Before tonight's CWIL meeting I combed the shelves of Borders for non-fiction books for my research. In the end I bought 4 paperbacks: "English Society 1580-1680" by Keith Wrightson, "The Age of Shakespeare" by Frank Kermode, and "The Tudor Housewife" and "Pleasures and Pastimes in Tudor England", both by Alison Sim. That should keep me busy for a while!

By happy coincidence, someone at work is selling 2 tickets for a trip to the Globe Theatre on the 24th, which I had previously failed to sign up for in time. It's to see a production of "The Winter's Tale" in Elizabethan costume (tho' not one of their all-male productions, sadly). Of course I snapped them both up, so Richard and I can go.

Every serious writer these days has their own website, complete with blog to keep their fans interested and informed. Since I develop websites for a living, I have absolutely zero excuse for not having one! For starters, I shall take down my old site and replace it with a temporary one that has some minimal info about me and writing. After that I want to try out some blog software and put together a more sophisticated site.

Decided to try bBlog, an open source project, as it uses familiar stuff like PHP, MySQL and Smarty. The admin interface doesn't work very well on my Palm, but I guess I can hack the template to cure that.

Another CWIL meeting, another Jacobethan shopfest :) This time it was music and movies: a CD of Dowland songs and DVDs of "Shakespeare in Love", "Stage Beauty" and Kenneth Branagh's "Henry V", courtesy of a '3 for £20' offer :D

If I'm going to be writing 2-3000 words a day, I need reliable technology that doesn't interfere with the flow of words. I currently have 4 options:

Thought is the parent of the deed, as Thomas Carlyle put it. So today I went out and bought a G4 iBook (a refurbished Panther model, thus saving over £100 on the price) :D
I can see it will take some getting used to; I've only driven a Mac on a handful of occasions in the past 25 years, and not at all in the last five.
I also bought a copy of "The Reckoning: the Murder of Christopher Marlowe" by Charles Nicholl; a bit of Elizabethan intrigue should set the old imagination racing!

Spend a large part of the day copying files from my old laptop over the WLAN to either the iBook (stuff I have immediate use for) or the desktop PC (stuff to archive). A tedious job, but necessary.

After several frustrating attempts to use to bBlog's web interface, only to have it lose my data, I've decided to try an alternative called Blosxom. As its name suggests, it was written for OSX, though it can run on any Perl-CGI web server. It's very basic, but looks like it should be easy to integrate with my own pages. However it uses individual text files instead of a database and gets the posting date from the file, so I'll need to add plugins that read the date from a meta tag in the file instead.

OK, I've given up on trying to get Blosxom's date plugins working, which means it still shows FTP upload times as the posting times of entries - which is sod all use! Development on the project seems to be stalled by the original author's withdrawal, and I don't have the time to wait, or to fix the code myself. I'm thus hoping that my third choice, Movable Type, will meet my needs. I first came across it about three years ago, so it's certainly a mature product (by web standards!). I've even ordered a couple of books on it from Amazon, so it'd better work!

Took my iBook into work today (in case I needed tech support) and finished installing everything I need. I now have Apache, PHP and MySQL running, with MT and PHPMyAdmin; Firefox & Thunderbird; X11 and The GIMP; Palm Desktop for syncing the LifeDrive; and AbiWord for writing. Woohoo!

Well, having finally got a decent blog app set up on my iBook, I can at last start copying my paper journal and Palm notes into blog format. MT is great: very easy to use "out of the box". For now I'm going to concentrate on getting entries into the database; I can play with the template later :)

The Movable Type books finally arrived today. Although I've already learned a good deal just by using it, there are plenty of features covered in the books that will help me get things done quicker than if I relied on my own devices.

With some help from the Movable Type books, my website is starting to shape up.

Yesterday's trip to London was exhausting but definitely worth it - almost as good as a trip back in time (and without the smells!)

My novel series and its website finally have a name - hurrah!

I just imported my local copy of the MT database into my online MT installation, et voila! - Secret Theatre is on the Internet :) Not much time for blogging this morning as I have to get ready for work, but I wanted to record this momentous occasion.

Tomorrow I start my big push to write a first draft; I'm both nervous and excited :} I keep telling myself that I can do this, I just have to immerse myself in the story and use a combination of planning and spontaneity to keep up the momentum. Oh well, too late to back out now...