Getting Rid of Asterisks: The Revenge

Asterisk editing is finally complete!

The whole of CP Alpha has finally been edited to so that it’s easier to read, including chapters that hadn’t been broken up yet. It came to a total of 92 chapters, each anywhere from 3 to 6 pages, but usually around 4. There’s a small gap from missing logs between chapter 90 and 91 but there’s some time until that goes up. That can be tracked down or filled in.

Chapter 92 is not, of course, the end. Because we never finished CrossedPaths and are planning on rebooting it. We might put a pretty little bow at the end of 92 though. I kind of ends rather abruptly.

Meanwhile I’m experimenting with scheduled posting. I’ve queued about 3 chapters and they should be going live on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 6am Pacific time. If it works, I’ll go ahead and set  up the remainder, which should still be several hours of work but not nearly as daunting as the asterisk thing.

With that automated, I can work on other things. I’m thinking the art blog, since we have a lot of nice stuff that’s just hiding on drives. But really, it’s 2014 now and the deal was new year, new CP…
…and webhost renewal. That needs to happen soon too.

 

Getting Rid of Asterisks: The Update

Well that took a little longer than intended, it is now almost July! The necessary editing is complete, however, and I should be able to begin editing the log entries with the improved version soon.

Getting Rid of Asterisks

In addition to formatting the chapter-ed logs for upload, I’ve started going back through the already uploaded logs and changing the way action and conversation is formatted. Since this was an RP played in a variety of chat rooms and instant messengers, it made sense at the time to enclose actions withing asterisks *she said* and leave what was meant to be spoken without any punctuation, such as quotation marks.

This, it turns out, is really hard to read. This is also serving as a third editing pass, so I’m catching the odd typo I missed the first two times. Aside from removing an excessive amount of ellipsis, I haven’t changed much of the content at all. We’ll see what Arrin decides to change when she makes her own editing passes.

On the update note, I’ll start adding new logs once I have caught up and made these changes to the fifteen already posted. I would like to find a way to prepare a post (or several) ahead of time that would then “go live” on certain days, like a webcomic might.

That way new content could be posted even when I’m otherwise too busy or out of net range, posts are nicely spaced time-wise rather than dumped all at once, and perhaps it could coordinate with my fellow evil author’s schedule so she can review and make changes as needed without being inundated with 80+ logs.

 

On the webpage front, I found out how to change the color of the “previous” and “next” links so that they not only match the rest of the color scheme but are also visible.

I’m also playing with categories and tags. The first theme we used only had categories so I used those to make a note of what characters were in the chapter, any location notations, and so forth. These were preserved when we migrated to the new theme, but the new theme also allows for tags. Thus, I’ve decided to change it up a little.

Characters, locations, events (such as nightmares) seem better suited for the tag area while I’m using categories as a broader filing system; the logs will now be categorized as “Crossed Paths Alpha” to distinguish from Bonus or AU content.

I’ve stretched this to the ArtBlog, where the characters in a picture are tagged and the artist is the category. Not quite sure what to do here on the News roll though. I think I’ll stick with categories, at least for the time being.

Minor Outage

I noticed yesterday that the News page wasn’t displaying at all. I reloaded the WordPress theme just now and that seems to have fixed it. (I was concerned that it may have gotten mixed up with a nearly forgotten test page that was recently brought to my attention with a DreamHost ‘hack’ report. No problem, easily fixed by deleting everything since it was irrelevant.)

Anyway, it appears the real issue was an error with the theme that was easily fixed by updating and reloading. I’m not sure how long the page was down but it’s back now!

Meanwhile I’ve begun work again on preparing logs for upload. No new updates yet but I hope to have something by the end of this week.

 

New Theme

In the past few weeks I’ve been changing things around, looking at new themes and playing with color schemes. I finally settled on Graphene, which is highly customizable and has lots of little features that I like though I’m still at a loss as for a good color scheme. (If you’re looking at a bunch of somewhat garish greens, then you see my placeholders for indecision. If you’re looking at some other colors, then hopefully I’ve found something pleasing to the eye!)

In the meantime, as I take an search engine fueled crash course in color theory, I’ve been working on tidying up the logs and removing some of the artifices that were needed to make it look nice with the old theme. (Note to self: Something funky going on with the text formatting on Chapter 11. That may need to be redone entirely.)

