Acknowledgments

• Classic Widgets by WordPress Contributors
  LaraRebooted is a bit of an “old-school” web designer, having begun coding by hand back in ’01, so she’s not a huge fan of WordPress “Blocks” taking over everything. Being able to program the widgets using the older methods is more comfortable for her… and I like them better that way, too.
• Code Snippets by Code Snippets Pro
  Having to dig into your theme’s functions.php file is a pain in the butt at the best of times, so being able to add in bits of code via your WordPress control panel, instead of FTPing into the back end of your site, is cleaner and easier. The plugin also warns you if there’s a problem with the code you are trying to install — and won’t actually let you launch the code if that’s the case — so the odds of breaking your site in the process of adapting it go way down.
• Column Shortcodes by Codepress
  Anywhere you see text columns on the site — which is, like, every single title page — this little plugin is hard at work making things tidy and pretty. It’s wonderfully flexible and allows the multi-column system to switch back over to a single-column setup for people browsing on their phones and other small screens, while keeping all of the data in those columns in order.
• Enable Media Replace by ShortPixel
  Can you imagine if, every time I found a typo in one of my stories, or needed to add or revise a chapter, I had to delete all of the eBooks and upload them from scratch? Or if I had to do the same if a change needed to be made to one of my covers? There is no way this archive would have been possible if that were the case, so this plugin is absolutely essential. Trust me when I say that it got used a lot while the site and its contents were being set up!
• Gallery Custom Links by Jordy Meow
  This little baby powers all of the book cover links on the “Browse By” pages, and it’s a real life-saver. Super-customizable, too!
• Media Library Assistant by David Lingren
  This is one of the big heavy-lifters of the site. It builds beautiful, orderly cover thumbnail galleries for the “Browse By” pages, with a versatile tagging system that can be used to filter and organize the gallery contents.
• Meta Tag Manager by Marcus Sykes
  This plugin generates the tags and data that make links on Facebook, Twitter, and similar sites look really pretty instead of really random. If you came here from one of those links, you’ve already seen it in action.
• Outerbridge Nested Shortcodes by Outerbridge
  This amazing little plugin may be tiny, but it’s super-powerful and super-essential. A lot of critical metadata about our stories is accessed via shortcodes… and without this plugin, we wouldn’t have been able to display those shortcodes within the Read Online tabs and would have either had to scrap the Publication Data tab entirely, or resign ourselves to updating the same information multiple places, by hand, anytime there was a change to a story. This little godsend means that we only have to update the data in one location, and it propagates out everywhere. It also made a whole lot of formatting shortcodes possible to use within those tabs! Win-win-WIN!
• Permalink Manager Lite by Maciej Bis
  Normally you’re stuck with whatever link is generated by the article title and/or “slug” created by the site’s engine… which can be an unwieldy mess if, say, you have a long story/article title. Or if you have two pages that need to have the same/similar names. This gives you total control over what pages are called and allows for an amazing amount of customization.
• Post and Page Builder Premium by BoldGrid.com
  Dreamhost gifted this to me when I set up the WordPress install, and I use it constantly, although I do prefer to strip out a lot of the code it likes to add. Still, it’s excellent for building pages the way you want… especially if you want to go old-school and use the “text” feature that lets you hand-code html elements yourself and still make use of powerful add-ons. I believe the premium version comes with Boldgrid Gallery (something I haven’t seen offered separately) which added special features used in the creation of the fan art galleries.
• Post Views Counter by Digital Factory
  While I have another plugin that manages download files and tracks the number of times they’ve been downloaded, it’s also important to know just how many time people have accessed the “Read Online” pages. This plugin not only tracks that access, but lets me post the data about it wherever and however I want (so it can be displayed on the separate Title Page, directly below the “Read Online” link. You can choose how much time it waits before counting another visit by the same person as a separate reading session, you can tell it not to count visits by bots, and do a lot of other things to make sure your numbers are accurate and realistic, and presented exactly how you want them.
• Redirection by John Godley
  When your site has had as many different now-defunct directories as mine has had, this is an essential. In addition to keeping track of the locations of files and pages within WordPress itself, and automatically creating redirects if they are renamed or moved, it can keep people from poking around on pages that store back-end information and aren’t intended for public consumption, and can automatically send anyone looking for those old directories back to the home page.
• Regenerate Thumbnails by Alex Mills
