Fabricati Diem - The Footnote Site Blog

Progress

2009-03-03T16:34:00.002Z

Technically, I have finished the Discworld MUD website!

Only technically, however, because one page needs a bit of polish, another section is present but vastly incomplete (and I haven't decided on a final design for the navigation), and one section was deliberately uploaded incomplete, on the grounds that I'll never get it done if I don't try to inspire myself by doing something radical.

But it still feels like a load off my mind. The site has no dead links on the main sections, and finishing it off properly suddenly feels much simpler.

Also, I've made a small breakthrough today. I have finally moved my local files onto my biggest pen drive, on which is installed Portable Apps and XAMPP.

At last I have found a *AMP setup that actually cooperates with me! And, even better, I can carry it around in my bag!

Which is nice, because there are definite security issues to be considered, and therefore I wouldn't want to install XAMPP or anything similar on my home PC. I've already had a hairy moment after setting up passwords on apache and MySQL and failing to login. All I'd done was spell the password wrong, but honestly! Great start.

Also dodgy: I've actually written these passwords down on a piece of paper. Very, very bad form... but I could feel them leaking out of my head as I typed them: I've never created a password and felt more certain I was going to forget it in my life! I think I'll just have to remember to login to it all on a regular basis, and memorise them ASAP. (Needless to say, these passwords are different to all my others.)

So there we go :) Looking forward to moving on with the other sections. Had some really nice ideas for the F3P section too (content rather than design, which is still undecided). I'm currently reading Pyramids, and while some of Sir Terry's books are easy to imagine on film, this one isn't - I think it's possibly the one which relies most heavily on ideas, send-up of stereotypes which are no longer really current, and comedy which is almost entirely in the writing.

But I can see a way to do it. And because I'd have to move so far away from a literal depiction of the book's contents, I might be able to get around the copyright issues sufficiently to put it online.

Mmmm. Have to give it some more thought when the time comes. I think the Books section must definitely come next. How could it not?! The only reason I started with the MUD was because I was stuck... ;)

*********

Hey! This is the first post of the year! Only 3 months in.... but what an auspicious-looking date: 3rd day of the 3rd month of the 9th year. Nice!

Arise Sir Pterry!

2008-12-31T10:19:00.002Z

Congratulations to Terry Pratchett for being knighted in the new year of 2009!

The Independent on Pterry's Knighthood

Although... is this the honours list for 2008 or 2009? I've never cared enough to wonder before.

I actually came in here to cheer about the fact that 2008 - a year almost as crappy as 2007 - is almost over. And to raise my glass - or, at this time of day, mug of tea - to the hope that 2009 will be a considerable improvement.

The website is going well, but very much in fits and starts. Hoping to be able to post a new section early in the new year, but I'm not quite there with it... and the FTP interface at Heart Internet seems to have gone a bit wrong. Still waiting for them to get back to me about why. Hope it's sorted soon, really don't fancy having to fiddle around with old-fashioned FTP-ing.

Just heard the Bangles' cover of Simon & Garfunkel's Hazy Shade Of Winter. Oooh, I remember that when it came out - it really was the springtime of my life. Hadn't heard the original at that point, and thought it was great. Now it sounds a bit tinny: can't help thinking how excellent a real rock cover of that song would be, using roughly the same arrangement as the Bangles.

'When your hopes just pass away, simply pretend that you can build them again'.

Not a bad mantra for New Year's Eve... It could be my song, right now.

Time, time, time, see whats become of me
While I looked around
For my possibilities
I was so hard to please
But look around, leaves are brown
And the sky is a hazy shade of winter

Hear the salvation army band
Down by the riverside, its bound to be a better ride
Than what youve got planned
Carry your cup in your hand
And look around, leaves are brown now
And the sky is a hazy shade of winter

Hang on to your hopes, my friend
Thats an easy thing to say, but if your hopes should pass away
Simply pretend
That you can build them again
Look around, the grass is high
The fields are ripe, its the springtime of my life

Ahhh, seasons change with the scenery
Weaving time in a tapestry
Wont you stop and remember me
At any convenient time
Funny how my memory slips while looking over manuscripts
Of unpublished rhyme
Drinking my vodka and lime

But look around, leaves are brown now
And the sky is a hazy shade of winter

Look around, leaves are brown
Theres a patch of snow on the ground...

