I want E-Books to not be called E-Books, for it is a crap name.  I'm not getting the book, I'm getting its contents - the story.

I want to go to a website and find a story to read.  There will be no purchase, no login, nothing to stop me from getting to the story.  The web page will display the story, along with a selection of plain, unstyled links across the top of the page, and nothing more.  No graphics, no fancy layout - nothing that will distract from the text or hinder my ability to read it on my phone.  Which is the device that I'll be using most of the time.

This website will work not by asking authors to upload their stuff, but by asking readers to find great free stories and tell the website where these stories live.  The website then spiders the page on which the story lives, creating a local copy stored in a database (and stripping out any word-processor-generated HTML garbage as it does so).  Alongside the actual story, it'll store the original URL, the author's name and PayPal E-mail address, the genre, and the word count, all of which become searchable.  Y'know, just like how a search engine works (think Google mobile).

When I go to read a story, the website will present the text in the no-nonsense way I've described above.  Links at the top of the page will change the stylesheet used to display the story, presenting the most popular from an array of user-submitted stylesheets and giving an option to view all of them or make my own.  Thus I can read the same text in 10pt Arial, or 12pt Georgia, or whatever font in whatever size in whatever colour against whatever background I like.  Naturally, I'll set it to white text on a blue background and carry on.

At intervals of roughly two real-book pages, a tiny "#" link will be inserted into the text.  This link is an anchor - the sort of link that takes you to a certain point inside a webpage (for example, http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/02/comprehensive-excori.html#comments - takes you to http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/02/comprehensive-excori.html, then jumps the page down to the comments section).  If I want to save my place in the story, I click on the closest # and bookmark that URL.  All of this is handled by my web browser, no special software required.

I can save this story to my local machine using my browser's Save Web Page function, and read it offline in the exact same format, using that exact same web browser.

One of the links at the top of the page will take me to the source page, where the author will have their own links to different sections of their website in case I'd like to find out more about them - and, of course, view their adverts.  Every now and then the spiders are sent out again to check if the story is still the same.

I want to be able to create a user account for this website by typing my E-mail address and password into the Login box.  There is no "Create an Account" page, no Turing tests, no E-mail confirmation - if the e-mail address is recognized, the password is checked against it.  If the E-mail address is not recognized, the password is assigned to it.  I'll prove that I'm human later, when it matters, when I'm in a position to contribute content to the site - and at that point, my human peers will be my judges, for they can tell a robot apart from a human much more easily than a robot can.

Once I'm logged in, I can add stories to my favourites list, which I can refer to when I'm at a computer that doesn't have my bookmarks.  It will also notice when I click the #'s, and keep my place for me.  It'll let me download all of my favourite stories in a lovely big .zip file whenever I change my phone and forget to save my bookmarks.  I can tell the website whether I liked a story, and it'll suggest other stories for me to read based on what other people like me have liked.

If I enjoy the story, I'll send the author a nice E-mail and give him a pound, which is a damn sight more than he would get out of a sale of a physical book.  I will do this by using the site's inbuilt features, or by going directly to the author's website and hunting around in the links until his website stubbornly reveals how to give him money.

Let's sum this up:

I want to read stories on the same devices that I spend hours staring at every day.
I want to read stories that will work on any device whatsoever, including the one that's always - always - in my right-hand jeans pocket, and I want to read these stories in white text on a dark blue background (or with whatever stylesheet is appropriate for the circumstances - a dark background with grey text for when we're reading in bed and our loved ones are asleep, for example).
I want a crowdsource-powered intelligent feedback machine that will find me a story that I'll love, every time, with a degree of accuracy that makes it seem like some strange form of voodoo.  Y'know, like StumbleUpon.
I want to pay exactly what the story is worth to me, plus the cost in bandwidth and processing power to deliver that story (a very, very small fraction of a penny, which can be offset by a single banner ad on the login page - or, by me giving a fiver to the website itself).  I want the money I pay for the story to go straight to the author.  In short, I want to pay the worth of the story - not the worth of a book - directly to the person who wrote the story.
I want to be able to say, directly to the author, thanks for writing a great story - and here, have a pint on me.  I don't particularly care if he writes back, although it would be nice.
If I like the story a lot, I want to give the author a quid and a nice E-mail, and then E-mail that story to all of my friends.  Hopefully they'll do the same, and then E-mail it to all of their friends.

