Last night I uploaded our first eBook, a short story called Chickens, to Amazon, using Kindle Direct Publishing. I read a lot of how-tos and advice, and tested a lot of procedures and tools before settling on a system that seems to work and is easy to do. I documented the steps on Creating eBooks for Amazon Kindle. The steps aren't very detailed - they're mostly just notes so I can remember what to do the next time I get a few hours to work. A lot of stuff floats through my transom from one weekend to the next.

Second weekend of creating my own site in Drupal, and things are going really well. I spent Friday setting up more features, including adding a wysiwyg editor and file manager. I looked over a lot of documentation for the options, and decided to go with CKEditor and CKFinder. I downloaded and installed CKEditor first, and after just an hour or so of seeing that red message for purchasing a license, I did it. The selling point for me was that these two work together, and that the license also buys a year of tech support.

... and hey, I think I'm doing pretty good! Of course, I slept and did other things for 8 or 9 of those hours. I really haven't been at this desk all night. (Honest!) I'm getting to know all kinds of cool things about Drupal. I'm a little sad about leaving behind Dreamweaver, we've been friends and companions for so long. But I really need for our site to have functionality that I just can't get the old-fashioned way. I've forgotten how much fun it is to create a website completely on my own.

I know I'm supposed to be creating my site in a testing location, but what the heck? I decided to just do it all live. All the content from my old site is safe on my hard drive, so I'm thinking once I get the site set up the way like I'll just start moving it over. I'm not sure how many people every look at our site, anyway :-) I've spent hours going through themes, looking for the ones that have the features I want, look good on mobile devices, and won't require massive hours of tweeking and messing with code I don't understand and don't care to understand.

Today was the day I jumped in and dumped all my old website files and installed Drupal. I started about 4 hours ago, and here I am now, writing my first test article. I'm following Drupal for Dummies page-by-page, and only ran into a couple of glitches with my webhost provider. However, I used their chat service twice, and both times tech support fixed the issues and got it back to where I could go to the next step. I give ixwebhosting tech support a 100% today! Not sure how long it will take me to get all our old files back onto our new repurposed site, but it's a priority now!