Category: Ramblings

Mar 19 2024

The Road to Recovery – Day 17

Work-work has actually picked up as we draw the current school year to a close and gear up for the new one, so I only did a bit of work on the site during my lunch break and the last hour thereabouts before I headed home. That was enough to finish the remaining teasers and the still early in serialization WttW1, as well as make the post on the front page announcing the achievement of this milestone. Once I was back at the ranchero, I spent the evening putting together the skeleton of the movie reviews section. Now all I have to do is plug in the 1000+ reviews before I can move on to the other sections (about 400 for TV shows, 500 for manga, 80-something for shorts, 45 video games and 11 books). It’s still a lot of work, but the end is in sight. If I continue to work at a decent pace, the goal of finishing by Easter seems quite doable. Now I’ve just got to do it. Stay tuned.

Mar 17 2024

The Road to Recovery – Day 16

I got up early to remotely attend my niece’s birthday party, which meant that I had extra time to work on the site. I finished CeleKing2, CeleKing3 and TG in relatively short order, leaving me with some 20+ teasers to round out the Stories section. I took care of the remainder in the Earth Arc, Cross Arc and If Arc, but just started on the Else Arc when I decided to call it a day. I’m almost there. I just have to wrap up the work in the Else Arc and then it’s on to the reviews. The road ahead may yet be long, but there’s a glimmer of the light at the end of the tunnel. Stay tuned.

Mar 16 2024

The Road to Recovery – Day 15

Had another productive day. Dove right into the Cross Arc novels and finished NagaTen, EM2, EM3 (as far as I’ve gotten), and CeleKing1 as well as starting in on CeleKing2. Now I just need to finish CeleKing2, then do CeleKing3 and Tzipi’s Garden and I’ll just have odds and ends to wrap up and that’ll do it for the Stories section. Another day should do it. Stay tuned.

Mar 16 2024

The Road to Recovery – Day 14

I did pretty well for myself today. I got through KoG2 and 3, T3W and KniTwi, as well as adding a fair number of teasers. From here, I can focus on the remaining Cross Arc stories and any other odds and ends and that should wrap up the Stories section of the site. I should be able to get all that done by the time the weekend’s out. From there, I can start getting the reviews back up, and once all the content is restored, I can start fighting with Drupal so I can get things looking the way I want. By my estimates, it’ll probably take another two weeks. We’ll tentatively set our goal at being fully functional by Easter. Now it’s back to work for me. Stay tuned.

P.S. While working on T3W, I did get sidetracked a bit doing some renaming of characters for greater consistency. Ended up renaming about half of Randwulf’s family tree, and that’s just for starters. I still have the other seven of the Eight Stars to go, but I’ll save that for another time, and maybe explain things in a Commentary post.

Mar 14 2024

The Road to Recovery – Day 13

I started by putting TTWC3 back together, then it was on to the Gladius Cycle teasers that were clustered together in the database (two that were more recently added are further down the line and will be picked up later) and after that, I rounded up all five Gladius Cycle novels and went through all the prep work with them before putting up KoG1. Now, I would’ve gone straight on to KoG2, but for whatever reason, I got to thinking about my “redact”-class divs (which I use to cross out material in the Update Archive that no longer exists on the site) and realized there was no point to use them when we have the <strike> tag. However, then I got to thinking that I’d heard the <strike> tag was deprecated, so I looked into it and then went through the Update Archive swapping out all the “redact” divs and any instances of the <strike> tag, which was more effort than you might think. (Steff was a rather active contributor in the early days of the site.)

With that done, you’d think I’d use the evening to at least get KoG2 up and running, but instead I got it in my head to update my records on the site’s analytics, and I paid particular attention to the HTTPS version of the site, which I’ve ignored until now. I haven’t actively started trying to redirect traffic to the HTTPS side until I began this reconstruction process, so I was surprised to find that there’s recorded traffic to the HTTPS side as early as June of 2018. Not much and almost all bots, but it was still there and there’s a rather different character to what pages are being targeted and where the traffic is coming from. Yes, I’m a sucker for this sort of thing, but I need to get back to the main task at hand. The goal is to finish the Gladius Cycle novels tomorrow. We’ll see if I can get it done. Stay tuned.

Mar 13 2024

The Road to Recovery – Day 12

Well, between scheduled and unscheduled interruptions, I fell short of my goal, only finishing TTWC1 and TTWC2. I would’ve at least gotten started on TTWC3, but I spent a fair bit of time going back through and updating links to HTTPS. (I’d thought I’d already done it, but then I realized that I’d started slacking off when I was digging into the story content.) Anyway, TTWC3 is on the menu next and after that, the Gladius Cycle. Stay tuned.

Mar 12 2024

The Road to Recovery – Day 11

Another day of respectable progress. Besides getting up a decent chunk of the Tellus Arc teasers, I also posted TWH, Tellus, the Umbriel Cycle shorts, and TBP. Next up will be the TTWC trilogy and after that, I can dig into the Gladius Cycle, so I should be done with the Tellus Arc in the next couple days. After that, probably another couple days to take care of the Cross Arc and one more to get anything left over. Then I can get to the reviews. Oh, yippie-skippy. We’ll see how well I can stick to this forecast. Stay tuned.

Mar 12 2024

The Road to Recovery – Day 10

Not having any work-work to do, I was able to throw myself into work on the site and managed to get Tico2-4 loaded. That takes care of all the Space Arc content, so according to the database, I’ve got some Tellus Arc material to do next. I thought I was going to get some of it done in the evening, but we had a going-away party for some retiring colleagues and by the time I got back to the ranchero, I promptly conked out in my chair, so no further progress to speak of. Tomorrow’s another day, so we’ll see what I can get done then. Stay tuned.

Mar 11 2024

The Road to Recovery – Day 9

Because I was still implementing edits in Tico1, I didn’t progress by leaps and bounds, but once I was finished with Chapter 11, it just became a matter of copy-pasting (with some minor corrections to the coding as I went). I was able to get all of Tico1 up, so that’s three novels down, 23 to go. Nothing to it but to do it. Stay tuned.

Mar 09 2024

The Road to Recovery – Day 8

Having now rounded out a full week of trials and travails, the grunt work of simply plugging in the HTML for the pages is the primary task for the time being. I was making pages for a lot of teasers until I got to the Space Arc. As mentioned in the WIP Update post, the edits from my proofing work on the Space Arc shorts and Tico1 before I nuked the site,were getting implemented as I was reconstructing their pages. As I’m doing some extensive rewrites to character dialog in Tico1 for better dialectic fidelity, the pace of the work slowed significantly when I got there. Now, instead of going through the whole book right now, I’ll only continue this work through Chapter 12, which was as far as I’d gotten with the proofing, then just copy over what I have for the rest of Tico1 and the other Tico series novels and go back to fully proof them later. Once I get the Tico novels up, the Space Arc will be good to go. Just one more step on the way. I imagine that’ll at least take another day or two. The work continues… Stay tuned.