Bookstore updated for the holiday season

I've completed an update of the From Shadowed Shelves online bookstore, just in time for the holiday season. I caught a few errors and typos left over from the major re-design I did at the beginning of September, and I hope there are none left now. If anyone notices a problem with the bookstore, do send me a note about it at realvamp[at]net1plus.com. There are 34 new titles added, including both of Charlie Huston's novels, Already Dead and No Dominion, and Practical Vampyrism for Modern Vampyres by Lady CG. Enjoy browsing!

I should have continued making posts here, but I've been more in an information-collecting stage--and the holidays have intervened.

I'm doing a lot of research and information-gathering for the articles which will be the next major additions to the website content. These have been planned for a very long time and I'm finally getting to them.

I've been reading other websites and message boards, as well, catching up on discussion topics and opinions and reviews after my long period of time being less connected to the OVC and its doings. There hasn't been a dramatic change in the basic outlook of self-identified vampires since the 2000 psi-vamp/sanguin schism. But there are two very noticeable changes since then: the explosion of the "Otherkin" communities, which in 2000 was barely getting started, and the much greater overlap with the VC and Pagan/Wiccan/Witchcraft/Magickal topics, which in 2000 was far less evident. Both of these may be related directly to the ascendency of the psi-vamp identification in the VC as a whole. Whatever is behind it, it's now more common for messageboards to include forums for these categories than not.

I posed a question on the Smoke & Mirrors messageboard, asking anyone who had let a vampire-themed website lapse in the past, why they didn't keep up their website. No one replied, suggesting that people who let websites lapse also stop participating in the community (not that the whole world is on Smoke & Mirrors, but Sanguinarius is moving her forums to a new server and they're currently on hold). I remain curious about all the vanished websites, though. Where did they go, and why? Even among the sites still running, a significant minority of them have obviously not been updated or changed for years.

Anyone who hasn't filled out the Atlanta Vampire Association's VEWRS and AVEWRS surveys, should do that: they need to be done by December 31st.

I lied...

...now I've got the flippin' template straightened out.

I've revised the site banner, so if anyone reading this has a copy of it on their site for a banner list or exchange, you'll need to download the new version. I'll try to contact site owners individually, but I'm not sure where all copies of the banner are.

I'm having an interesting "trip down Memory Lane" as I review materials and assemble notes for some of the content that will be going up in the near future. Where, oh where is the "Vampire Community" hiding out these days? I've applied to a couple of webrings, pending approval from their mods. I've added a couple of sites to the links pages.

If anyone would like to suggest a site of their own that I've missed, contact me at realvamp[at]net1plus.com.

I finally got the template straightened out--it's probably working better than I deserve, given the seat-of-the-pants hatchet job I did slapping it together. I do appreciate the flexibility that Blogger.com gives users in customizing their blogs. Other blog servers make you pay for anything approaching it.

I've made some more updates to the links pages. I've added this site to the Occult 100 Topsites list, so go to the Search & Topsites page and vote for it, if you're so inclined. I've added the Site Mission Statement and a few odds and ends. Much more content to come!

And we have a launch!

Version 4.0 of By Light Unseen is now online and running! There's much more to come, and some tweaking to do with this blog's format and the links pages, but at least there are no more broken or outdated links on the site. I hope that people will be able to find the bookstore more easily; I've replaced the old store main page and Resources page with blank pages that automatically forward to the new store, in case people had those specific pages bookmarked and were getting lost. Woof, what a job! I've spent the last three days doing almost nothing else!

Still tweaking the blog format

I've been working for a couple of hours on this blog, trying to get the formatting to match the rest of the pages. While I'm certainly pleased to have gotten the background graphics and header and nav bar to work, the problems with the text column being on the left and the text centered inside the column continue to baffle me. I was probably rather reckless in how I shredded the template, but I'll keep working on it.