Skye Template In Flight

Well, I’ve done it. I’ve been bouncing back and forth and around the horn and through again between and upside out with these templates. The last one I had up for awhile was called Rally. It was fine enough. It had the infinite scroll that I so desperately wanted for some unknown reason. But it was a plain Jane empty white page that surrounded my bloggys and my books. (I say books, as in plural, because I imagine there are more than one. There will be more someday. Rest assured.)

Should the blog be the thing that is front and center or am I just wasting my time trying to create a decent looking home for it when I should be focusing on a landing page for my current novel (whatever that may be)? I don’t know. The answer is more than just blowin in the wind, it’s blowin in the farkin cosmos. Two things, farkin and cosmos, that both relate to Marcus’ story.

As of this writing at 11:34 a.m. on August 21, 2019, I have implemented the Skye template. Skye! My daughter’s name! How apropos! To not use this template would be sacrilege to her, would it not? It is, as far as I can see, the prettiest of the infinite scroll templates, of which there are only a few. But again I come back to: Is the bloggy the thing? Or do I want my site to better showcase my current book? I can’t decide. Clearly as I keep bringing it up. For the bloggy to be the bread and butter of the site, the thing that draws a reader in, I would most definitely want to put up regular, unputdownable content. Instead of these rambling uncertainties that are boring messes that are few and far between.

Keep it active! Keep it safe!

What?

You know what else? I don’t even know if the random reader to visit this bloggy by way of SEO (does that even work) would know to click the three-line horizontal bars in the upper left hand corner in order to engage my menu? Or does everyone know how to do that now? Am I an old fogie living in a new fogie world?

My friend Ron Dean informed me recently that he at least knows about the menu dohickey. He didn’t call it a dohickey. Although he might have been thinking it as a dohickey. For he is the same age as me, give or take a few months. Ron’s had one guest bloggy up here before. lemme see if I can link to it here. Boom. Click the boom to go read it. Ooh! The link is orange! I heart that so much more than generic blue. I think I actually made that color change somewhere along the way. Website design is fun. Ha. Yay. Happy early Fall, everyone. But go click the link to read Ron Dean’s first guest bloggy. It’s a great piece on about world building. You won’t be sorry. And if you are, then I’m sorry. Were you not entertained? What kind of monster are you?

Yes, the key to any successful bloggy is to insult your reader by calling him or her a monster. Take note, prospective writer. The way to your readers’ hearts is with word daggers. But what the heck, it’s 2019. The word Monster has so many positive connotations it gives the negative ones a run for their money. What’s my research on this? Um, I call my second-born the loving nickname “Penn Monster” from time to time. he’s not a monster. Not in the old school, evil ogre sense. Look at Telly on Sesame Street or Billy Crystal on Monsters, Inc. Both of those cuddly furballs are happy-go-lucky dudes just trying to get a laugh or learn an alphabet, reverse-respectively. So, in conclusion, your monster-ism, as deemed by me, is a compliment. Boom-yah! Let’s return.

How To Use Squarespace’s Skye Template

Dude, I don’t know! I’m just getting into it now and there’s all kinds of funky things going on! Like, for instance, why does the image I choose for the front page also show up huge at the top of each bloggy? I think I need to choose a separate one for the text. Testing….

Oh, and by the way, in case you haven’t noticed, this entire entry is a test. It’s a lot wordier than “Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3, Bubble gum, pineapple, do re me,” but at least the nonsense gets my fingers moving. Since having that third kid a couple weeks ago, I’ve been out of practice. Yeah, we had a third kid. He’s awesome. More on that some other time, maybe. Maybe not. I did talk about him in my mid-August Newsletter. Did you miss that? Oh no! Well you can subscribe to the righteous thing here. What was I talking about?

Oh yeah, picture test. Here we go….

OK, needy sign. … So this image is lame and I would never use it for anything except this test. I certainly don’t want it to represent this bloggy entry on the main page. So how do we go about changing that? Let’s find out… I also don’t love that this caption is grayed out. I’ll have to look into this.

All right soooo…. I guess I have to publish this post to see what’s up. To be continued. Hey, look at your inside look at my bloggy! Fascinating ain’t it?

Post-Publish Analysis

I’m sure no one is still reading this. If you are, apologies. But at least now I know what happens when you publish on Skye and don’t have an image to represent your front page. Guess what? There is no image on the front page! Brilliant! But bad. So now we need to find a good-looking image that represents all words, ideas, and genius herein. And it needs to be pulled into the right corner of my Options screen which, I know, will thereby also bring it to the top of this very same entry? You lost? I’m not. Hold please…

Ahh! This bloggy is so nutty! What a perfect representation! Shut it.

That cracks that nutcase. When you upload an image to the front page, it also shows up huge on the individual bloggy. Within the Skye template, that is. So if you want to have some variety, you’re gonna have to go ahead and select a different image than the one inside your blog to represent the top image/front page image, as they are one and the same? Got it? Got it. (That’s called a thumbnail, by the by. Oh the things we can learn if we try!)

Now what do we do about that sidebar? Why is my name over there owning the entire right column portion of the page? Bananas! Fix it, now!!

Hold that thought. I just found a way to make the obnoxious nut pic at the top much smaller. Go to your site style menu option (look it up) and tweak the “banner image width” from normal to narrow. That’s much more pleasant than being bombarded right up front with a 100 story pic of your Aunt Josephine… if you’re writing about your Aunt Josephine. How’s she doing, by the way? I hope she’s well. Give her my best. OK, I got sidetracked, back to that righthand column nonsense.

Well that was easy! In Site Styles again, go to “Sidebar Style” and tweak to “Don’t show sidebar style.” You’re welcome dumdum. And by “dumdum,” I’m you’re welcoming myself. So thanks to that too, me, I guess.

I’m gonna go take that third kid I mentioned briefly for a walk. He’s almost two weeks old. Time for sun, son. I’ll have to come back to finish this post later.

Is it later yet? No. But soon.

SPACEBALLS reference!

Walk over. Good walk!

I am going to have to write another bloggy this week to make up for this masquerade. Painted faces on parade. I was posting two blogs a week for the first six months. All the way up until I realized that, in the longterm, that makes very little sense. If all I wanted to do was write bloggys all day then fine, but I gots ta get back to those books, boy-o! And yes, that’s books with an S because yea, sir Whitman, I contain multitudes.

Right?

In removing the worthless, right hand column, I now realize that the text is super center! It’s fine. It’s sleek. It’s kinda cool. But now I kinda wonder what I could have put in that right hand column. Could I have put an archive dropdown? A search bar? No wait, that is at the top next to my social icons. Lemme play with this again. LEMME!

I can’t tell if that long list of archival bloggys is annoying or miraculous. I’m gonna go with the former and cut ’er down.

It’s an image of the text within the text! Too trippy, man! Bail! Bail!

OK now it’s just a list of months. Boring! If anyone clicks any of them, I’d be shocked, humbled, and also would never know. So thanks if you do or did or will. Shrug.

I’m really just tweaking. Is that what it’s called when you’re twitching from a drug withdrawal? It is, right? “Yo, this blogger is straight up tweaking!” Twerking? No. Pretty sure it’s tweaking. I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s obvious. I’ve spent a good portion of today playing with my website and my blog when I could have been writing Book 2 of the Lost Identity series. There aren’t enough hours in the day folks.

Yes there are. If you use them wisely.

OK smarty pants, let’s see your bloggy! That’s what I thought.

Oh, you put a link in the comments? I’ll check it out. … Very impressive! I fold.