DIY Website Projects with Susanna Ives

Less geeky people than I gaze about their home and think, “What if the walls were a cool sand color, and I bought that plush modern carpet at Ikea with the overlapping circles…?” I don’t do that. Instead, I gaze at my website and think “What if the background were a faded montage and I used that cool plugin to…?” Unfortunately my pie-in-the-sky website designs are hardly reflected in my current site design due to these horrible constraints called time and energy.

However, these last few weeks, I’ve made baby steps towards solving a web problem that’s been plaguing me for months. I have collected a massive library of primary source book and journal resources across the web. (I’m a junkie for old illustrations and house plans.) However, my cyber library’s organization is akin to a closet with no shelves that I’ve been tossing books in willynilly for years. Needless to say, all the research in the world is worthless if you can’t find anything.

To remedy the problem, I desired to create a grand library in Wordpress. Unfortunately, the plugins I found were too complicated for someone as lazy as myself, or only worked for certain sources such as Google Drive or Open Library, or were tiny, useless widgets. I already had a link library on my website, and to be honest, looking at links is boring, boring, boring. I want fashion and photographs! Color and pizazz!

One day, I was searching on Googlebooks, and I noticed the Pinterest “Pin It” button hovering on the taskbar. A tiny light lit in the bug zapper of my brain. I could build the library on Pinterest boards and then embed a preview of the boards on my web site! I admit, this made my geeky day.

So for the last weeks, while everyone else is pinning Italian villas, recipes, sexy heels, backless dresses, and shirtless men, I’ve been pinning the covers and inside illustrations of such page-turning classics as: The Lady's Country Companion; or, How to Enjoy a Country Life Rationally from 1852 (This title kills me. I suppose one should never irrationally enjoy a country life.) or The Eighteenth Century Architecture of Bath (the butler did it) from 1904.

If you have a moment (Who am I kidding? If you have several hours to get sucked into the Pinterest vortex) stop by my website and see my progress. Please mind the cyber dust, this is a reading room in progress. Oh, and please subscribe to my newsletter when you visit!