I don't want some bullshit copy protection scheme that'll waste ten minutes of my valuable time in cracking it while costing the author a shitload of money.
I don't want to pay five quid for a story, especially not when I can buy a book with the story inside for seven quid.
I don't want to use PDF for anything that I'm not going to print.  And that's not just for stories, that goes for everything.
I don't want to be able to click on any word and get an instant dictionary definition.  If I want a definition, I'll ask Google.
I don't want to be able to highlight passages, make annotations and remix the story.  And if I do, I'll just copy it into a text editor and do it there.
I don't want to See The Pages Turn Just Like A Real Book!  If I wanted to do that, I'd Buy A Real Book And Turn Its Pages Just Like A Real Book.  All day long.  Naked.
I don't want to buy an E-Book Reader, because I already have about half a dozen of the damn things, all of which are different, and all of which are about a million times better at reading stories than any dedicated E-Book reader.


I don't want an E-Book.  I just want the damn story.

After a year of on-and-off tinkering, I've finally released my MMORPG.  It's at improbableisland.com, and it runs on LOTGD core.  The Midget Brothel needs some work, but other than that, it's ready for a public beta release.

Right, now what to do?  Oh yes, actual work, that's right.  Anybody need a website?

Terry Pratchett has early-onset Alzheimer's.

...I don't know what to say.  I can only hope that he either surprises us by retaining his marbles against all odds, or that he goes out in a blaze of speed-writing glory that will not soon be forgotten.
I met him at WorldCon '05.  We chatted about the recent London bombings.  He's not just an excellent writer, he's a very compassionate and intelligent man, with a gift for seeing the Big Picture.  He's NOT the sort of person who should be struck down by this sort of condition.
I do wonder where the justice is.

Current Mood: sad

It's a V12 Twin Turbo bike he built from scratch, dubbed "Jagged Edge."  He's got crippling carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists, so he can't ride it anymore.  If anyone can help pimp this auction, it'd cheer him up immensely.

Why oh why do I get so thoughtful at stupid a.m.?

Tonight, I'm thinking about infinity for some reason.  And that there's no such damn thing.

This is more philosophy than physics, but my twisted, sleep-deprived line of reasoning goes something like this:

The Universe isn't infinite in the sense that it just goes on and on.  It's merely expanding at the speed of light, or near to it.  For all intents and purposes, that makes it as good as infinite to the likes of us.  It's not really, genuinely infinite, but only subjectively infinite, in the same way that a beach doesn't actually have an infinite number of grains of sand - but it becomes as good as infinity to any poor bastard given the job of counting all of them, particularly if I turn up in a lorry every half an hour and dump an extra half a ton on his head.  The Universe ain't infinite - it's just really, really big, and getting bigger all the time, and we'll never ever catch up with it.

Granted, that's pretty well what "infinity" means, at least to us.  But if the Universe is expanding at twelve million miles a minute, was it of infinite size when I started typing this sentence?  What's a few million miles less than an infinite breadth?  "Immeasurable" would be a better word, and sounds bigger to me anyway.  To me, "Infinite" just sounds like "We just don't know," whereas "Immeasurable" conveys the whole "and we never will know, either" bit.  Sounds much grander.

So, if the universe itself isn't truly, objectively infinite, then it can't contain anything infinite or unlimited either.  No unlimited data transfer, no infinite tape loops, nothing that won't, one day, either run out or stop working.  That's depressing.

Also, there's a fun little theory that if the universe were objectively infinite, then you can imagine pretty well any event, any object, any person or lifeform; and the probability of it existing somewhere out there would be 1, or as close to 1 as makes no odds.  If the universe were infinite, then there'd be an infinite number of habitable planets with intelligent life.  Infinity is a rather digital thing...  Douglas Adams joked about this too, but he took it the other way.  A finite number (in this case, of planets) divided by infinity is as close to zero as makes no odds, so the population of the Universe is zero - or, as close to zero as makes no odds anyway.

Aha, but, dividing shit up like that doesn't give you an actual figure, only a decimal that you might convert to a percentage.  And if the universe were truly infinite, then even 00.0(hold down the zero key for an hour)0001% of it would be an infinite amount.

...not that you can actually perform any sort of calculations with infinity, anyway - 'cause if 0.01% of infinity is anything but infinity, then you weren't performing the calculation on infinity in the first place.

