joereddington
commented
4 years ago 17/01/20 13:39 to 14:05, build new publisher website +EQT
Time to make a publisher website for WWW
- Poentially we can use this api https://www.googleapis.com/books/v1/volumes?q=isbn:1721257225, but it's not that reliable
- I wrote a stack exchange question. [https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/138043/why-are-these-books-treated-differently-by-google-books](I wrote a stack exchange question) to see if we could flush data from Amazon to Google Books, but lets see
- Explored converting the Driver page, and in the end decided it was better to go from allbooksever and eventually fold in the driver page.
23/01/20 11:29 to 15:24, New WWW website,
- Took 15 minutes to get running, silly jekyll
- Took a lot of time sorting out images.
- Images got 'good enought by 2pm'
- Want to publish though so let's break the back of it properly.
- It's online on github pages, which involves a certain amount of github trickery with subtrees
- We can't simply elminiate the missing images - we have to do that at the allbooksever level.
The key command is: git subtree push --prefix _site origin gh-pages
23/01/20 15:53 to 16:21, Working on website +EQt
- Okay, next big thing, is to go properly thought all books ever and make sure that it's got everything in it in terms of amazon links and blurbs for, say, 40 books.
- Then the big thing is to write all the copy for the first page of the website and send it to Franceca for notes
- Write a script to make allbooksever downloda work
- Put in the banner image
- Add the contact us page.
- Then upload
24/01/20 11:18 to 14:14, Working on new WWW site at Gym for +EQT
- Worked out the right way of writing it.
- Sorted out a bunch of links
- Finally got the logo working by putting it on top of everything
- Wrote a script that automatically updates based on allbooksever
- pushed to gh-pages. Will tidy this up while I wait.
- Sent details to reviewers
24/01/20 13:48
- Big things left to do - get the rest of the missing images sorted. Any then add more books to allbooksever
- Fix the links in the authors section, including putting the FAQ in.
- Add the news link
Background
Over the last few days I've rebuilt www.whitewaterwriters.com from a site advertising the project to strangers into one that is focused on our writers.
It's now a publisher's website because that's what the project is about: we help young writers publish their own novel and we should act like it.
It was a bit of a mental struggle to make the change. Largely because I've never known how to market White Water Writers.
Actually, I've never known if we can market White Water Writers. It's a complex project that produces incredible results and nobody really believes in it until they see it working. That's made worse by the half dosen companies that claim to do what we do, but don't. The result is that most of our work is repeat work, and the vast marjority of our new work is by referral (a suprising amount of our new work is 'teacher from previous school moves to new school and calls us').
That means our website is mostly likely to be used by people we already work with (teachers, writers, parents of writers), or people who have already heard of us and want to check us out. It's not a place for us to sell directly to faceless individuals.
That's actually quite freeing - that means that the website doesn't have to worry about sales funnels or collecting emails, we can make it exactly how we like.
I decided to keep it simple. We publish books, so we should have a book publisher's website.
This has a bunch of advantages:
From the technical side, this version will be easier to maintain and cheaper to host than the previous one (It's Github Pages rather than WordPress). I learned a lot putting it together and while I was doing it I migrated our email services away from a expensive host that I've grown to dislike (Dreamhost) to a free host that I trust (Google Suite). I suspect that all future sites will be on Github Pages. You can read about all the technical challenges at the project issue.
Todo