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.

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.

I continued to implement the edits to Tico1 up through Chapter 11. Once I’m done reconstructing the site (or whenever I need a break), I’ll continue the proofing work from Chapter 12. I also did a quick pass with the spellchecker through Tico2, 3 and 4 to add to the custom dictionary and see if I couldn’t catch anything that slipped past me all those years ago. One small thing which typifies how obsessive I can be over little details is the spellings of “civvy” vs. “civvie”. I favor the latter, but then I decided to change it to the former, only to finally decide that “civvy” is the singular noun form and “civvie” is the adjectival form, thus warranting another pass through all the manuscripts where citations of the word can be found. I’m sure no one else does this (the distinction between “civvy” and “civvie”, that is), but at least this way I’ll have internal consistency.

I mentioned before that I was adjusting the rendering of dialectic speech and that was the main thrust of the day’s efforts, but I was also making some adjustments to stage direction and such as I went. Small changes, but they add up. Once I’m done, I’ll have to compare how the wordcount has changed. Anyway, it’s back to the grunt work, so look for further updates in the Road to Reconstruction series. Stay tuned.

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.

Since I saw fit that my earlier proofing work warranted one of these posts, I’ll do so here as well. As you may recall, before all this nonsense with the site began, my proofing work had extended to the Space Arc shorts and Tico1. Well, as I was reconstructing their pages, I was implementing the edits I had made two weeks ago. For the shorts, there wasn’t much to change, but with my reworking of the dialectic speech in Tico1 (which will of course extend to the other three books when I get to them), there’s a bit more elbow grease being applied. As you might imagine, I’m kinda thankful for character like Matt whose speech is stiffer and more formalized. Less work for me. Anyway, life needs rigor and so I’ll continue on my way. There’ll probably be one more post like this as I get caught up on the proofing work I’ve done so far on Tico1, but probably not another one for a while unless I take a wild hair to do some story writing as a change of pace. Stay tuned.

While most of my colleagues were busy with the last round of finals and getting their grades in, I was done with my part and after yesterday’s fun, there was nothing to impede me from driving right on along with the reconstruction work, so I brought my laptop with me and spent most of my time in the office working on the Stories section. (I did answer a few questions about grammar and such and helped another colleague with a little technical project, so I wasn’t totally wasting my employer’s time and money by being there.)

While there would have been a certain elegance to restoring the story content in the order it was originally posted, I was drawing a lot of information from the old database, so I was adding things in the order they were indexed. I finished restoring EM before heading homeward and would have JJ up before the evening was out. I was also getting a lot of the teasers and a couple shorts up as well. While I was at it, I decided to count out how many stories I have listed in total. 119 novels and 20 shorts, of which 23 novels and 13 shorts are currently completed. I’m probably going to have to pick up the pace if I want to finish before I buy the farm.

Anyway, all I can do is keep hammering away until the work is done. I will, of course, keep you posted. Stay tuned.