My brain hurts and I'm tired.  Bed time for me.

Current Mood: thoughtful

Whoo!  RSS syndication via LiveJournal rocks my socks.  Bigger update coming soon - for now, here are a few new journals that suckle from the RSS teats of my various sites:

cmj_co_uk - my blog website, rarely updated...
pwtalk - the feed for Project Wonderful Talk...
retroreviews - every now and then I review MAME-emulated arcade games.
jammaforever - remember JAMMAForever?  Not updated since November 2006, but I'm idly playing with a couple of new game ideas.
twistedlibrary - Emily's site, Twisted Librarian, can now be read in your LJ Friends Page via the wonder of GeekLog, RSS and LJ cross-talking-goodness, and you can comment on TL using your LJ login!  Whoo!  Are you paying attention, trebro?

Making syndicated accounts is Good.
Pictures from my and Emily's Adventure are also Good.
And for now, until I have time for a longer update, that is all.

I've been making odd little excuse devices for ages, now.  Now, I've done it again - but this time, it's all Web 2.0 and lovely!  You can edit all the words on the reels, and it'll spit out a URL with all the relevant entries intact in the query string.
And THEN, I figured... well, hey, why stop at just excuses?
Now, there are two, three and four-reeled versions available to play, and you can edit the reels and labels to make a device that can generate anything.  Really, ANYTHING.
Here it is!

(and no, I still haven't written a damn word on the Machine of Death contest, and I have about fifteen hours)

When I made the last incarnation of my portfolio site, it was a rush job, and then I didn't update it for two years; every time I tried to, people came to me with paid work, so it went a bit stale.
Here's a fresh one.

I can't sleep. This is why I'm posting to my LJ - and I'm going to try to resist the temptation to post another "It's been six months, here's what I'm up to" post, because that's pretty well what the last page of updates have been.
Instead I want to nail down what I've been thinking, the past six months or so, about the nature of happiness.
I've come to learn that the human capacity for happiness is infinite. I say this because of experiences at around this time last year (which I'm sure the majority of people on my F-List know about) which completely turned my world upside-down, challenging my preconceptions of love, happiness, misery, hatred and everything in between. Actually, fuck challenging them - breaking them, completely and utterly.
It turns out that it's entirely possible for a person to go for five years or so believing that they're at their happiest; that it's impossible to ever become more contented, that life right now is as good as it gets.
Let me tell you right now, mate - it's all bullshit. There is no such thing as "As good as it gets."
Being with Emily has made me happier than I've ever been before, and that honestly confused me for a while - I wondered if I was paying the past the respect it deserved. After all, Gen and I had some really, really good times before it all went tits-up, but it's entirely possible that I was letting my most recent opinions of her corrupt the memories of when everything was good. The past deserves respect, and it's a tragedy to look back on when something was going well and think "That really wasn't so good, 'cause she's a bitch."
I have a good memory for emotions, so I looked inside myself, back at the times when I was happiest - the early days of the Quest around England, getting our first flat together, those perfect afternoons of eating French bread smeared with stawberry jam on the slopes of the Glastonbury Tor, reading freshly-acquired secondhand books in the Chalice Well. Things started heading south just before we moved to the lower flat, the one with the garden - but up until then, life was mostly peachy.
After a long time feeling around in my past, I knew that the feeling of happiness I had at the time was genuine, and enormous - and that I was probably right in thinking that they were among the happiest days of my life at the time. But what struck me as strange was the fact that the good times didn't seem any less good, even though everything was even better now.
They were still great times - fantastic times, in fact. But the Big Thing was that I was happier now, and that didn't diminish how happy I reckoned myself to be back then.
I would have expected that joy would be kind of elastic - that, if I was happier now than I was then, that it would make the past seem kinda dull by comparison. It doesn't, which is odd, and gives rise to further questions. Questions like "Is there a definitive "ceiling" for happiness?" and "If so, what is there left to do when you're really, without a doubt, as happy as you can be without running the risk of spontaneous combustion?" and "If not, does that make the pursuit of happiness an unending task?" and "Given that there's no such thing as Ultimate, Max-Level Happiness, is it wise to pursue that which can't be obtained?" (my answer to the last question is "Yes, because even though you can never max-out your Happy Points, it's bloody good fun to try")
When Emily's family took me in over Christmas this year, and went so far out of their way to make me feel so warmly accepted as one of the family, it happened again! Just when I thought I couldn't be any happier, life smacked me in the face and said "Stop thinking that you couldn't be happier, 'cause you're just putting theoretical limits on your potential happiness!" Once again, my preconceptions of what happiness actually meant were shattered, and replaced with new ones, better ones.
I won't say that I thought I was happy when I was actually just feeling all right - that's a cliche, and it's not even accurate. I really was happy back then, on the slopes of the Tor. I didn't think I could ever be any happier.
It's just that I found out, some years later, that to think "I can't ever be happier than this" is to accept just that, and it's bullshit. You can always be happier, because there's no maximum value for your Happy Points. You can't say "I'm xxx% happy" because your Happy Points go from zero to infinity, thus making it impossible to meaningfully express happiness as a percentage of total. Unless you're talking about expressing past levels of Happy Points as a decimal in relation to current Happy Points, of course - and I'll stop that sentence now, because my Programmer Head is coming out and making me do theoretical maths at three in the morning.
Knowing that my Happy Points don't go from 0-100 or even 0-1,000,000 is fucking empowering, because now I'm constantly chasing that buzz that comes from having preconceptions utterly shattered, and I know I can get it. Also, by removing the glass ceiling of Maximum Happy, I oblige myself to chase after something I can never quite catch - which is ace, 'cause it's the chasing that's fun.
Emily has completely fucked up my ideas of what happiness really is, and that's great, 'cause they were ass-backwards 'til she got involved. Of course, she didn't know she was doing it at the time (and she tilts her head to the side sometimes when I talk about the idea of infinite joy, and shows that modest "Yeah, right" smile when I say that she's responsible) but that just impresses me even more, and makes me more thankful that she's in my life, ratcheting up the Happy Points a bit on the way. It's a delicious circle.
I'd normally read through this before I posted it, but it's late, I'm tired and I think reading it through would defeat the purpose of posting it in the first place.
This is what I'm thinking, right now.

