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Category: Website Updates

Technical stuff about Quacking Alone, the website (usually posted by my husband).

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Hey there anybody who may have come to this website before and saw it in perfect working order, I'm Angry Old Fat Man, husband of the (part-time) romance novel author Mary Anne Graham.

I created and maintain this website for my wife, but I've been horribly neglectful in that duty for the past couple of years. So much so, the core software for the site, WordPress, went through several generations of updates, but I never changed the website.

Fast forward to this past week, when I was looking for something I posted here many years ago. It turns out that the new webhosting company that has our site stored on it stopped supporting the older version of WordPress (and version of PHP, the computer language it is written in) that our site was based on.

In other words, the website was broken. Big time.

But I blew the dust off of my old IT professional hat and went to work on it.

And now? VOILA! It's working again. No need to praise or thank me, just hire somebody to install a stripper pole in my house and some redheaded strippers to demonstrate how it works. 😀

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The Angry Old Webmaster for Quacking Alone here.

Many apologies for the bad news I'm about to break to our readers and people who hate the things I blog about and want to tell me how wrong I am, but for some ungodly reason, the website comments no longer work.

This is not anything to do with censorship or any such thing, but is strictly due to technical problems that I have no idea how to solve.

I figure it has to do with our last huge website update, which involved the attempt to make the site compliant with mobile devices. Google told the world that it was necessary to make websites functional to their specifications, so if we wanted to continue our existence on the biggest presence on the interwebs, we had to do it.

But now our user comments don't work, even though I have tried my utmost best to make them functional, it ain't happening.

Once again, boys and girls, I apologize for my lack of tech skills.

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Hello there dear gentlefolk (and assorted jerkasses) it's me, Angry Old Fat Man, otherwise known as Crazy Duck Lady's husband and website manager.

My wife has discovered a strange, wonderful thing. It is the ability to link, via the site Books2Read, to a "universal" vendor page for each and every book she writes.

So far, I've put a button on every book that has this capability (in the Mary Anne Graham book page) to allow you, our blessed readers, to buy the books for whatever e-book device you happen to own. The button looks like this:

Right now it's functional in the Mary Anne book list page, but it will soon be available in the Olivia Outlaw book list page and possibly the Book Bundle page as well.

Enjoy them, s'il vous plaît!

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Husband slash webmaster here.

Quacking Alone is having some difficulties with e-mail contact forms as of the moment, so we deeply apologize for any problems this may cause any of you out there who want to contact me or Mary Anne.

I am working on the issues. We will hopefully have everything working correctly soon. I also apologize for stomping on my wife's update.

Angry Old Fat Man

UPDATE:

E-mail forms are working as of May 23, 2017 8:50 AM. However, you will have to type in a subject line for the e-mail form instead of having it default to something meaningful. Sorry. Mea maxima culpa.

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Hello there girlies and boy...ees...

Anyways, my wife the Duck Lady has finished up bundling the Seducing The Guardian series. I put it up on the site in a brand new section I created for you, our customers. I broke out the bundles into a separate section from all of the individual books, and I put a link to the section in the upper menu and the sidebar section list.

Mary Anne has also created paperbacks for most of the books now on Amazon's site. You see, a site called CreateSpace used to let you do that, but they got bought out by Bezos and his boys, so now Amazon is the one-stop shop for paperbacks and e-books.

Because of the dominance of Amazon, and the use of mobile devices in looking at webpages now, I have pretty much thrown away all of the old purchasing buttons and replaced them with much, much bigger Amazon buttons.

As an aside, I replaced all of the e-mail links with web forms, to keep the spammers away.

So check out all the new pages and see what you think.

And while you're at it, read my little sci-fi/political satire series, The God Emperor of Soon (links below).

Installments 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 , 7, 8, and 9.

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Sorry about that my dearies. Big old nasty husband here, by the way.

I was in the process of writing up the fifth installment of my dumb little series "God Emperor of Soon" and clicked the Publish button instead of the Save Draft button. I unpublished it as soon as I could, but the incomplete post still hit Twitter and possibly other social media that Mary Anne happens to be using.

So if you get here by clicking a link that goes to a non-existent page, that's why.

Many apologies, and have a relaxing Labor Day.

Angry Old Fat Man

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Hi kids, it's me the Angry Old Fat dude comin' atcha once again.

I've got some more installments of my little online series The God Emperor of Soon lined up and ready for your perusal - or ridicule, or whatever. Haven't gotten any feedback on the current two installments, so I don't know if you like what you're reading or not. Alls I know is, a little more exposition in the third installment, then finally action starts on the fourth one.

ANYWAYS...

Good news on the Olivia Outlaw front. She's finished up her Seducing the Guardian series of gay romance, and the latest book is now available (as always) on the Amazon Kindle and compatible devices! YAY!

I've also updated the website to show the book, Enticing Duty, in the sidebar and on the List of Books by Olivia Outlaw.

So hit one of those links above, get the book, and get to reading! Don't make me go get my belt...

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Hello my little chitlin's, it's your big daddy Angry Old Fat Man here.

First off, Happy Mother's Day to all of y'all with rugrats, or former rugrats like ours. Remember, if Mama ain't happy, NOOOOObody's happy.

And now the business at hand.

It seems the website for Quacking Alone Romances needs to be brought properly into the 21st Century. I got word the other day that Google is going to start ranking pages according to their ease of use on mobile platforms, like smartphones and tablets. Of course I ran the website through its paces in the Mobile Friendly Test Tool that Google provides and it came back with abysmal results. Not surprising, since smartphones were barely a thing when we first started this romance-writing-and-selling business.

But now, with everybody and his brother, aunt, uncle, and teapot Chihuahua using iPhones and Samsungs, AND with Google busting our virtual balls, we're forced to update the site. Luckily, I decided to give the heavy lifting of the website coding to WordPress early on in our business start-up. That decision will allow one dude, moi, to update the entire site in a matter of days if I simply find the right theme to institute and tweak.

So that's the big announcement. Look for huge changes soon in the website you're looking at right now. And in the meantime, buy Olivia Outlaw's latest same-sex romance Seducing The Guardian, Book One - Tempting Duty.

Over and out, kiddies.

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It's the husband of the Crazy Duck Lady, with the simple announcement that all of her Carnal Collateral books have been published and are online, waiting for you guys to download them and salivate over them (or whatever it is you do).

You can see the last one, Devil's Delight, in the sidebar and the Olivia Outlaw books page. Or you can click the links I just graciously provided for you out of the (diminishing) goodness of my (cold, black) heart.

Sorry I haven't been updating. Not motivated enough to be creative. Been too angry at situation, work, life in general, and the attempts to maintain my much coveted status as one of the rich. You know, the rich. The ones near the age of 50 working two part-time jobs to keep the luxuries of such extravagant lifestyles, like living indoors in small houses with electricity, plumbing, and food. And no retirement money or plans at all, and no medical coverage. The Affordable Care Act apparently has, in one of its several thousand pages, a provision that says "health insurance shall be affordable to all - except ANGRY OLD FAT MAN, who is too rich to enjoy all benefits listed in this document without paying out his ass".

I hope everybody who came up with and approved of such a travesty burn in Hell while being raped by the barbed penis of Satan.