Did a little writing on Lowborn tonight, painting the imagery of a strange little farming village, as suggested by first-readers.

Experimented with that new forum mod, and I believe it will serve my needs.  I have the new setting for image filtering entered in, and all seems to be well.  We’ll see if it works once I implement it on the actual test pages *laugh*

Did a few odd little tweaks to the forum, too.  Changed the default logo to my own, added a return to website link ( Had to do this to wordpress, too.  Why in the hell do all of these programmers assume that you’ll always be using their software as your homepage? )

The next thing that I’ll probably do is create the “guest” image filtering example.  A link from the index/warning page of the site will direct guests ( or anyone who isn’t logged in ) to an image filtering page.

On this page, guests will be able to choose from four links: SFW – No Adult Images, No Nude Female Images, No Nude Male Images, and No Filtering.  Once one of these links is clicked, it returns to the index page with that setting carried along.  Any links within my website pages will continue to carry that setting, filtering images and adding warnings to links that contain NSFW images.

While this will provide a way to filter the website without creating a login, it isn’t perfect.  If a visitor goes to the forum or the blog, the setting will be lost.  I’m not about to go through all that code and modify it to carry the setting through both of those.  The visitor will have to return to the index page ( which is where the “homepage” links in the blog and forum go to ) and go through the process of selecting filter levels again.

Settings for logged-in members will automatically return upon leaving the blog/forum.  So long as you’re logged in, your current setting will always be present and accounted for.

I’ll probably go through the code of the blog/forum and make modifications to return logged-in members to the “home” page of the site, rather than the index.  That will be easy for the forum.  Not sure about the ease of implementation on WordPress yet.

I’m putting the basic building blocks together now.  Once I have a handle on the foundation, I should be able to start restoring some of the actual website content that was here, and expand it with ease.

The website will be much more interactive with the ability to comment on blog entries and participate in the forum ( and probably more, such as LST3K U-Riffs )  It should look better overall, and be easier to update/expand.  I should be able to finally create a mailing list with highly customizable options for what new stories you want email alerts about.

Long story short, the website should be better by orders of magnitude.

I’m going to see if I can’t finish that imagery painting before I crash out.  As soon as that’s done, I’ll be ready to move on to Lowborn Ch. 05.  Still not sure how long this one is going to run.  The characters are just taking me along for the ride here.

There’s nothing I love better than that when writing, and I think that it shows up as a much more immersive experience in the final stories when it happens.