I started the day’s efforts with trying to get a custom theme going, but I don’t know enough about how everything functions, so the results were rather messy, prompting me to revert back to Olivero. Speaking of Olivero, for some reason the bottom navigation on the movie review pages is floating to the right of the pictures, even though the two are in separate divs. It appears to be a stylesheet issue as it behaves like it’s supposed to when you strip away all styling. Anyway, I spent a good hour or so fighting with this before I decided to set it aside and resume the work restoring content. I was actually fairly tired and ended up napping a sizable chunk of the day, so I only ended up posting 36 reviews. I’m just five shy of finishing Page 2, so that’s something.

As noted in earlier entries, I have a fair bit of work-work to occupy me at the moment, so don’t expect progress by leaps and bounds, but I’ll be using my break time to continue the work and there will be the evenings as well. Next week is my last chance to use my special leave days, so I’ll have a nice five-day weekend to hopefully make some good headway. I’m also thinking about resuming regular updates, using writing time as a change of pace from just plugging in page after page. We’ll see how it goes. Stay tuned.

As today was the last day of school and therefore a half-day, and because I had plenty of actual work to do, I didn’t bring my laptop with me to work on the site while I was in the office, and because I napped until suppertime after getting back home, I didn’t actually gain much in the way of time to work on the site. That being said, I did make it partway into Page 2 of the movie reviews, up to Arabesque. I’m constructing a new index based on directors as I go, so the process of putting up the reviews is taking just a little bit longer than it would otherwise.

Here in Japan, the vernal equinox is a holiday, so that means plenty of time to focus on the site. While my initial plan was to focus on restoring content, my frustration with the default theme resisting any changes I make to it is reaching the point where I may just have to take a moment to craft either a sub-theme or an all-new theme of my own so I can get things to actually look the way I want. It’s pretty annoying to see a giant column in the picture index because I can’t display images inline. (And the heck of it is that I got it working earlier, about the only change I made to actually stick, only for it to have apparently reverted and then ignored my dummying out of the block display condition in the stylesheets. Rrg…) Anyway, I was doing some research in the current trends in CSS design and I may be able to recreate all the positives of the Olivero theme without the interference. The situation calls for some experimentation.

Anyway, between restoring the still massive amounts of review content that remains and getting the design of the site to better align with my vision, I’ve got plenty to keep me occupied on my day off. Continue to follow our ongoing coverage here for more updates. Stay tuned.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.