And then there’s this other thing I’ve been working on, though it’s still extremely rough.

If the previous iteration of the site was CrossedPaths v2.0, consider this v2.1 and still in progress. :)

October 2010 Progress

I’ve updated the splash page, as there’s enough content to no longer warrant a “coming soon” page. I also learned how to make an HTML redirect page, yay me! (I figure since there’s hardly anything on the main page that it should just go ahead and redirect here. You can also click on the banner if you don’t want to wait 5 seconds.)
Perhaps in the future we’ll have more to put there but for now everything’s going on back here. It’s a little plain right now, if anyone has any suggestions feel free to pass them along.

Updated WordPress again and deleted about 80 spam comments from the logs. I’ll add the same restrictions to it as I mentioned in the previous post, er, last year?

No progress yet on resuming the log posting but that’s coming.

It’s been crazy, my friends. Thanks for your patience with me.

…and Back. Again.

Soon after my previous post my brand new hard drive gave up the ghost taking with it everything since May 2008 (my most recent backups).

It will take me a little while to recover from that, considering I need to re-do all of the changes to my Crossed Paths filing system to catch up to where I was before.

I’ve also changed commenting ability on the News and ArtBlog sites to people who have registered and are logged in. This has cut down immensely on the amount of spam coming through. The Logs page hasn’t had this problem yet but if it starts to develop it I’ll do that there too.

Consider this fair warning.

I haven’t figured out yet how to get the images on the ArtBlog page to center. They used to but something in the latest WordPress updates seems to have broken that function. I may instead just align everything to the left for consistency.

Similarly, posting text seems to have become somewhat less customizable. I have to go in and manually add break tags in order to get a space between paragraphs, whereas before a simple double-return would take care of that.

Finally, November is NaNoWriMo and I plan on participating this year. I know there’s been a huge hiatus from updating Logs and Art due to my technical difficulties but I plan on NOT updating during November. If I do, it’s an unplanned bonus. Otherwise hopefully by December I’ll finally have everything back up to speed so that I can update with ease again.

Thanks for your patience!

And We’re Back!

I’ve got my new computer up and running,  deleted the approximately 2,600 spam comments (I’m not joking about that number), and have upgraded WordPress.  Hopefully that will take care of the spam issue but if not I’ll hit the thing with higher security requirements which will mean that all commenters need to have an account and be approved.

Expect to see some more activity in the Logs and ArtBlog sections! I plan on working a little bit on each per week as time allows.

On Hold

The posting of logs is on hold, as it has been for the past month, until my desktop computer is fixed.  I’m now on my laptop which has been restored to being able to connect to the internet but all of the logs are trapped on my 120GB harddrive that is safe and fine and undamaged but is inaccessable without a computer that works.

Repairs are slow thanks to work and such. I hope to be back up and running soon but I will make no predictions as they’ve all proven false during the entirety of May.

Art Blog!

The Art Blog is up and functional!  Holst, you’ll need to set up a new account there but it can be the same info as here.  Soq’s already done so.  I also upgraded you both here from Authors to Editors because there’s more options that way. The next step is Admin which has too many things to play with.

 

For the art blog, I tried to set it up as easy as possible but its taken some fiddling to figure things out. There are a few things you should make sure to do if you upload a picture.

 

As soon as you upload the image, a bigger option box will appear. These are the things you need to do:

 

Caption = This is optional but in my fiddling around with things this seems to be the easiest way to insert text without it becoming a huge hassle, especially if you’re adding multiple images.

 

Click the button that says FILE URL. This is important. This will let us click on the image to open a full version.

 

Align = Center.

 

Size = Thumbnail. This way the full size doesn’t stretch the frames.

 

When you’re done click Insert into post.

 

Back in the post editing area if you want to add any more descriptions (such as who the art is by) feel free to do so.  On the side there is a box called Categories.  Check the appropriate boxes (like Azrun if the image includes that little fox) and add more categories if you feel the need to do so. (You should be able to with your new permissions.)

 

Then publish! Yay!

 

 

Meanwhile, I’m still working on figuring out how to make it display who the author of the post is and if we can include an icon with that.

 

ETA: Done! Except for the icon bit which might be a bit trickier and harder to integrate with the look of the whole shebang.

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