Hey, new Black Dog Blog theme created for me by Mark Ty-Wharton! Thanks Mark. :)

It's a lot less claustrophobic than the last theme I'd been using – although it uses the same gorgeous header graphic, created by alice-grafixx.de.

I'm going to have lots of fun tweaking this one.

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Just gone back tweaking a previous entry after the obvious realisation that people reading my LJ mirror on their LJ friendslists, using their own stylesheets, won't see my custom "spoiler" CSS class. And no doubt the same goes for the feeds.

Not sure what to do about that. Any thoughts? Right now I've just duplicated the styles inline, which completely defeats the object of making 'em. (And of course whenever I change my style, I'd have to change a bunch of individual entries, which is ludicrous.)

Here's what the "spoiler" style looks like, if you don't know what I'm talking about. It used to be a redacty black-on-black until I decided that was needlessly hard on the eyes when viewed under my default styles.

View the original post at HellHound.net

Drupal NW user group meeting last night was pretty good.

I wouldn't say I'm entirely sure how to go forward, but that'll come in time, and meanwhile someone did a good demonstration of using views in 6.x to do just about anything. I'm still at the "planning how to organise data" stage just now. To that end, I got an answer to my "how do I add y/n options to a node" question (surprisingly complicated). So, first I'm upgrading my test install to 6.6 and then I'm playing!

It'll be such a relief to drop Discus with their secretiveness and complete lack of release schedule. Drupal, apart from being FOSS and far better supported with a large contributor base, is much more geared to community sites anyway; with all the modules on offer we may be able to do just about everything we want within the CMS.

Could we start a pie-in-the-sky wishlist? Maybe I'll start a topic for it on the boards. Yep, done. Comments disabled, so please post on the boards.

(It amuses me that a search for Discus 5 turns up a thread on how to migrate Discus to Drupal. From the thread: Discus 5 is coming out in mid-Feb [2006] (I hope!:) ) Looks like I'll be strictly on my own migration-wise.)

View the original post at HellHound.net

I know the boards are down. I'll have to fix it tomorrow; I can't do much from here (am at Paul's) and nor can UH Support.

In the meantime, please feel free to hold posting frenzies in the comments of this entry (here or LJ, whichever). Or use the moonburntlounge LJ community.

Twine should still work. It doesn't rely on MySQL.

View the original post at HellHound.net

Radio interview went well

Registered domains this morning

For now (cheapest-ass new website ever): http://pyroclasm.hellhound.net/ is the home of Pyroclasm. Small page so no Slashdotting, with any luck.

Recorded interview, will listen and edit later...

edit: MySpace too. I chose the url; /pyroclasm and /pyroclastic were both already taken, so rather than /pyroclasmuk (muk! muk! glorious muk!) I went for /pyroclasmic (which still sounds slightly grubby if you have a dirty mind, thus is perfect). Pyroclasm of course immediately friended Alestorm.

View the original post at HellHound.net

The Profusion redesign discussion is unfolding interestingly. Anyone with opinions, even if they're only the "I know what I hate when I see it" variety, please chime in.

As a whole different topic, the other night I started talking with Ree about what exactly I'd include if I were laying specs for a scalable writing-roleplay community sort of thing (à la SFV) to build from the ground up. The current plan is to stick with Discus because it's far better than any other forum software I've ever used. Indeed, if they ever release version 5 I'm prepared to pay for it (gasp). I'm only witholding my money now because they keep promising 5 then ducking questions about when it's due, and I don't like that.

Still, thinking along the lines of scratch-cobbled software is entertaining, if nothing more. I have half a site structure in mind. You can see where some webby2.0 and/or semantic elements could creep in (some variant of XFN among the characters! Generate your fecund elven prince's family tree! I'm buzzing at the mouth just thinking about all the fun) - and, by contrast, where you'd need to stamp down hard on arbitrary HTML and impose hard-coded limits on things like graphics. (People with more experience than me in horrid Sue-ridden huge-signature-graphic-using communities would have even more idea of What Not to Allow, I'm sure.)

Some flavours: the distinction between Pro and Twine (our encyclopaedia) would be much reduced, with background information a lot more closely integrated with the actual storyboards. Character personal 'blogs'. In-character discussion areas, with the IC/OOC line truly understood and reinforced and supported at a software level. Statistics (character last seen on #; click here to see all characters of this species; this character is currently in # active stories; # characters list 'sex' as their occupation). Oh, and an absolute ban on using copyrighted photos as PBs. So we'd need a supporting artist community - or an avatar generator...

Of course... actual members. Yah. Think small, Mutt. Think content, think customer service.