  This pairs up seamlessly with Enable Media Replace to ensure that, any time a book cover gets updated or corrected, all of the different sizes (especially the thumbnails!) get updated and corrected, too. Since a few of my book covers weren’t actually finished yet while the site was under construction, this came in really handy more than once.
• Rich Event Timeline by richteam
  I went through a lot of attempts at finding a good timeline plugin, but this was definitely the best. It let me show things my way. A bunch of customizing definitely went into it (as always) but I’m really happy with the results… and I had just about given up on the idea that there were any good ones out there when we found this.
• Say What? by Ademti Software
  Sometimes there’s a word or phrase that comes standard with a WordPress feature, but which really isn’t appropriate for my content. One way to deal with that is to try to dig around in the raw files, via FTP, find the phrase and change it, and then hope that you don’t have to change it all over again every time the program, or plugin, updates. And that would absolutely suck. Or you can use this little plugin to pick out the phrase in question as the page is loading and substitute in whatever phrase is a better fit. Trust me, you’re so much better off doing it this way.
• Shortcodes Ultimate by Vladimir Anokhin
  This is another of the huge heavy lifters on the site. You see that little image carousel running on this page? This is the plugin that controls it. And the tabbing system on most of the Browse and all of the “Read Online” pages? Again, this plugin is what makes them work so smoothly and easily. You even clicked on a button they designed to see this very text.
• Show-Hide/Collapse-Expand by Bunte Giraffe
  I could probably have gotten Shortcodes Ultimate to do something similar to this, but we found this first and I like its simplicity. When you have adult-rated content on your pages and you don’t want people wandering into it accidentally, you need some kind of system… and I really didn’t want the hassle of having people sign up for accounts and all of the privacy/security concerns that come with it. So this lovely plugin provides the warning images that you see, and have to click on, before you can access any of the material with an “M” or harder rating on the site. And yes, it will reappear if you refresh, and maybe that’s a little annoying… but trust me when I say that it’s a better solution than your having to sign up for a site account just to read a story I wrote more than a decade ago.
• Simple Download Monitor by Rahul Amin et al.
  This awesome little plugin serves up the eBook and PDF files and ensures that I know exactly how many people have accessed them. Even if you copy a download link and send it to a friend and they never click on my links, this plugin makes sure that it gets counted. It also allows me to seamlessly swap out files as necessary without those links changing, which is a definite bonus. I like it when I don’t have to ask people to pardon my dust because they never even see it. Best of all, it also knows the difference between genuine browsers and ‘bots, and only counts the real live human beings.
• Simple Local Avatars by Jake Goldman and 10up
  Okay, fine, I just didn’t want to have to sign up for a Gravatar account just so I could use a personalized icon on my own website. This let me upload an icon of my choice. That’s going to be especially handy on RGFC and AoVD, where there’s a whole crew of authors, artists, and staff who will need site accounts but might just feel the same way about also needing to get a Gravatar account. I’m honestly not sure why WordPress is farming out something as basic as a profile avatar in the first place, but whatever because Jake fixed it.
• UpdraftPlus by UpdraftPlus.Com and David Anderson
  I tried a few different backup systems and this was the cleanest and most comfortable for me… plus it links directly to my optimizer plugin, so it can make backups on the fly before database elements are optimized, and it sends all of the data to my DropBox account. It’s very efficient and reassuring, especially for a packrat like me.
• WordPress Tooltips by Tomas
  This lets you add pretty tooltips wherever you want them, with whatever you want inside them. It also lets you control exactly where tooltips and qtips can and cannot appear on your site, so everything looks streamlined rather than cluttered. It’s a little bitty godsend.
• wpDiscuz by the gVectors Team
  This is a powerhouse. If you leave a comment on one of my posts, or a review on one of my stories, you’re using this plugin to do it. It allows you to post using the social media account of your choice, and is super-customizable to display only the features and settings I actually want. I have a pretty stripped-down and streamlined version running on my pages, but if you want all of the bells and whistles, this program has them. All of them.
• WPForms Lite by WPForms
  A clean and simple way to let people contact you without leaving out a lot of handles for spammers and hackers. Super easy to use, too.
• WPOptimize by David Anderson, Ruhani Rabin, and Team Updraft
  It’s amazing how slow WordPress can get after its database gets cluttered with revisions and random junk. I was getting frustrated with it, until I found this plugin. It keeps the site from becoming an enormous slog to get through.

