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.

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.

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.

I went to bed with my FTP client slowly deleting the old files for Drupal so I could upload the new ones, and that was exactly what I did when I got up in the morning. However, with nearly 18K files, there was no way the upload was going to complete before I needed to head out to work and I didn’t want to interrupt the upload process while I was in transit. (Remember this.) I left my machine to do its work while I went to do mine, and you know how that went from the previous WIP Update. Well, when I got back home, I found that the connection to the FTP server had timed out and the client was still stubbornly trying to ram files through without success. As I’ve only ever done small-scale uploads until now, I didn’t quite handle things as efficiently as I could’ve, but that doesn’t change the fact that my FTP connection is only good for about 6K files.

I spent the evening doing iteration after iteration trying to get those dang files across. While I was doing that, I was seriously looking into alternatives to Drupal. Joomla strikes me as too similar to WordPress, which is fine for the blog but not really suited for what I want to do with the main site. Concrete5 had some recommendations, but as I was testing a demo, I remembered doing so before and not liking it then either. Also, like Drupal, it has a nasty habit of making changes to the source code you input, only it does things that the current HTML rules don’t like, and I really don’t need that. At the cost of having the basic framework designed for me, I was looking into something that wasn’t WYSIWYG, which led me to CMS Made Simple. It’s a lot closer to what I want, even if it’d take more work to develop the skeleton of the site myself. I vowed that if the upload failed again, I was hopping ship. However, after something like the eighth or ninth try, I finally got all the files uploaded and everything was functional again. The only thing really holding me back is the fact that Drupal is already optimized for mobile, which would’ve taken a fair bit of effort for me to design myself. Also, I learned a lot from the repeated failures in the update process, so I feel it will go a lot smoother next time.

During the FTP shenanigans, I was doing offline prep work, so I’m ready to go all in reconstructing the site content. While there’s some appeal of using my free time in the office for writing, I really need to focus on getting the site back in order. And with that, the work begins anew. Stay tuned.

With the accessibility issues sorted out, I could return to my work without any hindrance. I continued to flesh out the “James” section in preparation for the main content. Of course things had to be going too smoothly for me because as the evening’s winding down, I get a notice that a new version of Drupal’s out and I need to update. Now, we can’t have it be a simple single click to update like in WordPress. Oh, heavens me, no. You’ve got to strip out a decent chunk of your files, then upload the new ones. I have the distinct feeling it would’ve been faster to delete the old files in CPanel’s File Manager rather than my FTP client, but I did the latter and so that was going to take the rest of the night. Joy.

One of my concerns is that the htaccess file was set to resolve the issues of the past couple days and now I have to replace it. I of course saved a copy of the old version, but I need to go through the code and see what’s changed with the new version so I don’t screw up anything there. Hopefully I can get it all working without too much trouble as Drupal seems to update rather regularly. It may not have been great for security, but I liked having gone all those years with Wolf CMS without updating anything. Well, such is the price we pay to stay on the cutting edge. If there aren’t any major issues getting things up and running again, I should be able to resume work without too many headaches. Will it work out that well? If recent history is any indication, no, but I’d welcome a pleasant surprise for a change. Stay tuned.

Without access to Drupal, I worked on reconstructing and converting offline copies of the site’s code. After posting the previous entry of this series, I got to thinking about the solution proposed by tech support yesterday. I wasn’t sure if they were going to do it or if they expected me to do it, so I decided I might as well try it myself. I set subdomains for the blog and the wiki, then the redirects, and while I regained access to the wiki, I lost access to WordPress. Well, fudge. I contacted tech support again, and though it took at least two hours if not closer to three, when it was all said and done, I had full access to Drupal, WordPress and PMWiki. Huzzah.

From there, I went about putting together the skeleton for the “James” section of the site and now need to go forward with the content. I intend to restore story content first and then the reviews. This will be a hefty undertaking, but once it’s done, I can work on the appearance of the site to get it more to my liking. Expect the next few days to be little more than just updates on content restoration. That’s all I’ve got for the time being. Stay tuned.

The first thing I did was makes some tweaks to the Update Archive that I had on my mind at the close of business yesterday. One thing I’ve decided to do was rebrand the Five Arcs as the Six Arcs as there’s now more than enough reason to elevate the Else Arc to the same level as the other five. I was updating the internal links and setting up a redirect so any legacy links won’t be broken. Before getting into the core section of the site, I wanted to chronicle the previous day’s activity, only to get a 403 error when I tried to log in to WordPress. Now, I’d had a similar issue with the wiki the day before, but the problem didn’t affect the blog… until it did. I went through the solutions I could find before finally deciding to contact HostGator for help. They restored access to the blog at the cost of access to the main site. The proposed solution was to set up a subdomain to avoid further disputes over permissions between Drupal and WordPress (and theoretically PMWiki as well). There’s supposed to be a followup, but I’m not sure if I’m expected to do any of it myself.

My motivation level dipped quite a bit after dealing with all that, so I took a nap after supper and when I got up, I started working on rounding out the offline backup with the updated code. That alone can keep me busy a good long while and it was enough to occupy me for the rest of the evening. Between archived versions of the pages via the Wayback Machine and the original database, I was filling in the gaps in my offline archive. Once I have access to the main site again, I can start plugging in the content for the pages. The current situation gives me the opportunity to make more changes to the site than I might otherwise. Once it’s all done, we can welcome Palidor Media 3.0. How long ago was it that I unveiled the 2.0 version of the site? It’s been ages, hasn’t it?

Well, anyway, depending on accessibility, I may just be doing offline work for the foreseeable future. In a bit of good news, I managed to get through my writer’s block on TWH, so whenever I want a break from my work on the code, I could actually get some writing done. Stay tuned.

I continued my work on reconstituting the Update Archive. I was able to significantly improve my efficiency when it came to swapping out the old code for the new. I was able to complete the long journey to 2024, but as I was running out of time, I realized there were some other tweaks I needed to make to the files. Better to get it knocked out know when the list is still short. (Yes, I can search for specific pages, but I did like Wolf’s folder structure for keeping everything organized.)

When it comes to the look of the site, I’m having a real uphill battle trying to override the default CSS. It’s just something I’m going to have to hammer away at until I get it fixed. The current settings for blockquotes are really obnoxious and I need my div classes to format text the way I want. (I refuse to rely on the WYSIWYG text editor. The code those things produce is just so daggone ugly.)

For now, I want to focus on the grunt work of creating all the files and then I can focus on making it all look the way I want. As this is finals week, we don’t have to pull full days, so that means more time to focus on getting the site back up in working shape. Stay tuned.