Today is Friday and it’s snowing here in Fort Worth. Lots of people from outside north Texas seem to be under the misconception that it doesn’t get cold or snow here. It’s 24 degrees right now at 3:30 PM and lightly snowing, after dropping to around 21 degrees last night. I have an inch of snow on the ground in my yard now. Sure, this might be all the snow we get all year, but it might just be the first of several cold and icy days this winter. Several years ago we had ten inches in one day, an all time record, not just for one day, but for an entire winter season.
I’m building this website myself. I’m too poor and cheap yet to pay someone else to do it. It’s a WordPress site, which is an Okay platform, however I keep finding stumbling blocks. Things like, terminology I’m unfamiliar with, concepts I’ve not heard of or if I have I don’t remember them.
Right now, I’m trying to figure out how to setup a mailing list form and get MailChimp setup. I was able to do an inline form on one of these pages, but I want it in a Widget to the left on the main page The Theme Developer has made it so I have to pay them to change that part of the theme. I get it, they want to get paid for their work, but so many of these developers think they deserve to be paid for the work even if the theme sucks. Some of them don’t even work the way we want it to, but they want to get paid anyway. I don’t agree with that.
As a writer I probably should agree with developers about getting paid for their intellectual property, but story isn’t about functionality like software is, it’s about preferences. Sure I might write a shitty story, but ultimately you got to read it as far as you were willing to. These days, most books you read are going to cost less than $10 and many less than $3. A developer wants anywhere from $49 to $129 for a theme. They’re sure I’ll love it and get my money back on it many times over, but I expect it to work like I expect a car to work when I buy it. Test drive it, make sure it’s what I really want and it suits my needs.
I think the difference is that writing, fiction especially, is seen as a frivolous thing, not worthy of much more than $20 per story, while a developer sees their work as much more valuable because it “might” help someone make money. Maybe that’s true and I should not care, but I do.
Hopefully in the next day or so, I’ll figure out how to setup MailChimp Lists and Segments so I can start my first campaign, to send a thanks for signing up reply to myself for signing up to my own mailing list.
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