Although I didn’t have any work-work making demands of my time, I decided to spend some time with my financials, to include filing my US taxes. I’m sure Intuit appreciates the $60 to keep Uncle Sugar off my back for another year.

Anyway, even just working on the site after lunch, I made some good headway, posting 59 reviews. The afternoon went so well that I can be forgiven for slacking off in the evening. I decided to take a trip down memory lane to review the misadventures of ten years ago. I just recently cleared the ledger of that fumble, so I guess that’s one more mistake of the past safely interred. Will I have the sense to stick to the safe and level road or will I venture off the beaten path again? I’ll be honest with you. If certain plans come together in the next two or three years, it may be the latter. More on that when there’s something to report. In the meantime, I’ve got a lot of work yet to do, so we’ll see how productive I can be over the weekend. I decided to start keeping count of the reviews I’ve posted to measure my progress. I currently stand at 177 of 1019 (and that’s just for movies). My labors continue… Stay tuned.

Today didn’t see massive progress, only about 20-some-odd reviews. I managed to finish my work-work, which gives me a little breathing room during the daylight hours, but when I finished, instead of working on the site right away, I was fiddling around with the Tellus world map. I’ve been trying to rework the scale of things for a while now, trying to cross-reference with some of the more proportional projections of our own world and adjusting things accordingly. Anyway, one idea I’ve had was to move the Hannibal region from the northwestern corner of the Central Continent down to the southwest, so it would be nearer to Zephyr, Notos and Euros. (You see it never did rub me right the way Boreas was so far removed from the other Kingdoms of the Wind.) To avoid changing the overall geography too much, I had to flip the Hannibal map, which then required me to adjust all the references in the peripheral materials and later in Tellus when I get to proofing it. The Eastern Steppes where the Dragonriders hail from is no longer quite so expansive, but they’re closer to the Valley of Tiamat, which makes sense. Also, with the Dwarf and Goblin communities closer to the ones we know from TTWC, it makes more sense that there would be a lot of cultural and linguistic continuity between them. It’s a bit of a sticking point that El-Sidar, El-Alar and El-Haman are now somewhat clustered together, leaving El-Simil as the only one of the Five Ancients in the Northern Hemisphere, but I suppose it could work conceptually for El-Simil to be more isolated among the Elven communities. As for the former location of Hannibal, I’ve decided to dub the region “Hyperboreas” and add a legend that King Boreas fled there after his ouster. It’s not the northernmost land if I maintain my current configuration of the world, but it is the northern extremity of the Central Continent, so there’s that.

What does all this have to do with the reconstruction efforts on the site? Other than being the reason why more progress wasn’t made, not much, but in the absence of more to report, it’s something to talk about, right? Anyway, there should be less stuff making demands of my time tomorrow and there’s the weekend beyond that, so we’ll see what we can get done. Stay tuned.

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.