Category Archives: Website

More behind the scenes

Environment not conductive to erotic writing has kept me away from the word processor today. Hoping to get to bed at a decent hour tonight and see what I can do about that tomorrow. Still have the drive to write, but can’t frikkin’ find the quiet time :p

At least it isn’t lack of motivation, which is my usual bane.

So, I did a little more behind the scenes work on the website. I’ve been primarily concentrating on the opt-in mailing lists for my work. So far, only have the display and the input processing complete. Have to do a lot of double checking before I start actually writing any information to the database. The input-checks on this page are very complex, due to the level of choice I’m going to offer in email alerts about my stories.

The choices will be:

Alerts about all stories as Les and Dark on Lit and SOL
Alerts about all stories as Les and Dark on Lit
Alerts about all stories as Les and Dark on SOL
Alerts about all stories as Dark on Lit
Alerts about all stories as Les on Lit
Alerts about all stories as Dark on SOL
Alerts about all stories as Les on SOL
Alerts about new chapters of SOTM on Lit
Alerts about new chapters of SOTM on SOL
Alerts about new Nobles by Deed stories on Lit
Alerts about new Nobles by Deed stories on SOL
Alerts about new Magic of the Wood stories on Lit
Alerts about new Magic of the Wood stories on SOL
Alerts about new LST3K episodes on Lit ( Lit exclusive series )

So, you’ll be able to tailor your alerts pretty well to your tastes. Once I complete this, it will be part of a “contact” section of the main page. Below “What’s Happening” will be a little widget that displays the most recent updates to the website ( very similar to “Latest Releases” for my stories ) Below “Latest Releases” will be the Contact Links, which will consist of the Newsletter Link, and a contact page link.

The contact page will start out by noting the forums, and the PM feature within. I’ll also have links to my Lit and SOL contact pages, in order for visitors to utilize the anonymity available there. I’ll also have a link to my PM box on Lit.

Odds are that I’ll have a form mailer built into this page as well.

I’ve always wanted to have an easily managed ( and highly customizeable on the user end ) mailing list, so that’s why this is getting priority over adding new content sections to the website. Finishing it and the Website Updates widget will complete the front page of the site, as I plan it to be for the foreseeable future.

There will be a sitemap available eventually, which I’ll link from both the floating menu and the “More” page. That will let you drill down, and perhaps find pages that you overlooked the links to elsewhere.

Fiddling around with an automated utility to track the Lit contests as well. That’s all new programming ground for me, though. So, I’m really just in the planning stages of that beyond testing the first bit of functionality to make sure I had at least half a clue what I was doing *laugh* ( I can grab a contest page and parse the information I need from it, as things stand )

When I eventually finish that, it will make tracking contests a button-pressing operation, greatly reducing the amount of time required ( and potential math errors ) to keep up with contest tracking. Automating it will also most likely lead to me tracking all Lit contests for a while, to finally build up a solid data set.

I am so getting my money’s worth out of the software purchase that’s making all this possible. Hell, even if no more than a handful of people ever really look at the website, it tickles me to have everything moving toward how I’ve always wanted it.

Me tickled = higher potential for forward progress on writing.

The things you find…

I was digging around on the hard drive, looking for some pics I might be able to use on the next LST3K cover/poster ( I’ve been adding those, as they’ve never had them )

Lo and behold, I discovered a folder hidden about three layers deep that had some gems. Way back when, I was reducing my covers down to a really small size. Can’t really remember why, but I was running on low resolution, and they looked fine. When I updated to a higher res, I realized how small they were, but the thought of tracking down everything to recreate them was daunting.

Fortunately, this folder contains not only a lot of the resources I used to create my early covers, but actually contained full-size covers for a few stories.

Thus, I’ve went into my handy-dandy backend editor and changed the cover pic references for the following stories:

It Cuts Both Ways, Of the People, Outlaw’s Redemption, Take Me Away, and The Beast Within.

Those will now show the larger covers instead of the tiny ones I’ve had associated with them for years. Many of my small covers will be easy to recreate from the resources in this folder, so I’ll probably update quite a few ( perhaps, even improving upon them, while still maintaining the same general look ) in the future.

Welcome to the updated Darkniciad.Com

I’m sure that you’ve probably noticed that there are some changes to the website *laugh*

To get the full effect, register on the forum ( link on every page ). During the registration process, you’ll be asked to set your image filtering. You have a choice of NO filtering, filtering ALL nude images, filtering FEMALE(and mixed sex) nude images, or filtering MALE(and mixed sex) nude images.

