New Pages Implemented

Back when I was a partner at a local Internet Service Provider I set up the original Augoeides as a Scoop site running on a dedicated server. Scoop at the time was the software that was running much larger sites like Daily Kos, and for awhile there had been a Thelemic Scoop site online called Beast Bay that had gone down about a year previously. The red color scheme that I used for Augoeides was based on the one from Beast Bay that I particularly liked, and I hoped that in time the site would grow into a large venue for discussing not just Thelema, but all forms of magical practice. The site never wound up getting that big, and when we decided to close the ISP I could no longer host the server for free. So I decided to set up the site on one of the available free blogging platforms.

I picked Blogger mostly by accident. It happened to be the first platform that I came across and I just went ahead and ported the site over. However, if I were going to set it up today I probably would use Wordpress instead. That's what I did with my author web site, for two reasons. First off, the themes for Wordpress in my opinion just look more professional. If you haven't done so already take a look at the latest incarnation of Rune Soup which runs on Wordpress - it looks great, more like a real news site than a blog, and I don't think there's a way to do anything similar with Blogger themes. Second of all, Wordpress supports pages, which behave like standalone web pages rather than blog posts. This is a great feature, and one I've missed on Blogger for quite a long time.

Now, none of this means that Augoeides is moving to Wordpress. I already moved it over once and it was a real pain, and there's no way to switch platforms easily with the amount of content this site has amassed. I was pleased to discover a couple of months back that Blogger now has rudimentary page functionality, albeit not nearly as sophisticated as the Wordpress implementation that supports an unlimited number of them and multiple layers of nesting and ordering. Still, the Blogger implementation is better than nothing, and about a month ago I added an About Augoeides page replacing the old FAQ that was buried in the posts.

This week I've been setting up an Amazon Associate page entitled Books and Media so that there's at least a possibility that I could make a small amount of money from the site when people order books based on my reviews. My Google ads have pretty much been a complete bust, making almost nothing, and perhaps the Amazon links will turn out to be similar - I really have no idea at this point. It's not so much that I need the site to make money, but as I see it whether you order a book from my page or from Amazon makes no difference in terms of how much you wind up paying and if you order from me I get a small cut that would otherwise just go towards making Jeff Bezos even richer. Whenever I post a review from now on I'll add the book or product reviewed to the page.

In the future I'm thinking about putting together another page that would serve as a resource for ritual magicians, with links to a collection of my serious magical articles all in one place. That would make the material easier to find, since you would no longer have to sift through book reviews, weird news articles, and whatever else I've commented on over the years in order to find my more technical articles on working magick. At the moment that remains a work in progress, but I'll add it to the list of pages in the upper left corner when it's complete.