Calibre is intended to let people manage (and, yes, modify) their existing eBook libraries, yes, but its amazing hidden superpower is its ability to let you make your own books from scratch. The first test-run was with Apprentice… and boy did that reveal a lot about the value of starting off with clean HTML code, because the files I initially grabbed were .html versions that had been generated by Microsoft Word for use on Fanfiction.net more than two decades ago, and that was some spectacularly messy HTML. But Calibre made it fairly easy to clean up, too.

You can insert media into your eBooks. You can organize your table of contents exactly how you want it. You can convert the eBook you created into a whole slew of formats including .epub and .mobi (which, between the two of them, make the books accessible to pretty much every eReader and eReader app in existence), DOCX (great for getting solid word counts and, because it’s less forgiving — now, anyway — of HTML errors than most eReaders, a great way to make sure your formatting really looks as good as you think it does), PDF, and many more. The conversion process gives you total control of all kinds of important details you might not normally think of, like how backward-compatible your files will be with older readers and how wide the margins in static formats should be.

You can also have multiple Calibre libraries, which is awesome if you are, say, preparing one eBook for three different websites that need their own distinct covers and copyright data applied to it… or a whole bunch of eBooks that will be similarly straddling those websites’ collections.

And yes, there are other programs on the market that do these things too… but Calibre is free. (Which is wonderful if you are, say, starting up a website development/graphic design/eBook design consultancy business and need a way to show off your skills before anyone’s begun paying you.) It’s definitely worthy of donating to, though, once you can.

I used to be an enormous fan of Adobe Photoshop, and used it for years back when I had access to inexpensive academic packages through my Universities… but if you’re the same way, you’ll find that transitioning to using GIMP is easy and intuitive. And powerful.

I’ve seen LaraRebooted take a small, bland, low-contrast photo and, through GIMP’s tools, transform it into a large, high-contrast image with dramatic lighting, a themed color scheme, and the appearance that it was painted. She came up with the “Riddick Vision” color scheme featured on the The Bogey Man and the Black Knight and Where Silence and Death Meet covers, and which will be used on several more covers over on AoVD. And heck, the three actresses sitting cozily together on the cover of Three Sisters have probably never once been in a room together in real life. GIMP helped make all of that happen.

There’s a huge online GIMP support community that will help you figure out how to create virtually any visual effect you can imagine, too. If you can describe what you want to do, there’s someone who has figured out how to do it and can show you how… and there’s probably already a thread up that walks you through the steps. And again, all of this power is completely free… but this is another one that’s absolutely worthy of donating to for future development.