All that’s required to sign up is a username, password, and valid email ( checked by a confirmation email to complete registration. Necessary to prevent spammers from signing up – sorry! ) You never need to post on the forum if you don’t want to. You can just use the settings on your profile page to control the various features of the website.

Of course, you’re more than welcome to post!

There’s one more custom setting on your profile page that you’ll probably want to look into: Floating Menu

This setting is near the bottom of your profile tab settings. It’s set to “off” by default, but most of you will probably want to turn it on. What it does is create a floating menu on the left side of the screen that stays in place, providing a quick way to jump back and forth between major sections of the website. Much more convenient than navigating through “Back” links.

This menu will expand as I add new sections to the website.

For now, what’s available is primarily a listing of my stories in both pen names with quite a bit of additional information. There’s even more information if you list them “by series” on the My Work page. You should see a link on “Danica” to a timeline of my fantasy world, for example. Links to stories by other authors in the chains are available for “Laresa’s World” and “A Royal Sacrifice”

The front page will now display the latest story I’ve released, as well as the excerpt from this blog.

Sign up, click around, and let me know what you think! You can do it here, or on the forum. It’s probably easier to have discussions on the forum, but feel free to keep commenting here. Always nice to see comments on the blog, too.

Hope everyone’s enjoying the new chapter of SOTM! Remember to vote, for sure, but keep those public commments coming at Lit. Those attract new readers, which attracts more feedback, which fuels me to keep writing.

I can’t stress enough how important feedback in the form of votes, comments, and emails is to a free author as far as inspiration to keep writing.

SOTM 16 in the queue

Just put SOTM 16 into the queue at Lit. Aiming for a Thursday night at midnight release.

Everything appears to be working fine behind the scenes with the website. I’m adding a final page that I forgot I was going to have available as a launch feature (thanks Kolrin), tweaking a few things, and getting ready for launch.

Everything should be designed in such a fashion that I can work on new features in the background, and simply link them up whenever they’re complete. I’ll then be able to update any feature with simple fill-in-the-blank forms, and I can stay ahead of the curve by utilizing public/private switches I’ve built into a lot of the data. I can have all the information for a story already entered, and then simply flip that switch when the story actually posts.

Let’s see if I can’t make some writing progress to report tonight.

No need for second review

Not many changes in SOTM 16, so no need to send it back for a second review by Roust. All that’s left is to format it for Lit and submit it on Monday. So, keep your eyes peeled on Thursday, but there’s always a chance it could be Wednesday or Friday.

On the website front, I’ve finished the “story codes” feature for the “My Work” page, and all is working well. I finished entering all the codes for my stories as Les, and now just need to finish the data entry for Dark.

As far as the launch features go, that’s pretty much the last one. I have one more little thing to add, but that’s more or less adding a column to the database and a template edit to display the field on the “My Work” page. Still need to do a little editing on the forum — just setting up actual forums for public use, rather than the default forum that’s automatically installed.

I do have a little bit of work to do with double-checking things for the launch, though. Soon, you’ll actually be on the new content delivery system, though you probably won’t notice. It should look exactly as the page does now while I check all the links and functionality in the background.

Once I’m sure that everything is working, the front page will switch over to the new version, and you’ll be able to explore the new stuff + sign up for the forum and adjust your viewing preferences for the website images. Unless you’re signed in, any adult images will be hidden. So, you can default to a ( imagewise ) Safe For Work page just by logging out before leaving the website.

If I do this right, I’ll be able to check all new features behind the scenes, and then simply activate them on the front page as I finish them.

That does mean that you’ll have to sign up to see most of my cover images, but it’s free, anonymous, and I will never use ( or sell ) any information you enter for anything you don’t tell me to. The only information really required will be a username, password, email ( necessary to make sure you’re a real person and not a spam-bot ) and the NSFW settings. Anything else you choose to enter will be your business, and won’t be required. Email is hidden by default, so about the only thing anyone other than you can see is your username, if you don’t choose to divulge anything else.

The forum software even has settings to let you be invisible while signed in. Forum participation isn’t necessary to view the website, though I certainly welcome anyone who wishes to post 🙂

Off to format SOTM 16 for Lit. Think I may take a look at Lowborn and see if I’m feeling it. With the website so close to ready, I’m getting a serious itch to write again.