Ah yes, you're never too old for a bit of teenage angst. Especially if you're a goth. ;)

So, do I have a New Year's resolution? I certainly do. And it's almost possible to achieve!

Get the MUD section of the site completed
Get at least a skeleton of the whole site done and online by this time next year
Complete a first draft of my book by this time next year
As soon as possible, achieve a proper sense of proportion re: work

And there we have it. The second and third are definitely achieveable - I just need to pull my finger out and get the hell on with it! The first one is too... I do see the end in sight. Although the Thynges To Do section will always be a work in progress. As it should be, I think.

The last one is more of a challenge, but it's the major one... if I spent less time being depressed about work, I could get of the first three done! And if I could just remind myself of how happy doing the first three makes me, I'd achieve that sense of proportion, I think.

Anyway, enough of that. My work diary is password protected... this one isn't!

Happy New Year to all of us ;)

Neither rain nor snow nor glo m of ni t...

2008-08-03T18:38:00.009+01:00

... although a couple of metaphorical big green things with teeth did mean that it's been one (hell of a) year since my last post.

A brief summary, in roughly chronological order:

1. Chinese buffet nearly killed me, due to my stuffing myself with about 2LB of cheap seaweed. How was I supposed to know it causes nearly disastrous dehydration? And, incidentally, a nearly catastrophic failure to digest food four months later. But never mind. I'm still here, and I'm feeling much better now.

2. Went to see the Josh Kirby exhibition in Liverpool on its very last day, September 30th 2007. Most excellent, and honestly, the man's work has to be seen up close to be truly appreciated; the book covers do it no justice whatever. It made many impressions in my mind, but the deepest is: awesome brushwork!

3. Terry Pratchett announced in October that he had been diagnosed with a rare form of early onset Alzheimers Disease, describing it as "an embuggerance". Hard to say anything about that which doesn't sound hopelessly trite. :(

4. Indulged in a new domain name: herebefootnotes.net. Yes indeed: the shiniest of shiny top-level domain names, with! [drumroll] privacy protection! Now, instead of being able to merely quiz the Whois database with a domain name in order to see the registrant's full name, home address, email address and phone number, all you'll get from my domain name is the address of the ISP through which it was made. How I love my web host! (Heart Internet - go visit them now!)

5. Finally erected a website on the world wide web, on my shiny (and marginally more expensive, especially with the privacy protection) domain. And it is... the Discworld MUD! On the grounds that I already had a lot of ideas in my head and didn't have to spend time wading through books to write it. Having said that, though, it has turned out to be rather vast... but I'm about halfway through it, and progressing nicely. Check it out at: http://www.herebefootnotes.net/

And there we have it. Possibly I'll be back next month to report some real activity :)

Web hosting idiocy

2007-08-03T16:30:00.000+01:00

Ho hum. Currently writing "intelligent" stuff for the Discworld MUD section of the site, and decided to try signing up the Heart Internet free web hosting option, to upload it when it's a bit more complete.

Last time I tried this, the wizard didn't seem to be working; but that was a couple of months ago, so I thought I'd have another go. Success! Moved swiftly through the sign-up process, no problems, and then reached the part where you're meant to choose the domain name to which you want to attach your free hosting account.

Had the bright idea of signing up "thefootnote.org.uk", as this will be one of its sub-sites (the most independent of the four, for reasons which will, some day, be obvious). Then, just as I'd click the button to make it so, realised I could just glue it to "sothis.co.uk", since my primary character is called Sothis, and it's an almost separate site - and then I could keep "thefootnote.org.uk" pointing here. Sweet.

So, being clever, I just clicked the "Back" key on my browser, selected "sothis.co.uk" from the list, and clicked the "make it so" (can't remember what it's really called) button.

Result: one hosting package, two domain names pointing to it... only one of which will let you in to the file management system. D'Oh!

Tried a few things to fix it, but ultimately had no option but to fill in a customer support ticket. Argh. They must think me such an idiot... and rightly so in this case.

Bah. [here comes the excuse] It's because I'm still half-asleep after three weeks annual leave. And it's Friday afternoon... I'm sooooo tired! And I'm going out with the rest of the department tonight; we're going to the Chinese Buffet for all-you-can-eat-for-a-tenner (*thinks irresistably of Harga's House of Ribs*). Yum! Although I'd frankly rather go home and collapse on the settee in front of the telly...

