There’s maybe some sawdust left to sweep up here and there, and I’ll probably be picking crumbs of masking tape from obscured corners of the trim for months, but we’re getting close to just about being done: the first major overhaul of this entire website since I, uh, launched it. In, ah, a whiles back. Goodness.
The underlying content management system, or CMS, has been upgraded, from Textpattern 4.5.7 (released back in 2014, on the tenth anniversary of Dean Allen’s very first release of the beast) to the current version, 4.8.8 (there’s a beta of 4.9 available, but we are not, as a rule, beta people; we shun the cutting edge in this regard). —The upgrade went so much more smoothly than I’d feared, which has left me resolved to keep up with further upgrades in the future, and not let things fall so far out of date; we’ll see how long that lasts.
With the engine in fine fettle, I decided to put it through its paces, with the first major redesign, as noted, since the original design, from back in 2006. There’s been any of a number of advances in CSS over the intervening years, as it turns out. The front page is a better landing page now, I think, and everything displays in the house font as intended, or should, and it all looks so sleek and modern on a mobile device, the list of chapbooks should be much easier to navigate, now, and as for the table of contents—
Well, yes. It’s kinda been stripped bare. But! Starting next week, installments will be (re-)published on a Monday–Wednesday–Friday schedule, with the newly edited text from the recently released ebooks, all properly typeset for the web: as close to a definitive edition as is possible, for the moment. —With forty-four novelettes, at two weeks per, this will take us to September of 2026—the twentieth anniversary, more or less, of the first post hereabouts.
Season Three won’t languish during the reruns, rest assured; the first draft of no. 45 has almost cracked 5,000 words. As novelettes are completed, they’ll be released as chapbooks, and Comrades and Patreons will be getting their copies as per usual; they just won’t appear publicly, here, for free, until the reruns have caught up, in September of 2026. Who knows? Maybe I’ll be five or six novelettes into the new season by then.
So that’s how we’re sliding into the new year, scrubbed clean and refreshed. In the meanwhile, if you find you’re missing the story (and don’t have copies of your own, yet), well: here’s an ebook collecting the first five installments available in a pay-what-you-want edition:
Posted 49 days ago.