Current Mood: happy

I don't think I've ever been this pleased with a piece of artwork that I've done before:

http://www.cavemanjoe.co.uk/images/darker-run.jpg

Even if the perspective is totally fucked up, and Darker doesn't look nearly panicked enough, and she's kinda looking upwards... Darker modelled and articulated in Poser/LightWave, background done from scratch in PhotoShop.

I've always wanted to draw - and in particular, draw stuff from my fiction - but having dyspraxia kinda stops that from working properly, although it's not for want of trying. I accepted a little while back that you couldn't teach a blind man to see any more than you could teach me to draw. I'm glad we live in an age where I can piss about with Poser and PhotoShop to make something look the way I want it to. :)

While here, I should probably explain a bit, 'cause I get lots of people saying "Dyslexia?". Dyspraxia is... well:
*puts hands up, in a "Don't shoot" position*
I have no idea where my hands are.
And that's dyspraxia in a nutshell!

Emily's site, the Twisted Librarian, is now online. 99.99% of the site's content (of which there is FUCKING LOTS) is written by Emily. The design was a joint effort between Emily and myself - the artwork is scanned from 12th century books from Emily's library, manipulated by myself, and the colour scheme mutually chosen.
I really, really like this site. I couldn't be more pleased with the way it came out, and I think it's the first site I've been truly happy with in a good couple of years.
You can search for Emily's reviews of the books using the search box in the left hand column (just enter an author or a title), or search for Amazon.com customer reviews using the box in the right hand column (and yes, Emily does get a bit of moolah if you then go on to buy the book, so think of us next time you wanna buy from Amazon).
You can comment on any review using your LiveJournal login, your Blogger.com login, or if you don't have either of those, it takes less than one minute to make an account and comment.

The address is http://www.twistedlibrarian.com. Pimp it. PIMP it, I say!

~Dan

Just a quick one to let people know that cavemanjoe.co.uk has been revamped. Emily and I are also working on a new website. That is all.