I saw an interesting plot idea on BRPS, of all places. I might introduce a storyboard like that, if I can find the interest for it...

View the original post at HellHound.net

Anyone any good with hCard microformats?

I've been adding info to my blog for fun, but I'm running into issues (when testing exporting it as a contact file through Operator and opening with Outlook): in a couple of cases it is incorrectly getting its data from the tag contents instead of the title attribute. (I'm using titles simply to make the human-readable part flow a bit more nicely.)

Code:

<address class="vcard">Contents &copy; <a class="url" href="http://hellhound.net/"><abbr class="fn" title="Herm Baskerville">Herm</abbr> '<span class="nickname">Mutt</span>' Baskerville</a></span>. <span class="org">Mutt <span class="title role" title="admin">administrates</span> <a class="organization-name" href="http://profusion.hellhound.net/" title="Profusion">Profusion writing and roleplay</a></span>.</address>

produces (edit: following code removed while I test stuff):

It's correctly picking up Herm¹ Baskerville as the full name. (The abbreviation tag with title is apparently best practice, better than classing separate words [plus a space] as name-parts, and clearly it does make more semantic sense.)

It is incorrectly picking up "Profusion writing and roleplay" for the organisation (instead of "Profusion") and "administrates" (instead of "admin") for the position.

Now, the title attribute is meant to overrule tag contents, unless I misunderstood something; perhaps it doesn't count in these specific cases? And no I'm not sure I really want to include all this info on the page, but I'm trying things out, godsdammit. :)

edit: Responses and interesting stuff to be found on the LJ mirror of this entry

¹ Less confusing than "Herman or Hermia, depending on my mood", right?

View the original post at HellHound.net

My Perl Akismet module is installed. Now I've absolutely no idea what to do with it. Won't this be fun!

(I anticipate a lot of help-cadging from people on UnitedHosting's support fora.)

View the original post at HellHound.net

Originally published at HellHound.net. You can comment here or there.

HHnet is mine for four more years. <3 (And my name is masked from the world for two more, because you can only buy WhoisGuard for two, apparently.)

41 bucks. Twenty quid. And Namecheap take Paypal. Very awesome.

Limerick¹ for first person to spot cheesy reference in this entry. (edit: Bunny wins!)

¹ (author reserves right to substitute other rhyming poetic forms)

Originally published at HellHound.net. You can comment here or there.

My webhost is actually pretty awesome.

With the SEO stuff I've been reading at work unanimously proclaiming that, when you get down to it, there's no substitute for good content, I realised that I need to add some actual stuff about hellhounds to HHnet.

Well, it's a bit of a gyp to register hellhound.net and not mention hellhounds on it except for my own fictional ones; it would be courteous to add some resources on classical ones. I've had the intention lurking in the back of my mind for a while, and what with my other commitments taking priority it'll be another while until I act on it, but in the meantime I put up a really really brief thing with a couple of the links I've found particularly useful.

And of course there are millions of sites out there with brief descriptions of Cerb and lots that mention the spectral dogs of the British isles (most of them, I suspect, more or less copied and pasted from Trubshaw), so as usual I've been wondering "what can I provide that that lot doesn't?".

So far, I'm not sure. Visiting Bungay and Blythburgh etc. with a camera and collecting some memorabilia would be fun, but other folks have done that and it's just as easy to link out.

I don't particularly want to do reviews of the various Baskervilles adaptations, because I am no cinema critic and by no means impartial about Sherlock or phosphorous wolfhounds; and while it would be nice to acquire Zoltan, Hound of Dracula and put up some stills or clips from it, it would also be major copyvio.

I'm not widely read in Bangsian fantasy, so have nothing original to say about hellhounds in general fiction. I have no interest in manga, so will not be providing any material about all those "angul & deemun bishiez yey!" titles. And I'm no artist either! So, hmm...

View the original post at HellHound.net

As some’ve you will’ve already noticed, the HHnet index page no longer links frumiously to my old Diaryland blog.

Instead, there’s columnage. Don’t all laugh at my css at once. I’ve been playing Ben Grimm all afternoon on playstation and I’ve decided I could stand to do a bit more clobbering. *loamy loom*

And, though nobody will ever notice, my rss.gif is custom made. I wanted ‘em a bit redder, and also nobody’s sure of the copyright on that little universal image all the other sites use. (Honestly, look. Even though I enjoy pixelwork, I don’t create extra work for myself without at least a flimsy pretext.) I hereby release my RSS gif (version visible on HHnet’s index at time of writing) into the public domain, or in countries where that’s not possible, I give everyone permission to use it for anything ever for free.

View the original post at HellHound.net