a crash on a popup.
You younger people with reasonable health don’t have to prioritize certain choices – you can afford anger, you can afford time, you can afford effort. Me being envious of those abilities does not grant them to me. I can’t buy them. (And if you’re thinking I can buy someone to do them for me, the balance of my energy would be far into negative numbers from just trying to find and contract and explain to a ‘someone’.)
So I’ll just appreciate your revamped site – and wish you’d included (did you?) a way to make it black text on white. But that’s not worth it to YOU, unless several of us have requested it, so don’t worry about it.
I do read for the content.
As a first thing, about the black text on white…
I’ll be totally honest with you: Remembering our previous conversation, I did experiment with a feature and it’s now programmatically possible, but I really didn’t like the result aesthetically. I simply couldn’t recognize the screen output as Home For Fiction. So – self-centered as it may sound – I can’t bring myself to do it.
The easiest solution for you and anyone else who would like a dark/light switch (for Home for Fiction and all sites) is to simply add the Dark Reader extension, available for all modern browsers. Despite its name, it can also be used to turn a dark theme into a light one. I’ve used it, it’s easy to set up and customize.
As to the crux of the matter, you’re making a good point about being able to afford anger. It’s a continuous balance between a sense of justice/morality (or simply personal wishes) and the associated cost.
In plain terms, there comes a point in our lives where we simply can’t afford to be upset about everything that upsets us – if that makes sense.
This is an election year in the US, and it’s going to be a doozy for the news media – and I’m not going to pay attention. Another thing I can’t affect, and I can’t afford the adrenaline.
I have books to write (one being wrestled into being as I type which is giving me unexpected hiccups), and no bandwidth for that PLUS reading about the lies considered worth publication because some people want to read them.
And OTOH, I want to use the nice warm therapy pool here – so have to save a tiny bit of energy.
My most exposure to politics is stuff posted on FB (in very few and carefully chosen support groups), which I pass on if it seems appropriate, and otherwise ignore. But we will ALL be affected by the results, and it is a scary prospect.
Wonder how we’d do under a system of compulsory voting like Australia’s – followed by a celebratory sausage.
In my opinion, compulsory voting doesn’t work; frankly, I consider it an asinine idea, a paradox even.
I mean, if someone isn’t motivated, forcing them to get into the booth and vote won’t change anything – they will vote for Donald Duck or King George or whatever. There was a satirist in Greece famous for putting slices of salami into the envelope.
Parenthetically, there is compulsory voting in Greece, and I’ve never heard of anyone being penalized for not showing up.
People who are motivated enough to vote, will vote. People who aren’t motivated usually aren’t for systemic reasons: They don’t feel elections will change anything (and frankly, who could blame them), or they feel the whole system is rigged (ditto). Such people, when forced into the booth, will vote for Donald Duck or just cast a blank ballot.
Of course, admittedly, the US system is peculiar (absurd, even, by European standards) in that it’s a winner-takes-it-all; 50% of the votes +1 means as many as half of the voters in an entire state are left without representation. This is obscene for a system that is supposedly democratic.
I now also remembered something hilarious. I’ve read about how elections were held in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq: The process involved two ballot boxes, one with “YES” and another with “NO”. The question was, Would you like Saddam to continue as president. If you didn’t want him to, you had to cast your vote into the “NO” box, next to the armed guards and all. For some unfathomable reason. Hussein got 99.9% of the votes 😀