Thomas Wictor

I’ve added a new feature to the blog. First open another tab or window and go to the blog page. In the upper right, you can now choose if you want white text on a dark background or black text on a light background.

Click on a blog post.

If you want the light background, click the link, and you’ll get this.

Those of you who like the white-text-on-dark-background don’t have to do anything. However, several people have told me that they find white text on a dark background too hard to read.

If you choose to make the background light, the system will put a cookie on your computer so that the light background will be the default setting for the blog. You won’t have to keep choosing over and over.

So, your computer must be set to enable cookies. Do that in your “Preferences” panel.

You can change it back anytime you want.

This is what I’d originally asked for when I had the site built, but the designer didn’t follow my instructions. The customer is never right anymore. Due to the deadline for the beginning of the ultimately nonexistent publicity campaign, I had to accept that which I’d specifically asked to not have.

After the site went live, it was also invisible to search engines for a full month. I didn’t know this until someone pointed it out. My mother was in the process of ending her life in rage, fear, and agony; and the promotion of my failed memoir Ghosts and Ballyhoo was crashing and burning, so it didn’t occur to me to Google myself. I never do that anyway.

When I called the Web designer and said that the site was invisible to search engines, he adopted a very specific smug tone when he answered.

“Well, you didn’t say anything about making a Website that was optimized for search engines. That’s a whole different ball game.”

I didn’t say anything about making a Website that was optimized for search engines because I didn’t know that Web designers thought customers wanted invisible Websites.

Rather than pay him another penny, I took his name off the homepage and taught myself—at the age of fifty-one—the arcane magic of search-engine optimization (SEO). Professional Web designers now tell me that I’m of the best SEO experts they’ve come across. I could make a living at it. Here’s a huge part of my secret.

Yoast.

They’re for real. I bought the plugin and did online research on SEO, and now my Website is very visible to search engines.

The top hit comes from paying Google a fee. Out of 385,000 results, my Website is the third unpaid hit. I’m two steps below Wikipedia.

If SEO is important to you, buy the Yoast plugin and look for online articles with titles such as “The most common SEO mistakes.”

Listen, my knowledge of the Internet was stuck in 2003 when I taught myself this, and I’d just lost both parents, all my money, and my lifelong dream of being a successful writer. If I could master it, anyone can.

So by popular demand, you can now choose the background and text color on the blog.

Wrong can be undone.