Right, let's see, here...
I quit my job. I can now say that I was involved in IT-based work for the UK government, and I can tell you that ninety per cent of the work I did was releasing spam E-mails from the filter for the Financial Reporting Council, and the other ten per cent I still can't talk about - even though the remaining ten per cent is even duller. But I left with the impression that these Governmental types don't actually do any work, EVER.
There was also a little bit of work involved for the ODPM (quite amusing when people called up thinking we were Lloyds' bank - I liked asking people "So - how did you get this number?" and listening to them freak out). I have never in my life come across a group so useless. Check this out and see if you can figure out what it is that they actually do - I had full access to their networks for nearly a year, and I'm still clueless as to when (if ever) they will work out what they're supposed to be doing. I picture an office full of people in suits reading "inspirational" E-mails, scanning them for hints of what they're supposed to be doing all day, then going back to browsing b3ta.com.
I sold my bike. Got three hundred quid and a mint-condition Honda boggy 90, which go for about four hundred quid in nick this good. Damn, but I miss her. The same week I sold her, I found an air-cooled RD MCC. Figures.
I lost my home. When I told my landlady I was going to the States for three months, and said I'd either be letting my mum move in (my folks are divorcing after forty years of marriage, BTW) or paying her the three months rent in advance, she said she wasn't comfortable with either idea, and was thinking of selling the place anyway. Ta Sue.
Meanwhile, a metric fuckload of website design work rolled in, and I suddenly found myself with a grand in my pocket. It's strange that, although I've been worrying about money for the past two years, I don't have to anymore - but EVERYTHING ELSE went to shit, in the same week. Figures.
So, all my stuff is in storage, apart from my computer, which is sitting in Matthew's room right now. Did I mention I'm at Diane's? In Pittsburgh? No? Well, I am.
My computer is LARGE. I put it in my case, and realised I had enough room left over for three T-shirts, two pairs of boxer shorts and one pair of socks. Not enough for three months. Fuck it, I thought, I'll just buy clothes while I'm out there, they're cheap. Then I opened up my computer, removed the hard drive and stuffed the cavity full of Gen's underwear, which she had requested. Said underwear had been sitting in the laundry basket for a while, then when Sue said she was getting a surveyor in to take a look around the place and could I please have every room clean, I just chucked all of my washing into big black bin bags and hid them. The bin bags remained under the stairs for the next year.
I opened the bin bags the week before I came out here, eyes watering, contemplating how I could live like this.

I realised that, wearing a leather jacket and baggy pants and having what looks UNCANNILY like several bombs located around my person and luggage in the form of hard drives bound with bubble wrap, I was bound to get searched. The official would then open my case and find a computer stuffed full of women's underwear, and I would get raped right through my jeans - I decided to wash Gen's pants, so it would be slightly less freaky. The only thing worse than having a computer full of women's underwear is a computer full of worn women's underwear.

I threw away the last bits of the steak pie that Gen baked for me on our last day together in September 2004.
I know, I'm a fucking pig. Allow me to explain.
I ate three quarters of it, then put the remaining quarter in the fridge for later, still in the glass bowl and covered with clingfilm, because I was full. The pie became dry, but still appealing.
I left it in the fridge for a week, because I wasn't hungry. The pie became unhealthy and inedible.
I left it in the fridge for a month, because I was lazy. The meat started to look like beef jerky, and the pastry turned green.
I left it in the fridge for two months, because I was sentimental. The unspeakable black mold took over the dish and tried to push off the clingfilm.
I left it in the fridge for the next year and a half because I was too scared to touch it.

I bade my farewell to the house. Goodbye, stained carpet. Goodbye, salt forcing through the walls and wallpaper, bricks falling apart, almost-imperceptible tilt caused by living over a salt mine. Goodbye, ghost, and with you, goodbye, bleeding fridges and aluminium coffee cans imploding with head-crushing force. Goodbye, rusty oil barrel in the garden full of cigarette butts. Goodbye, wall vomit - I shall miss you the most. I will never forget the night I gave birth to you, and the following morning when I annihalated all of you but your persistent stain, and my relief that Gen wasn't around to see me wake up in the middle of the night after the Macouti staff party, stumble halfway to the toilet and puke Sangria and Mexican food ON THE FUCKING WALLS, two feet from a non-carpeted area.