• Pexels
  As explained in the licensing page, all of the images and videos on Pexels are free to use. Attribution is not required but always appreciated, and the license grants downloaders the right to modify and edit images as much as they like. It is, however, required that you modify an image before using it in a commercial setting, and that if the image contains identifiable people or brands, you will not use the images in a way that casts them in a bad light or implies a product endorsement on their part where none was made. Incredibly sensible stuff, really. The site even has apps for iOS and Android so that people working off of a phone or tablet, rather than a full-size computer, can still access and use the images from their devices. A further noteworthy limitation is that, while you may find some racy pictures in its collection, genitalia and the female nipple are always covered.
• Pixabay
  The licensing page on Pixabay is almost identical to that of Pexels. One thing Pixabay has, that Pexels lacks, is a Royalty Free Music section, although right now I can’t actually think of a single way to use that on my site that wouldn’t be a throwback to the most-loathed aspect of MySpace. 🤣 Nudity is the other big difference: you will see the female nipple and pubic mound on some of its racy images, but no male genitalia or really explicit content. This makes the site a bit less safe for use while in the office or around children, but not terribly so.
• PNGWing
  While the other sites are fabulous sources of stock photos, this site is great for clip art and transparent/semi-transparent images for use in layering. One caveat with PNGWing is that its Terms of Use page warns that the site cannot absolutely guarantee the copyright status of all of the images its users upload and must instead respond to DMCA takedown notices in cases of copyright infringement. This means that while its terms also specify that users grant the site, and those who access it, “the right to license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute” the images they have uploaded, there is always the risk that the user who uploaded the image didn’t have the authority to grant those rights in the first place. So it’s a really good idea, when you find an image you like, to run a reverse image search on Google to make sure it doesn’t show up as already being owned by someone who might serve you with a takedown notice. (I have spotted more than one image of questionable provenance while browsing its pages.) You won’t find anything especially racy on here, but you will find some lovely objects and effects that you can use as layers in a photomanip you’re creating.
• Unsplash
  Owned by Getty Images since 2021, Unsplash serves as that service’s royalty-free stock photo wing. Unlike Pexels and Pixabay, photos are all it carries. Its licensing page is a little simpler than that of either Pexels or Pixabay, because it lacks admonishments about negative portrayals or implied endorsements. It does, however, require that its images undergo “significant modification” prior to any kind of resale, and prohibits compiling of its photos “to replicate a similar or competing service.” Again, all of that is incredibly sensible stuff. As with Pexels, while some of its images may get a little racy, you will never see the female nipple or any genitalia in them (except, maybe, on a mannequin or statue).

• Font Meme
  This is probably my favorite site to use. Part of this is because it gives you very specific information about whether a font is free for personal use, commercial use, and/or both right on every listing. How personal vs. commercial use is defined can be found on their Disclaimer & License page. You can use their Generators function to see exactly how specific text will look rendered in a font you’re considering, and can even download that sample text to show others a graphics of the options currently under consideration. Fan art and connected graphics for a non-profit site will generally be considered as personal use, and if you’re looking for an image to use on a cover of a book you’re planning on selling, you can filter your search so that you only see fonts that are free for commercial use — which is still thousands of fonts!
• 1001 Fonts
  1001 Fonts is pretty similar to Font Meme, but they do have some different fonts from one another. Its Font Usage Terms page clearly states that “Personal Use” includes “recreational websites,” so again, safe for fan fiction and fan art of this site, but that “anything that will generate direct or indirect income” falls under commercial use (which will take certain things off of the table when it’s time to make book covers for an original work I plan to actually sell… and when LaraRebooted charges fees for design work…) but fortunately more than 5,000 of the fonts on their site are free for commercial use, so nobody will run out of options anytime soon.
• Cooltext.com
  While their font collection isn’t extensive (a little bit less than 2,000 fonts), what makes this site special is what you can do to those fonts. You can take any of the fonts on their site and plug them into the Cool Text Graphics Generator to produce a stunning and unique graphic. You can adjust size and color elements, too, to create something that is uniquely reflective of your goals. Only one story on my site uses the generator (“Frozen”) but it will see a lot more use on AoVD and RGFC. So 1,958 fonts x 128 graphics generator styles = 250,624 potential looks for a site graphic already, even before you start adjusting colors and other small elements. Seriously, you can spend hours on there just playing around with it all. And you are licensed to use your results, free of charge, however you wish. Just make sure to actually download those results. 😜
• FontSquirrel
  Font Squirrel brags that the fonts on its pages are “100% free for commercial work,” making it another cool place to hunt for something that you don’t have to worry about using in a way that accidentally infringes someone’s rights. Their extensive Terms of Service page elucidates a few points and adds a few caveats to that, however, so it’s still best to pay attention to what you’re downloading. But it’s a good way to feel pretty comfortable that you’re not wandering into a minefield.

