Possible Nude Day story idea

Had a possible idea for a Nude Day story as Dark in my fantasy world today.  It would be an “other dark” story right now, as it jumps to after SOTM, starring Mindblind and Christi’s oldest son ( of legal age to do anything sexual on Lit in that timeframe)

Could eventually become part of a Nobles Next Generation series, but I have enough on my plate as it is.  For now, if it comes out, it will be a one-shot story.

If I didn’t screw anything up, all the pages should now be running on the reduced style files, and all tables are eliminated from the code.  The next clean-up process will be removing all of the [br] tags, as they’re apparently frowned upon by modern standards.

Believe I need to go through and fix anything inside a div that’s just text ( no img, p, etc. tag )  Pretty sure I saw that pop up in the last “evaluate your code” thing I ran website pages through.

Doing that also reminded me that I need to add WxH dimensions to the latest releases database, in order to add those to the front page.  Also need to add that to the little quill and trophy icons on the “My Work” page.  There, at least, it’s a simple matter of adding them to two lines of code.

Pretty beat tonight.  Long, lousy day at work.  Might try to write a little anyway, as the young one appears to be winding down.  It will all depend upon whether I can close my eyes and visualize without nodding off if he does go down for the night.

Need to add a privacy policy to the bottom of my pages as well, since the forum and a couple of other things do gather information.  It’s standard browser/resolution/etc. stuff, but I can use that link to reiterate that I don’t sell or otherwise divulge any such information to any third party.  It’s simply for the purpose of making the website conform to the norm of visitors, then account for the outsiders as best as possible.  Should be able to put it in the footer without too much trouble, I believe.

Just peeked, and the young one is indeed in bed.  I’ll give it a half hour or so to make sure he’s out enough to turn off the television without him waking up on me, and then see if I’m coherent enough to write.

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Working again, it seems

Looks like everything is up and working properly again.  Why it is:  That’s the question.  I didn’t do anything, and the problem had resolved itself before the webhost got around to the ticket.

*shrug*  I suppose it may be a result of screwed up queries when I was finishing the newsletter page.  Perhaps when the backend of the site did some optimization tasks, it cleared up the gunk in the database.

Anyway, I did a little optimization of my own.  I started trimming down my style sheets based upon various types of pages.  I removed all the elements for the front page and the My Work page from everywhere else, cutting the size down to about half.  Trimming the front page stuff off My Work helped a little, and likewise trimming the My Work stuff off the front page helped it a little more.

Found a few things that need correcting to get up to current web standards, as well.  Fixed a couple of tags that weren’t properly closed under the existing standards, and made note of some other evaluations.  Now that I have different style sheets for various pages, getting rid of a lot of waste, I’m going to eliminate some legacy coding and get that put into the style sheets as well.

Pages that will be affected by this will be the Work Extras: Story Codes and Danica Timeline pages.  Those are using tables, and giving them style divs should bring them up to standards.  I hadn’t done it up to this point because of conflict issues with elements unused by those pages.  I’ll use the basic file I have now ( which doesn’t include those conflicting elements ) and create a style sheet for those two pages to share.

I’ve got a few other things I can do to speed up the page loads as well.  This will be important when I finalize the front page, as I’ll be adding a new widget that queries the database there.  Need to keep it at least where it is, or hopefully speed it up.  Initial loads should already be less due to the smaller style sheet.

Still need a beta tester(s) for the newsletter page, if anybody’s interested.

I’m going to try to get some writing done on Lowborn after I take a little break.  The environment at the moment isn’t the best, but I haven’t done much writing in a while, and it’s really bugging me.

Edit ( a little later ):  There we go 🙂  Lowborn 07 is up to about the halfway mark.  I’ve got a little bit of character development/sex to write ( yes, that development slash sex *laugh* ), then the setup for the final chapter.

Posted a teaser excerpt of Ch. 01 on the forum.

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Wanted: Beta Tester(s)

Just finished the email alerts subscription page, and it all appears to be functioning as expected.  It’s writing to the database, and the subscription page is correctly reflecting what the database says.

As I mentioned, the input checking code for this is rather complex.  I fiddled with it quite a lot, purposely trying to break it, but there’s only so much the programmer can actually do.  You need end users who are going to do things that you don’t remotely expect to find the holes in the code.

So, if you would like to participate in a little beta testing, post on the forum or drop me a PM there.  I’m not actually going to send any emails using this for a while, so you don’t have to worry about your inbox getting cluttered *laugh*

What I want is for some people to fiddle around with it, checking options and changing subscriptions several times.  Just play around and do whatever you want.  If it does something you weren’t expecting, or throws a php/sql error at you, then drop me a post/PM in the forum.

Try to keep track of what options you checked, and what options were already checked, as well as copying any errors it throws at you.  The more information you can provide, the better.

I’ll make sure that before I actually send any emails that I warn any beta testers, so you can set up your subscriptions ( if any ) the way you actually want them.  It will be a while, because I’ll need to finish the coding for the contact page and the website updates section before I launch the newsletter in public, anyway.

I’m hoping that everything will be going smoothly and I’ll be too busy writing to do much coding for a while 😉

If you’ve ever wanted to find something more than email, votes, and comments to pay me with for my writing, now’s a good time to donate your services 😀  Or, if you’re just feeling charitable *laugh*

This is the most complex ( and frustrating ) code I’ve written since starting back in.  I had some worse spots while coding IBProBattle, but certainly nothing like this since I got back on the coding horse.  I feel like I’m standing atop a dead dragon with a bloody sword in my hand right now *laugh*

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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.

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