In a little more than month from now The Thin Red Line will be Two Years Old and in preparation for that milestone I am going to take a hiatus from publishing libdrone.info from April 29 to May 26th. When my hiatus begins I will have written and published 351 posts, an average of 3.36 or so posts per week. (Under promise, over deliver. That's why I changed my announced post frequency from "almost daily" to thrice weekly. The daily posting target was frankly too much work. And I spend a great deal of time selecting and reading the books that I review (it actually got me in trouble, at least to the degree of a Warning for reading on duty last week; oops) and I definitely want some time to reflect, review, revise and re-launch the site into my third year. This is my tentative plan for the hiatus and relaunch:
TRL on hiatus 4/29--5/26 4/29--migration post goes up. post is closed to comments.
1) JD creates mirror
On mirror site:
2) change theme to http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/whiteplus
substitue existing header graphic for theme included graphic in new theme. re-size rather than crop the header image. make sure the barcode scanner's line shows
3) Consolidate all of the About pages under one About Page that has links to About Me And About This Blog, About The Links, About The Bookstore, About Books and Libraries, About My Audience, About Libdrone.com,
Add widgets and privacy policy page-- this page may go under About or under something else but definitely buried. another buried page??
4) Change dotCom page title to Blogroll. continue to promote the libdrone.com URL but get rid of the too cutesy dotCOM page name
5) Review and Revise Suggestions and Guest Reviews page
6) Add bookstore page using powell's partner bookshelves
7) Experiment and work with widgets and widget placements to get a very well designed and professional looking layout
8) check and test EVERYTHING three times
9) Write and schedule May 26th post about Michael Connelly's The Scarecrow
May 24th-- JD points the URL to the new site a full day plus before the Resuming post goes live.
The plan probably isn't complete in that I also need to plan policies and procedures to deal with advertisers. My post announcing the hiatus that will be up (but Not commentable on) the entire time I am offline is written and assumes an openly celebratory tone and announces a very special book selection for the come back. This is my first experience doing a written plan for a blot or website transition. Have you given your site a major makeover? If you did, please leave a comment and let me know any tips or suggestions you have.
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