Our AIFAMS Wiki

Before we created the The Indie Cats of Ulthar blog (TICOU), we had wanted to make a site with all the information about the world of An Introduction to the Fine Art of Monster Slaying. We don’t mean the Making Of posts or the Our Books page, but a wiki, like the ones made by several fandoms, where you can find short bios of the characters, important objects and locations. We had a vision for how it should look, but using a blog template didn’t seem feasible at the time, so we abandoned the idea. However, we later found out about Google Sites and the AIFAMS Wiki was born.

After we got the hang of it, making the wiki became super easy. The structure reminded us of our old computer classes, and the pages themselves had several customization options that allowed for some more creativity than a blog page. The blocks made it easier to align text and images, and the ability to change the background colour of each of them helped split the different sections of a page. Filling those pages also forced us to put in writing stuff that had been bubbling in our minds. We avoided big spoilers, but used this as an opportunity to turn bits of info scattered across books into a coherent whole. Creating the site was fun, and it looked great (at least we thought so), but Google Sites is very different from Blogger: it can only be edited on a desktop; it doesn’t generate a sitemap, which means it can’t be indexed; ownership is verified through Google Analytics; and the URL puts ‘sites.google.com/view/’ before the site’s name.

Homepage of the Google Sites AIFAMS Wiki

We weren’t planning for it to be an actual independent site, but rather an addition, first to the The Snarky Cats of Ulthar blog (TSCOU), and then to TICOU, so the indexing thing didn’t bother us much. The inability to edit it from a tablet or smartphone was a bigger problem, and made it feel somewhat remote, floating around in cyberspace, without us being able to easily reach it. Still, since we didn’t see any other option, we let it be. That changed when we did The Snarky Cats Blog News (TSCBN).

TSCBN isn’t really a blog - it’s a newsletter/linktree hybrid that replaced the Links page as the link on our social media profiles. So, in addition to all the blogs names, descriptions, and social media links, it shows the most recent post of each one. That it’s on a whole other blog allowed us to put the most relevant post categories across blogs on the sidebar. For our post Blogger Themes: the Good, the Bad, and the Baffling, we tested several Blogger themes and made it clear just how terrible the non responsive themes were. However, the fact that the responsive themes don’t show the full post on the homepage even when there’s only one, forced us to take another look at them. We used one of the Awesome Inc templates and made the fonts bigger so it could more easily be read on a smaller screen with no need to zoom in. There was an an unexpected obstacle, though. When we did our experiment with all the Blogger themes, we noticed that when clicking to a link to a post from one of these non responsive themes, we saw the desktop version and then were given the option to see the Simplified View, which did away with the sidebar and showed only the post text. The homepage was another matter - it showed just an excerpt of the post and a link to click through to it, like one of the responsive themes. We really thought that not being responsive meant that it always showed the desktop version - we were wrong. It took us a while to figure it out, but finally we found out how to disable the mobile version (it’s in the dropdown menu arrow next to Costumize on the Themes tab). More recently, we gave the TSCOU and A Goat 4 Zazzie blogs a makeover and opted for the Simple and the Picture Window, but got rid of the sidebars. The reason we picked those 2 was because the border between posts was clearer. In the Simple, the post footer where the labels appear has a background whose colour can be changed, and the Picture Window actually shows each post separately. We maintain that these themes aren’t practical, especially for bigger, more complex blogs, as the footers are a poor substitute for a sidebar, and the bigger fonts can look a bit silly on a desktop.

Working on the TSCBN opened our eyes to the possibilities of some of these non responsive themes: the full post on the homepage could easily serve as the wiki’s main menu, while everything else could be made using pages. Of course, it would never look as good as on Google Sites, but we thought it could work, and this time, everything was already written, so all we had to do was copy/paste. The pages were finished quickly, but adding all the links to the menus and between pages was a chore. This has to be done individually, and there’s no shortcut. Since there were a lot less customization options for each pages, we ended up splitting some into more pages, which of course forced us to make more title banners for the new ones. Even with all the extra work, we managed to end it pretty quickly, especially when compared to how long it took to make the original.

Homepage of the new, Blogger AIFAMS Wiki

With the new, blogspot.com AIFAMS Wiki ready to go, there was only one thing left to do - delete the Google Sites wiki. It was surprisingly easy, and that made it a little sadder. RIP AIFAMS Wiki. And of course the main menu post on the new wiki was immediately hit with a redirect error by Google Search Console…