Oh, I went to WorldCon with the highly talented and extremely sexy Diane Turnshek and Susan Hanniford-Crowley! It was fucking excellent. I meant to do a write-up of what happened when I got back (this was in August last year), but I was having too much fun to make notes.
The trip up to Glasgow was interesting. I had intended to get off work at six and then go straight there, but due to a series of unfortunate fuckups I ended up leaving at eleven PM to do a six-to-eight-hour solo journey, having only had three hours' sleep the night before.
I downed six cans of Red Bull and started driving. Remind me not to do that again.
By the time I was halfway there, I was absolutely out of my fucking mind. I was singing the level two background music from Bells N' Whistles (old Konami arcade game featuring Twinbee, music so catchy it got released on CD in Japan, look it up at the KLOV) at the top of my voice - it didn't have lyrics, so I was just going "Tralalala, la la la LAAA laa la luur luur la laaa la la LAAAAAA!" The lampposts flickered - I thought they were winking, and I winked back. I passed a sign for a Little Chef and, remembering that they charge a QUID for a slice of buttered bread, misread it as Little Thief - and giggled uncontrollably for HALF AN HOUR. Then I sung Ryu's theme from Street Fighter II.

I intended to arrive in Glasgow, kip in the back of my van, then go and meet Diane at the hotel. As it was, I got there, fucked around for a little while, then picked Diane up from the airport. Then I went to WorldCon!

I met Cory Doctorow, the BoingBoing guy - he didn't talk much about writing, or his work in general, instead trying fanatically to persuade everybody he ran into to switch to OpenOffice and Linux. OpenOffice pisses all over Microsoft Office, by the way, and there's a version that runs straight from your Flash drive on any computer without needing installation. But I digress.
Terry Pratchett came to the SFWA party. I immediately went downstairs for a cigarette before approaching him, as the alternative was to squeal like a fangirl and kidnap him, Misery-style. I thought he'd have had enough of talking about his books by that point, so we discussed politics, and it was good.
Hey, it's Terry Pratchett. How's it going? Come on in, Terry, grab a beer. *SQUEALPISSMYSELFDIE*
More details may come to me later.

Anyway, I'm in Pittsburgh. It's weird. Things between Gen and I are weird. It's strange to wake up and realise that she wasn't just a dream. I still have hope that we'll work it out and become comfortable with each other again, once we've gotten used to the way we've both changed over the past year. I couldn't tell you whether we'll still be together by this time next week, but given that I no longer have anything to return to, I'm hoping to stay for the full three months and see what happens.
There are things that Gen and I need to start telling people about, soon. I'm not going to talk about them yet, and I don't think Gen is, either. But you'll get the full story once we figure out whether we're at the beginning, the middle, or the end. That much I can say.

My latest crazy scheme involves making Flash games with a credit system and inviting people to download them for free and fit them into a modified arcade cabinet. Site users are then given permission to use them in revenue-earning situations such as pubs, arcades, chip shops, coffee houses or whatever takes your fancy.
http://www.jammaforever.com is the address.
And yes, Stompin' Game - Arcade Edition is coming soon.

All right. A little while ago, Lockheed had the idea of getting the old Inkspot/WBBS group back together and setting up... something. And I got all excited. So, I threw up a largely incomplete and rather shaky messageboard, which never quite worked properly. About two weeks later, I registered theinkspottedphoenix.co.uk. The name was suggested by Ben, and I think it's quite apt.
I think the shakiness and unreliability of the old board (and the horribly long path) kinda threw a lot of people. And then the London bombings hit, and we didn't have much else to think about for a while. Yeah, there are still new posts on the board at cavemanjoe.co.uk, but I couldn't help but think that the concept put forth by Lockheed and elaborated upon by all of us had far more potential than we were expecting.
Granted, the board was a bit of a mess, technology-wise. The version of Moby Threads I installed was kinda experimental, and broke a lot of things. But given a new installation and some nifty new applications, does anyone still think this can work?
What I'm trying to say is that... I think now that we're all grown up, we have it in us to manage a site ourselves. On our own. Not just as place for us to hang out, but as a "proper" writing site, which people would come to and join a community that got broken up when Inkspot died. And I think we owe it to the former moderators and administrators of Inkspot.com to make an effort, and name it after them. Maybe I'm just being sentimental, but I have damn good cause to be. Inkspot changed my life profoundly - if it weren't for Inkspot, I wouldn't have gone around the country in a Sooty van, I wouldn't have gone to the States, I wouldn't be engaged to the most beautiful girl in the world - and I want to bring it back. I want people who miss Inkspot to find The Inkspotted Phoenix, and find their old friends, and learn what everybody's been up to these past few years. And I want it to be managed by the group that had the friendliest and most accepting board, the board from which real-life relationships would spring, the board which must have had less than half a dozen proper flamewars in its entire existence. The Young Writer's Speculative Fiction members, who proved themselves more grown-up than most of the other boards.
So, I've put together the most basic skeleton of what could become a Big Thing for all of us. It's basic and bare because I'd like it to grow to be something we can all be proud of, and I don't want to have the lion's share of the decision-making - the point of this is for the YWSF board members to make a site that feels like home, not for me to make a site that I hope you'll like.