Mmmmmm... at least choosing stuff off the menu won't require much too much intellectual effort ;)

Success!

2007-07-14T13:37:00.000+01:00

And it has! Hurray!

So I think I might leave it for now... doubt very much anyone's going to come and say anything scintillating.

Unless a Google-person comes along and sees the reference to the previous error. In which case, the code etc. was this:

bX-9z85b6
Additional information
blogID: 35004269
host: www.blogger.com
postID: 6816568108542143113
uri: /post-edit.do

Hope it helps. The non-existent dud post is still listed in the total number of posts thing in the Dashboard, although I can't actually "see" it.

Test message #2

2007-07-14T13:31:00.000+01:00

Bah. Tried to post a test message to try and investigate why my comments link doesn't seem to be appearing (despite setting everything to "Show"), and the whole thing went weird!

Got an error message from Google, saying I should report it, complete with an error code... and could I find anywhere to report errors? Could I bloody hell. So I've put the error code into a Note (hurray for Opera :D ), and I'm having another go.

I think it may have been caused by including the Transliteration link - just thought I would, for the hell of it (it said it would help with developing the tool) - and when I started typing in here, all the text was appearing right-to-left instead of the normal left-to-right, and word-wrap disappeared... so I suspect the interface had just got a bit confused. Now I've removed it, everything's gone back to normal.

So, here I is again, trying to discover if making a post with the Reader Comments explicitly allowed will sort out the original problem of no posts. Hope so...

Friday 13th!

2007-07-13T21:38:00.000+01:00

Wooooo! And it's always been a good date for me. Today being no exception - actually managed to sit down and do some work on my infamous site (only 11 months after I thought of doing it...)

As mentioned in previous posts, the course of this noble endeavour has been far from smooth (along with everything else in my life... bah.), but today I've created a nice stylesheet and a nice graphic :) Sounds a bit puny, but I'm really pleased with it. And now there's the option to create mini-polls in this place, too :) Nice. I do miss my shiny GigaBlogs blog, with its rather impressive spacescape, but Blogger is a lot more functional.

Ho hum. What a boring post. I think I'll probably delete all of these once I actually get the damn site online.

The Latest Cunning Plan

2007-06-07T16:47:00.000+01:00

My ISP announced a wonderful new service last week: for £4.99 a year, you can withold your full details in the Whois database.

Meaning what? I hear you ask.

Meaning that I can now have a .net or .com address without letting the entire universe know my full address and phone number. In fact, having reserved a .net domain and applied this lovely add-on at the same time, it looks as though even my name is hidden. Fabby indeed!

So I've actually moved the hosting package I bought in January to the new domain and redirected this domain back here. Well, might as well, since there's nothing Discworld-related up there. And I feel far more motivated to do my own site (this being a private, ego-expansion-type of site) than I do for this one... and, strangely enough, ideas about material for The Footnote are starting to germinate, now I'm actually thinking about something else.

So, all to the good.

Fortune vomits on my eiderdown once more...

2007-03-19T17:25:00.000Z

Anyone reading this blog (nobody but me and my guilty conscience, but there we go) will have noticed that no website appeared on January 1st as proposed.

This is because, about three weeks after the last post in here, a major restructure was announced at my place of work, and a mere six weeks after that I found myself facing redundancy and unemployment.

A bit distracting, to say the least.

However... to cut a long and tedious story short, I have managed to hang on to my job and can look forward to continued gainful employment until August 31st. After that... hmm, best not to think about it. But at the moment, I'm cautiously optimistic.

So! Back to The Footnote, if I can possibly remember where I was going with it. Made a tonne of notes, just before my world collapsed, and actually bought some webspace for it in a January sale. Now I just need to get some files together and post them...

:)

Having a fabby diem! (Even though it's Monday)

2006-09-25T19:47:00.000+01:00

Having already signed up a blog by the name of "Fabricati Diem" somewhere else, I couldn't resist trying out this one as well. I don' t know which one I'll finally stick with - or whether I'll keep both, one as a public site blog, and one for the mindless witter which accompanies all my most creative thought processes.

Just have to wait and see!