Archive for the ‘Website’ Category

iTunes Blues and Website News

May 29, 2009

It’s a special kind of horror opening iTunes to find your music and playlists aren’t there anymore. Especially when you have 87 gigs worth of choons, and playlists crafted lovingly over a number of years…

Fortunately, while all the iTunes data has vanished into the ether, the actual music’s still on the hardrive so all I’ve lost are the playlists. Still, that’s fairly crappy, as I was proud of my playlists – they’re the scaffolding that gives the monolith its structure, the roads criss-crossing a massive desert of data, etc. etc. 😛  Ah well, time for a new start it seems, though I wonder if I can extract them from my iPod somehow… where there’s an internet, there’s usually a way!

Speaking of which,

the NOCTURN website is finished (for now anyway, aside from a couple of character art pieces which I’m sure will be well worth the wait), and running about as well as I could have hoped 😀 Let me know what you think!

http://www.nocturnonline.com

A Red Letter Day

May 26, 2009

N

I felt like I’d scaled the heights of the city itself, and I couldn’t quite believe it for a few moments, but today the website went online for the very… second time. Ahem.

See, yesterday evening I found a highly effective way of overcoming all those problems I was having with getting it online – by deleting the entire root folder that was hosting the site online in a misguided attempt at fixing what turned out to be my uploading everything into the wrong directory. Fortunately, Mr Kiser was on hand to help sort through the vacant aftermath and do a stellar job at getting me back on the right path, for which he gets a hearty ripple of applause, and something in the book that he’ll have to wait and discover for himself 😉 Thanks again mate.

So it was Take Two this morning, and as it turned out I hadn’t commited total digital genocide, so was able to get things up and running through the time and tested ‘let’s click this and see what happens’ method. So yes – the site is now online! 😀

However it’s not quite ready yet, so the next couple of days will be spent tweaking out all the little code gremlins and tightening extracts, lining up stubborn headers, etc etc, and then Friday will be the grand launch!

And by grand launch, I mean I’ll tell people about it, and some of them might visit, hehe. But hell, I’m quite excited! A lot of blood, stone and coding’s gone into the site, and it’s my first real attempt at building one, so it’s nice to see all those stray lines of html finally coming together 🙂

Oh, I didn’t make the final cut of the ‘Can you fantasize…’ competition, so my creative skills don’t get any supper for the next week. And home before nine! >_<

For anyone who’s interested, the Fifthwind posse’s entries can be seen here.

A.D.D. New Post

May 20, 2009

Can’t concentrate at all today. I’ve been bouncing from one project to another like a skin-covered pinball on hot coals, except I keep missing the triple-multipliers and  instead buffer myself into the chasm at the bottom of the table. Score 0, three balls left. Play Again?

The Chocalypse is coming along pretty well:

———

His was a face of chocolate oblivion. The eyes flashed zit outbreaks and ballooning hips. Each of the swollen, black hairs that hung from his sugar-specked scalp was a liquorice dipper without any sherbert to dip in. When his lips broke into a smile, every tooth was a caramel-centred slab of high-calorie menace, and Mazmin felt as if she had gained twenty pounds simply by looking at them. But where else could she turn her eyes? There was certainly no respite to be found in the rest of his figure.

“Let’s wrap this up,” he said in a booming rasp, and Mazmin felt flecks of nougat ping off her face as she stepped back in terror from his diet-raping grin.

“But I… I always brushed twice daily,” she stammered, feeling a drip of what certainly wasn’t icing trickle down the inside of her leg. “Once in the m-morning, and-”

The Horseman interrupted her by blowing through his gelatinous lips, their rubbery surfaces slapping together in a repulsive rattle.

“No concern of mine, meat-thing…”

———

But once I’d written 400 words I felt the tug of the manuscript, and my concentration gone, -KERCHUNK- , ball lost. Two left  – Play Again?

Pulling back hard on the spring-launch mechanism this time, I figure I’ll give the editing all I’ve got. A couple of pages get chalked up as successes, and I’m about to start on the third when I hit a paragraph that reminds me of the website. I never linked up the character pages, did I? It won’t take long…

One ball remaining. Play Again?

Full tilt. Time to play this sumbitch for maximum points.

siteinprogress

So, I link those <a href=”x”>’s like they’ve never been linked before… and then – hm. Gotta practice a blues riff I was messing about with earlier…

THUNK.

0x multiplier. 0 plays remaining.

Dammit. Tea-time, and no motivation to return back to any of the previous tasks.

Still, tomorrow’s a new day, with hopefully record levels of focus… and a trip to see Star Trek, which can’t be too bad.

Also today in a spat of procrastination, reading Jaym Gates’ blog post on various things writerly, forum RPGerly and Firefly fan-filmerly, she brought up the subject of tags, which I’d not given much thought about as of yet, but in the interest of hooking folk and drawing them into the hazy digital metaphor (Welcome! :D) I must remember to stick some in!

Well,  time for one last shot at focussing my attention long enough to get some more words down before the day is done. Please do feel free to say hi if you’re dropping in by the way, always nice to hear from people!

“No blueys today!”

May 17, 2009

said multipurpose local shop man to me this afternoon, taking a moment out from teaching his ten-year-old son how to run the business. No blueys today. Each word a bullet to the chest. And he was right – the crispy M&Ms were sold out. How’s a guy supposed to get shit done without a regular supply of his favorite chocolate munchies?

Clearly this was an omen, as my efforts to get a preliminary version of my website online have met with only marginal success. I can get a shaky text version of one page up – ‘index.php’, and can’t for the life of me figure out how to link it to the rest of the pages that I’ve uploaded. Well, it’s not quite ready yet anyway so I’ve got a few days to figure it out, and I’m quite proud of the re-design so far; it’s alot more streamlined than the previous version which up and died on me.

I wonder what the silver lining for the M&M cloud will be. Not getting diabetes, perhaps.

Oh, and I decided on ‘without the ‘e’ , for the book title. So NOCTURN it is! Mark it, and mark it well…

*Disclaimer: Excess sugar doesn’t actually give you diabetes, but it seemed too good an urban myth to pass up 😉

To ‘e’ or not to ‘e’

May 16, 2009

Nocturne logo copy

Nocturne.

Nocturn.

Hmm.

‘Til now, the novel’s been called Nocturne. However, that french twist it has doesn’t fit the language of the book, and the word itself has a certain meaning and origin in the book that I don’t want to conflict in the reader’s head. Nocturn, the more gutteral interpretation, would fit a lot better. Also, I quite like that rough ‘logo’ I just knocked up ¬_¬

Any thoughts?

Minor annoyance: last night I screwed up my website by accident, and have to start completely from scratch. God damn CSS unified template layout muttermuttermumble…