I’m slightly less comfortable with the next three sites, although they do have excellent materials on them, and mostly used them to hunt down fonts that I had been using for years, and wanted to link to/properly credit, and needed to make sure I wasn’t violating copyright by using them at all. If I couldn’t find them on the sites above, but they showed up on one of these, I would follow the breadcrumbs and hope for the best.

• DaFont
  I got one or two fonts off of here. It’s a bit harder to tell whether a font is free for personal use, commercial use, or what. There’s a small indicator over the download button on the listings page, and the extent of a “usage terms” page is a small notation in the site footer that “The licence mentioned above the download button is just an indication. Please look at the readme-files in the archives or check the indicated author’s website for details, and contact him/her if in doubt.”
• Blogfonts / FontsBlog
  This site, contains a variety of types of “free” fonts, which, according to their Terms of Service page, are “either freeware, shareware, demo versions or public domain. The licence mentioned above the download button is just an indication.” It’s a little harder than that to figure out what is what, although the individual font pages have “Extended Information” at their bottoms that can help you figure it out.
• A-Z Fonts
  This site contains both free fonts, which includes fonts that are “completely free or free for non-commercial use only,” and fonts that can be purchased. It is a little difficult to tell which free fonts are completely free or only for non-commercial use, however, and the License data on the individual fonts’ pages can be a bit confusing or simply missing, and its User Agreement page indicates that there is the potential for a font housed on the site being removed for copyright violation, so it’s a good idea to proceed with caution if you download from here, and check to see if the font appears on other sites that categorize it a little more thoroughly.

• Pitch Black screencaps at FanCaps.net
  This gallery contains 3,359 screen captures from the film, including all of the end credits, in full 1080p size. That’s a lot of chances to find just the shot you need of any of the characters expressing almost any emotion (that they actually portrayed on the screen, anyway). Also useful if you want to dig up and present credit data from the end scroll.
• Pitch Black screencaps at cap-that.com
  This gallery contains 5,635 screen captures from the film, not including any of the end credits, in full 1080p size. If you couldn’t find a certain facial expression in the first collection — if that site’s capping software somehow missed the relevant frame — you will definitely find it here.
• Prometheus screencaps at cap-that.com
  Cap That just plain rocks. This gallery contains 5,528 images at 1080p. Great for pulling out cool images from the film (and the cinematography is superb). I used it to get the “weirdo in the background” image in the Forbidden Gifts eBook, because there really was this very weird piece of artwork hidden in the lifeboat that goes almost unnoticed (until I had Zamin get a little freaked out by it).
• Alternate-scene screencaps from Prometheus on cap-that.com
  Another 1,726 images from Prometheus’s deleted scenes, which include some excellent shots of the Engineer not looking like a homicidal monster. See why Cap-That is awesome?
• The Chronicles of Riddick screencaps at cap-that.com
  This gallery contains 7,115 screen captures from the film in full 1080p size. Any moment you could possibly need is there.
• The Chronicles of Riddick screencaps on the Alexa Davalos WEB site
  On the off-chance that you need an image of Kyra that Cap-That somehow didn’t capture, the main Alexa Davalos fan site has a pretty comprehensive gallery of moments from her scenes. I’ve used a few images off of this site since I got over my issues and became fond of my AU Kyras.
• Screencaps of Alexa Davalos’s performance on Angel, from the Alexa Davalos WEB site
  More images from the Alexa Davalos site, specifically from her run as Gwen Raiden on Angel (and as crazy as it sounds, I think another reason I was so bothered by her casting in CoR was that it meant that Gwen would not be returning to Angel‘s final season as a love interest for Gunn, something that had been heavily built toward in these episodes). I used a screencap from “Players” for the cover of I’m Not Riddick, and this is where I got it.