oh also

Windi went and got hired out from underneath me -- I guess there's at least one company back in the southeast that recognizes talent when they see it. :) So, stepping up as Tomorrowlands webmaster is the equally incomparable Bob, who will also do a wonderful job helping me get everything running here at the site. Yay!

Heartbeat

*taptaptap* Hey, it looks like this thing's on! Awesome!

That took a little longer than expected -- and the server switch is still deep in the throes of impendingness, so we're not going to have full functionality for a while yet. But at least forward progress is being made again. Yay!

I've just hired a webmaster, the inimitable Windigo the Feral (nyar!), to take care of many of the long(-long-long)-overdue back-end changes and the full migration from my legacy Web site at ecis.com. Which ... uh ... suddenly no longer exists. Hence the rush. But the Draconity FAQ has been moved here already and other documents will shortly follow. Update your links.

Also, I'm in the middle of National Novel Writing Month, so won't be posting much for another (*checks watch*) 11 days. See you then!

More growing pains

There's one small disadvantage of the Movable Type setup over my old homebrew system: Since everything is based on an SQL backend, any time a server upgrade rearranges that or moves things around, stuff breaks.
On top of that, the forums use the same database and are also broken in pretty much exactly the same way.

I'm definitely not going to be able to fix either of those until at least late this weekend, since it involves some coordination with a guy two time zones away and since my writing has been lapsing enough anyway that I need to tackle a few other things on my priority list first. In a worst-case scenario, my journal and forums may be broken until August, since if I don't get things fixed this weekend, I'll be spending a great deal of time hiking (with Rene and on Baxwalk) and totally away from the computer.

In the meantime, if I have anything to say, I'll try to post it at Livejournal -- I'm baxil.

Obviously

... things are working again.

(That's all. Just a one-line-and-one-parenthetical-aside post. And it's sort of weird how neat it is that I can make a one-line post without a guilt trip these days.)

The joy of breaky

So this one time at band camp ... the counselors upgraded the server some. And at first it broke Movable Type, and we were all, "Yay! We get to skip Rafting!" but the head counselor came out with some duct tape and then we still had to go on Rafting after all but with leaky boats patched together with duct tape. And it kind of sucked because Movable Type was still broken even though the duct tape fixed it up enough that it looked like it was working, and how the heck do you paddle with only half of a Movable Type?

Then we went out paddling on the Lake Of Updating The Home Page By Hand, and that kind of sucked too because it meant the first time an update was posted, the hand-written post would disappear and our life rafts were still back in the cabin and the XML was still under the seats!

But we survived that. Kinda. Then the mosquitos came.

Surprise!

Unless you're one of a small handful of people from whom I solicited input during the changeover this weekend, this post is very likely your first introduction to the New Tomorrowlands (tm). Same as the Old Tomorrowlands, but different and better! (*cough* assuming I got the CSS working right.)

As previously mentioned, I've switched content management systems from my old homebrew scripts over to Movable Type, which rocks on toast. It supports multiple posting categories, multiple archive schemes, a fully templateable design, multiple authors (with their own usernames and logins! woo!), on-the-fly image uploading, probably a dozen relevant features I'm not remembering offhand, and on top of all that has a very intuitive and well-documented back end. Go Movable Type!

The primary significance of this is that I used to have a journal and news section, kept rigorously separate so that a necessary site update wouldn't bury a pithy and witty journal entry in the archives, or vice versa. That often left a many-months-old post in the "news" section if I hadn't had anything of significance to report. Not any more! "Tomorrowlands News" has simply been brought into the journal in the "Announcements" category and will be shuffled in with the rest of my writing -- but clearly labeled as news, with a spiffy little icon to match; and since the main page holds an arbitrary number of entries, I know it won't scroll away from view before its time, nor will it prevent people from reading the other products of my fevered psyche.

Anyway: I ramble. (As usual. But then, isn't that part of my charm, o reader?) As part of the switch, I'm ditching the "splash page" and "home page" setup. Update your Tlands bookmark to http://www.tomorrowlands.org/index.html instead of home.html. Nothing else, however, should be moving or disappearing; there will still be a plenty large site beyond the journal -- as always.

Of course, the rest of the site sorely needs an overhaul to be brought in line with the redesign -- I'll take care of that as quickly as possible, but the back forty of Tomorrowlands may look somewhat patchwork in the meantime.

Old permalinks of the form "journal.cgi?date=foo" will continue working indefinitely -- but won't work for the new entries; use the permalinks listed below each post instead. "Direct" links to old entries -- "month.html#date" -- will probably break someday, especially if I import them into MT so the nifty search function will work on them too.

The Tomorrowlands Forums will continue operating. Comments on the journal, as usual, should go there.

And I'm saving the most exciting news for last: Movable Type has built-in RSS feed support! Okay, that's probably Greek to most of you, but what it means in practical terms is that I can also mirror Tlands on a Livejournal account with minimal setup and no extra effort! If you'd rather read my journal on your Friends list, give me a few days to get around to it, and it'll be available in all its glory there. (If, on the other hand, you already use a feed aggregator for your daily reading, you probably already know what to do to add Tlands to that list. The link's at the bottom of the main page sidebar.)

That's about it for now ... enjoy! And let me know what you think of the new look!

Welcome to Tomorrowlands' new look

Thanks to a switch from my old, home-brewed journal system to the joy that is Movable Type, Tomorrowlands is getting a serious overhaul and redesign.

Already I like what I see, and I've got a vision for the site that involves categorizing journal entries and labelling them accordingly. (You'll be able to browse the archives by category, as well.) "Tomorrowlands News" will become just another category of entry and be streamlined into the journal entries. The site front will also expand to hold a number of the most recent entries, instead of just the newest news and newest journal entry.

Permalinks to old journal entries will still work, although I may at some point be importing the old entries to MT (which includes search functions and better formatting options). You can still search the archives manually by going to www.tomorrowlands.org/journal.html.

Plenty more to come. Right now, I'm knee-deep in CSS. (Movable Type itself was a joy to set up; the site redesign, well ...)