Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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New Site Theme

Your purchases on Amazon have fully funded upgraded hosting for this blog and for a premium theme on the Genesis framework. Thanks for your support.

I have a backlog of reviews to get through — once I get back to it, I might slacken the pace so that I have more time to devote to finishing my own first book.

Reddle is an older theme that doesn’t perform all that well, even though it looks pretty good. It lacks support for a couple newer WP features that I’d like to include. Downtime should be minimal.

The font is staying the same. The general layout will be mostly the same. No page URLs will change, so anyone who’s linked to this site will continue to be able to do so.

If I screw something up, the site might be down a little. Documentation is a lot better on Genesis child themes, so I doubt there’ll be many problems with the custom font and styling.

The site will, however, look a bit more modern. I’m doing away with all that wasted space on the header. I went with this theme because it’s free, I wanted to get the site up and running fast, and liked the simplicity.

I’ll probably migrate this site over to Ghost eventually, but until I’m more familiar with it, I’ll stick with what this site is running on for the time being and just continue to improve it.

If you have any comments or suggestions, now would be a good time to share them.

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Next Project: The Autodidact’s Guide

“But Henry, you said months ago that you would have a book out before the end of the year!”

I totally did. At that time, I wanted to get something short out, quickly, so I wouldn’t feel like I was entirely taking food out of my mouth by writing as much as I do on this blog. Then, I started posting more frequently and writing book reviews.

And then I looked at the original book concept and saw that it wasn’t in the interests of the readership to charge you $3 or whatever for a gussied-up compilation. And the relationships that I’ve made through this whole neoreaction thing have been worth more than whatever that would’ve earned.

The Autodidact’s Guide (title pending) isn’t the upcoming book. It’s a forthcoming short e-mail course.

I hate bad newsletters. I would rather not have one at all than to make a bad one for you. However, with the site’s traffic breaking records twice in the past week, I feel like an idiot to not have one, because it means much less efficiency in terms of publishing on my end, which means less effective quality for you to enjoy. The influence of this blog is also reaching more normal conservative circles, rather than just the cult of NRx, so more people are coming to this blog once for one article and then bouncing forever, never to be seen again.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I’m also using this as an excuse for practice, so I’m doing it anyway.

 

Anyway, this e-mail course will teach you everything that I’ve learned both from my own experience and other, more accomplished autodidacts. Look for it sometime… soon… because I’ve learned not to promise release dates that I’m unlikely to meet.

The newsletter teaser (if not a real regular newsletter) needs to be up before I release the book. Which is actually coming along well, now. Or I will have to waste a lot of time hawking it to people one-on-one. Time that I don’t have, really.

Enough people have asked me about this sort of thing through Ask.fm and e-mail to show that you all want my advice on this topic, even though I tend to be reluctant to really give advice unless I’m 110% sure that it’s going to be useful and non-harmful.

Ideally, this’ll also make it easier for me to write more in-depth articles with better research punctuated by shorter updates.

That’s about it. I’ll yell about it when I’ve finished with it.

Also, I missed my self-imposed Thursday book review deadline. The scheduled review will be up this weekend.

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