I have a couple of freelance web development jobs coming up in the New Year, as well as needing to extend my own NaNoWriMo scoreboard system, so I've been investigating possible rapid application development software to get me up and running with the least amount of effort. As you can perhaps guess from the corny title of this post, I've chosen CakePHP, a clone of Ruby on Rails in the language I already use for this site.

My new project is called Merlin, because my husband reckons it's black magic that would have had me burned at the stake in earlier times...

Continue reading "Let them eat cake!" »

Posted by Anne at 6:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, I'm up and running again after the sudden disappearance! Turns out that I was paying for hosting on a debit card that expired at the end of October, and I didn't get any notices from my ISP. Although they are generally very good, there's no way on their site to check your contact details, so I suspect they had an old email address for me. On the plus side, their support service was very prompt in answering my enquiry and getting me back online. A huge relief, especially as all my personal email comes via that account!

Posted by Anne at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Back in October I decided to start a LiveJournal blog to replace this one, the better to communicate with my writer friends on Forward Motion. Unfortunately I stopped updating it once NaNoWriMo drew near, and I've since realised that I just couldn't bear to consign the ongoing record of my writing progress to a website that has no backups.

However I've already paid for a year's worth of LJ, so I decided to make the best of the situation. I've revived this blog on my own webspace, which I can back up as often as I like, but I've removed the entries that weren't related to my writing in any way. That sort of personal stuff - non-writing news and trivia - will go on LJ, where it doesn't matter too much if it disappears, whilst this will be the place for recording my writing progress and anything else I want to be able to look back on.

Posted by Anne at 9:27 AM | Permalink

I got my first email feedback today from someone who wanted to leave a comment on my blog. I have (with some trepidation) turned commenting on, and am waiting for the deluge of spam...

Addendum: commenting is turned off on older entries, to reduce the chance of spammers finding me via Google. I will be installing further anti-spam measures in due course :)

Posted by Anne at 7:35 PM | Permalink

I moved this website again today, so that I can use my married name as the domain. It was also a good opportunity to give the pages the once-over and makes sure they were up to date, and spruce up the colour scheme, which I wasn't entirely happy with on the old site. Luckily it was very easy to transfer this blog - just a database import and a few tweaks to the template to work with the latest version of Movable Type.

Now, if I could only summon the energy to do some actual writing...

Posted by Anne at 2:15 PM | Permalink

Well, I finally got around to uploading my website to my new account! I had hoped to wait until it was finished, but the demise of my iBook made it more urgent to get my blog set up where I could get to it more reliably. So, at the moment there are some blank pages and the design is a bit spartan, but at least I haven't lost all my hard work!

Posted by Anne at 10:19 AM | Permalink

After much trawling of the web, and especially reading through relevant threads on webhostingtalk.com, I've settled on United Hosting as the new home for my site. They cost a bit more than my previous host but offer extra facilities such as SSH access, so I think it will be worth it. It's also a good opportunity to give the site a serious overhaul; after eight months online, I have a better idea of what works and what doesn't!

Continue reading "Hosting" »

Posted by Anne at 12:23 PM | Permalink

I just had an email from the company who host this site to say that they had had to restore my files from backup after another user's malicious script had overwritten files on my webspace! OK, it's nice to know they had sorted it out, but the problem had been caused by insecure permissions settings on the shared server, i.e. it's ultimately the host's fault. My faith in their competence being thus shaken, I have decided to take this blog offline temporarily whilst I find a new home for it.

Fortunately I can just set up a new copy of MT on my laptop and run it locally, so I'll continue to add entries even though no-one will be able to read them until it goes back online. After all, this blog is meant to be a useful diary for me, not just a publicity stunt :)

Posted by Anne at 12:06 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Anne at 7:46 AM | Permalink

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

Continue reading "Secret Theatre" »

Posted by Anne at 7:09 PM | Permalink

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

Continue reading "Blogs within blogs" »

Posted by Anne at 1:20 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Anne at 7:16 PM | Permalink

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 :)

Posted by Anne at 8:00 AM | Permalink

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!

Posted by Anne at 9:58 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Anne at 12:56 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Anne at 7:48 AM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Anne at 6:47 PM | Permalink