Here it is.

Read on if you're still interested.

Good.

The site runs from a Geeklog CMS system. What you see is a HTML-formatted front-end that interfaces with several PHP scripts, which in turn perform read and write actions on a SQL database. A SQL database can hold just about any type of alphanumeric data in whatever arrangement we choose, so we can put just about any sort of information we like on the site.
Geeklog is open-source, and there are a ton of plugins and enhancements available free of charge. We can even make our own, if we so desire - the source code is available for anybody to modify as they see fit. Here's some more information about Geeklog. For my interpretation, based on the same application, take a look at cavemanjoe.co.uk.
The site's based on user interaction. Any user can submit an article, a link, or an event, which is then passed through the Moderators for approval. It wouldn't take much to keep the site updated regularly.
The only modification I've made to the base install is to bolt PHPBB2 into it, so you have access to the Geeklog elements and the forum using a single login. The Phoenix forum at cavemanjoe.co.uk runs on PHPBB2, with the "Moby Threads" plug-in to enable threaded discussions. Geeklog to PHPBB2 integration is made possible by a mod called PHPBBBridge - and yes, mods for PHPBB2 will (usually) run without incident even when PHPBBBridge is involved. And there are a LOT of cool mods available for PHPBB2. Both systems use bog-standard HTML and CSS. We can make it look like whatever the hell we like. There's so many plugins, we can make it behave however we want, and we can integrate it with other systems too (even LiveJournal, if we so desire - every journal has an RSS feed that Geeklog can suckle from). If we can't find a plugin that does what we want to accomplish, we can make one.
With regards to our resources, we have past experience of what makes a board work, and (from the mass exodus) what makes it break down. I have the necessary PHP, CSS, HTML and Flash skills to pull this off, and I'm sure Ben could show me a thing or two in the technical department. Given that I'm now my own host, keeping the site online isn't an issue.

I guess I'm thinking of this now because I went to WorldCon a little while back with Diane and her friend Sue, which inspired me to no end. And NaNoWriMo is coming up.

Hell, isn't it worth a try?

Can anyone tell me why I'm only ever able to find Ehrgeiz on JAMMA when I don't have the money to buy it?
GRR!

Current Mood: frustrated

Yeeeee!
www.cavemanjoe.co.uk/cultureshock

Current Mood: satisfied

All you arseholes talking about nuking Iraq or burning mosques - stop calling yourselves British and get the fuck out of my country, right now.
Everybody in the United States - turn OFF your televisions, the reports you're seeing are GROSSLY fucking exaggerated. There is NO chaos, NO confusion. The news is happening in BRITAIN, so turn on a fucking BRITISH news station.
That is all.

Right then. Anyone who's interested:
Lockheed, Ben and I are kinda thinking about resurrecting the old Inkspotted Phoenix board. I am also thinking about resurrecting Inkspot entirely.
I have unlimited webspace at my disposal, and a metric arseload of PHP programs I can use to build one hell of a portal site.
So far, this is what we have:
www.cavemanjoe.co.uk/phoenix/board
It features an open forum (no registration, but if needs be, we can ban by IP address - and there will be a SpamVampire for our perusal, so we needn't worry about being spammed), a members-only forum, and a critique forum (you have to be a member, and then you have to be in the crit group). The forums aren't visible to anyone who doesn't have the necessary permissions to view them.
Also, theinkspottedphoenix.co.uk is about six quid for two years. theinkspottedphoenix.com is about nine quid a year, if anyone wants to chip in. Or perhaps we could do something with Google ads, I don't know.
We could either go for an all-out portal site and advertise the hell out of it, or we could set up a very simple little gathering point with a secure forum and a few links, and take it from there.
Either way - ideas?