Took a break from Barren Harvest to do a little digging around on the ‘Net for website solutions.

Just installed a forum on the server ( no, it’s not linked and won’t be for a long time, most likely )

What I believe it will provide is obviously the forum ( which will probably get little use *laugh* ), and an easy, secure method of logging in.  The forum has built in functionality to provide login from pages outside of the forum itself.  That part is easily usable for logins that redirect to custom pages, and I can add to the scripts to create new functionality that makes use of the secure login and sessions.

That should allow me to create new settings to filter images and join mailing lists with immense customization from notification about all new postings, all the way down to notification about individual stories on one of the sites I post at.

Might finally get that group riffing editor together for LST3Ks, too.  Would be nice to have real-time riffing that doesn’t require emailing drafts back and forth.  I could have permissions for riffers that allow them to reach certain pages on the site to work on riffs.

Could even build that “U-Riff” thing I’ve thought about off and on that lets users riff on stories and off each other.

Don’t worry, I won’t spend all my time coding PHP — though the temptation to build an attack system into the forum is somewhat hard to resist *laugh*

As you can probably tell from the frequency of posting, I feel much more comfortable just blabbering on my own site than I do on SOL.  With WordPress providing an easy method to do it, I’ll probably update with some regular freqency now, even when I’m depressed and/or not writing.

We’ll see how it goes when I actually start serious coding.  I’ve only been dabbling so far.  Previews of serious coded pages will probably be images only, to avoid anyone seeing me making mistakes while updating code on the working pages.

Okay — back to Barren Harvest.  I’d really like to finish this one this weekend and get it in the queue.  Just a matter of my son cooperating with going to bed at a decent hour.