Great new everyone! I’ve got my new blog site up and running. It’s got a similar look to this blog on WordPress, but several nice features that put it in a league above the current blog. For starters, you can see all of my posts, regardless of how long ago they were posted. You can search through my posts for specific tags and topics too, for example, if you wanted to read all my reviews just search for ‘review’ and all the book, movie, and TV reviews I’ve done over the last couple years will show up. The new blog also has a publications page where you can find links to all my published works (that will hopefully grow over time), a CV page where you can check out my writing resume, and a button that’ll let you send me an email on the bottom of the about page. There’s even a little button that’ll let you switch from a dark theme to a light theme in the upper right corner! All these quality of life features make me really happy, since none of them exist in the current blog.

There are a few missing pieces though, like how there is currently no way to comment on my posts. This is a big issue that I’m still working toward fixing. The issue with comments is that they actually open up all sorts of security concerns that might let a bad actor hack into my website. There’s no sensitive data on there, but still. It’d be awkward to wake up and find out someone has posted a bunch of penises or something on my personal blog. Similarly, you can’t sign up for a newsletter yet, but I’m working on that too. The template I used has integrated support for something called loops, which I haven’t messed with yet. Apparently it’ll let me send out email notifications with ease. That’s what I’m going to look into next.

There are some other little things too, like the second publication won’t display the bibliography attached even though the first one will (maddening, I swear I’ve been trying to figure this one out since I started), and also the suggested reading footer always displays random articles that have nothing to do with my page. Finally several posts are missing because they have links to images that no longer work. Those are smaller issues that I’ll fix over time. Right now I’m just glad to have the blog in a functional state.

Over the next couple of months I’ll continue to make adjustments to the blog, and eventually I’ll stop using this WordPress site altogether. For now, I’ll be posting on both sites. This post won’t be included because linking the site to itself would be weird. Friday’s post also won’t be there cause it doesn’t exist. I was exhausted after being sick all week and couldn’t budge from my place on the bed. Sorry!

You can check out the new blog right here! Let me know what you think.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley