Sillybean

All right. I have finally seen Battlestar Galactica reviewed favorably in terms of both Farscape and Space: Above and Beyond. You win. I watch. But not till Christmas, because I have a book to write.

I’ll be back in May with a new look (and a lot of new things to say about web design for authors). Feel free to amuse yourself with the old site or check out the May 1 Reboot project and all the other participants.

So I think I finally have WordPress templates sussed. At least, there are fewer things broken around here than there were last week. If you spot anything funky, leave a comment, would you? I also managed to get Lisa’s new blog design up and running over the weekend, and I’ll be fixing up the non-blog [...]

Why do I read Chez Miscarriage when I am not, have never been, and have never tried to be pregnant?

On the other hand, women who conceive via gestational surrogacy are selfish. They’re perversely exploiting the vulnerability of some other woman who’s clearly incapable of giving informed consent because her uterus functions correctly and therefore [...]

The move to WordPress seems to have gone pretty smoothly. You might have seen a couple of old articles pop up three or four times, but they’ve been shoved back in the archives where they belong. The “topics” link in the nav won’t work for the moment; I’ll sort that out tonight.

That’s the fourth migration [...]

I’ve used some of my immobile time to switch the site over to Textpattern and TextDrive. I’m still shaking out a few bugs (like the topic archives) but otherwise what you see here should be almost identical to the old MT setup. Sometimes it took a plugin (like this one) but recreating the site turned [...]

For those who read this by RSS or LiveJournal feed… which is most of you, I think… check the newish sideblog for quick links. It’s been there for a few weeks but I forgot to mention it here.

Right. Back to my drug-induced stupor.

I think I forgot to announce here that the writing and publishing resources I dig up are now simulcast on For Writers. If by any chance you’re reading for those posts and don’t want to hear about my wedding adventures or web design punditry, you might want to sidle on over there.

Via Mariann, what happens when books use Six Apart’s licensing scheme:

And there will still be the free version, from libraries. Only anyone who reads the book from a library won’t be able to make their own notes in it, and won’t be able to ask me questions about it. Like if I go to a [...]

Reading the 300-odd comments on Mena’s MT 3.0 post has led me to a lot of new blogs. Among other things, I learned how to include TrackBacks inline with the comments on individual post archives. Step 1: Grab and install Adam Kalsey’s SimpleComments plugin. Step 2: Follow Phil Ringnalda’s instructions for rebuilding the individual archives [...]

Movable Type 3 is out, and in order to maintain what most of us have built with it, we have to pay. There’s really very little to say that others haven’t already said ”better”:http://www.megacity.org/blog/archives/001733.php; already there are 91 annoyed Trackbacks to Mena’s post at the Six Apart site. (About to be 92.) (Update: well over [...]

I’ve turned my really simple PHP breadcrumbs into a Textpattern plugin. (updated June 18: v. 0.2)

<txp:scl_crumbs />

Let me know how it goes. Don’t forget to activate it in the Plugins panel before using. Check the documentation, too.

OK, I just had one of those forehead-slapping moments, so I have to share.

I’ve always wanted Movable Type to support author profile pages, so that with multi-author blogs, the name could be linked in the ”posted by…” line. The thing is, it IS supported. Here’s where I feel dumb. (OK, so all the sites [...]

This morning I needed a way to get the next three upcoming events from the HSC Calendar listed on the home page. Here’s how I got it to work.

I already had the calendar set up with some PHP to filter out events that happened before today (notes on how this was done). What I needed [...]

I once drew a diagram of the default Movable Type templates so I could make sense of all the nested divs and whatnot. (The templates are more complex than they need to be for modern browsers, but all the redundancy ensures Netscape 4 compatibility.) Of course I promptly lost the sketch before I could do [...]