tl;dr: some of the links have changed and you won’t notice a thing. It took hundreds hours of work to make this happen though, so I’m here to toot my own horn and there’s still much work to be done.
It’s true! If you were to go to any of the old links for your favorite Treklit authors like Dayton Ward, David Mack, or Kelli Fitzpatrick, you’ll be automagically redirected to the new and improved “Credits” taxonomy, which is a fancy word for grouping or category. When I first started this site over a decade ago, my primary focus was just on the stories, so the only credit I cared about what the author. Then I started to add images for the books, which meant I started to be interested in cover artists, which for most part for the books were all a single person at a time like Keith Birdsong or Boris Vallejo. It was great that a book author and the cover artist were never the same person, so having different taxonomies for those positions was just fine.
Then I realized I should add the audio books, and it turns out that there’s a number of authors are also narrators. Shatner is a great example of this, he has narrated nearly never full length books that he wrote and I ended up with two different pages for his content, which was less than ideal. Adding social links, photos, and tracking which version of them I’m linking to, it was getting a little complicated but not horrendously so.
Then I started adding comic books and the situation became was more complicated with cover artists, interior artists, editors, authors, and nearly a dozen other possible credits to include and when I really thought it out, I realized that it’s going to be an incredibly complicated web of custom taxonomies if I were to create a new one for each new type of content creator, and nearly every interior artist of a comic book would also have a cover artist taxonomy and many of the authors were also editors or artists (John Byrne would have at least four different taxonomies!).
Then I made the decision to have magazines on the site and whew buddy if I thought having comics would make it complicated, credits for magazines are whole other ball of yarn. Fiction, non-fiction, interviewers, interviewees, and news posts were all going to be new taxonomies and people like Larry Nemecek would be in each of them.
The situation had an obvious solution, which is to move everyone over to a single taxonomy of “credits” then build a separate taxonomy of “roles” then tie the two of them together in a custom field on the book or the book cover for people that were doing specific credits for specific editions of the books, like narrators or cover variants for comics or magazines. It’s working out well that everyone on the main book page is just an author and can be treated like one if there’s no custom field, and for the most part everyone on the specific version of the book on the attachment page is a cover artist and can be assumed to be one of those if there’s no role custom field. I had to actually update all the audio books with the new role collections, so each of those will have examples of the news stuff. It looks exactly like the old stuff, just slightly different, you won’t notice a thing on the front end, but let me assure you, there are things happening in the background that are most impressive.
The work ahead of me is to manually go through each book that doesn’t have that field and get every credit I can. Easy enough to say here, but with the books, comics, and magazines, we’re talking about over 4,000 edits to be made, so it’s going to be slow going. I’m also going to need to figure out how to break out the roles on the author page and make sure that the various imports and conversions I did to make all this happen didn’t result in duplicate entries and if it did (spoilers, it did ) and I can remediate them (spoilers, I figured it out).
The not so great news is that with all those imports to be in a single taxonomy the “all authors” page ballooned to have a list of over 2,000 people on it, which was killing the server if more than 5 people hit it at the same time. Solution? Create a new “Credits” page to search for specific people. It also has a list of 51 random people to scratch my itch for having a list on that page.
If you’d like to help motivate me along, you can support me via Patreon. Right now all the people signed up for my other sites and I don’t have a single Trek fan supporting the site. Guess I’ll eat some worms while editing credits+roles.
