Messages

Oh, and upgrade or disable gallery ASAP.

No problem. I've been very fed up with Gallery for some time and have been sitting on the fence waiting to decide what to do about it. I'll talk to Mithandir about moving the contents to WillowCMS.

As for the email, I can now log in, but the inbox isn't working. THis may have been the result of something that I did - I tinkered with the permissions earlier on, in case I needed to delete that 350 MB mailbox. Then when I decided not to do that just yet, I realised I'd forgotten the original permissions. I think they should be rwrr, but I'm not sure.

Once I get that working again, I'll set it to accept only internal system messages. It's not like I use it at all, normally.

Rocr.net is 500-ing out! Seems to be only the dynamic pages are affected.  I'll be checking with my programmer, Mithandir, but in the mean time: have there been any changes to the MySQL/PHP setup? Or the CGI configuration?

Also, I can't get into my email (username/password is not recognised) or SSH, so my ability to do my own part in fixing the problem is severely compromised.

Xepher: Thanks again for all the work you put into keeping the site working.
I didn't actually have the meta: content-type header until the problem started; it was a desperate attempt to make  the pages work. However, now that it's there, it's gonna stay:)

A few observations:
Code doesn't make a community. Shared interests and personal ties make a community. The codebase on journalfen.net and livejournal is almost exactly the same; Journalfen hasn't even bothered to edit some of the default output from the LJ-codebase it uses. So on several sections you'll see things like "monkeyfart has x entries in his livejournal". However, Journalfen comes across as much more of a community than LJ is, because it's smaller, focused on fandom, and it has a barrier to entry in that you need an invitation to get a free account. Also, all the action, from what I can see, is in the community journals - individual journals more often have no entries, which is why JF can get away with leaving the word "Livejournal" on those pages.

Having said that, Xepher.net should be in a good positio to become a community site. After all, we already have a fairly narrow range of shared interests and a vetting system so that not everyone can get in. Innovative code can help enable the community to present itself better. But I don't think a CMS is the way to go. A CMS would have to be very good indeed to seduce me into switching from the CMS I use now, which has over 1300 episodes of my comic in it, and besides there are already so many CMSes out there. Unless you made it compulsory, I couldn't see it getting widespread adoption.

What I would suggest instead is toolkits that are abstract enough to work with existing CMSes. Something that would help collect the work of xepher artists, present it on the front page, possibly in thumbnail form, and also gather up comments and blog posts from those artists. RSS is very useful with that because a lot of us already have RSS feeds for comics, blogs and maybe even for comments to either comics or blogs, but for those that don't, an easy system for setting up feeds that the collection tools could use would also be useful. OK, that does count as CMS functionality, only it would be focused on RSS instead of HTML output.

The above is maybe not the most well-thought-out idea, but the gist of it is that it's probably better at this stage to let people build their sites however they want, and concentrate on stuff that makes it easier to share the contents.

Er... xepher? I think I need UTF 8  for the umlauts and norse characters to work. The titles of my chapters have all gone corrupted. See this episode, for instance.

Okay, then we shouldn't have called you stupid. Still, read the front page. Go to the page about hosting. Actually, that page could be clearer.
To get a website on Xepher, you have to ask on this forum and you have to tell us a lot about yourself, what you've already done, what sort of website you want to make. And then the rest of us comment and say whether we'd like you in or not, and Xepher makes the final decision. It's not easy, and Xepher.net does turn people down.
If you're ten, and this is your first website, then probably Xepher.net is not for you. But you never know!

You're right! Amazing I missed that.

Maybe the "featured site" spot should be held by a call to suggest a featured site, linking to this forum thread. Or the Xepher.net forums themselves could be featured so people become more aware of them.

I really would like it to be changed, to anything. To a naive reader, it looks like I'm hogging that spot.

I want a larger house to live in. I actually dreamed of shelf space last night. Honest to God.
A tricked-out, high-end Mac has been on my dream list for many years, for no reason whatsoever (but then whenever I tried to tailor a computer purchase to a specific need, I've got it wrong - I always end up using them for something other than originally planned).
The body of a god. But I'm making some headway with that.
A real cartooning career instead of the hand-to-mouth existence I've got. That  would be nice.

Ooh, this is very interesting. Let me know how it works out.

I'll want to give it a try on my SuSE 10.0 system, though I've found out that SuSE isn't all that good about these things. Great distribution for the office but a lot of the multimedia support is deliberately crippled.

Much as I like having Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan as a featured site, it's time we got another one. Who'd you recommend?

It might, but quality control gets more complicated with PODs located in the US. I want this to look good, and the only way to assure that is to eyeball the books before they get mailed to me (and they have to get mailed to me at some point, even if it's just a preview copy).

I'm open-minded about POD, or at least more than I used to be. But if I went with a POD-type printer, I'd  go with one in Europe as most of my sign-ups so far are from here.

Thanks, Xepher and cha0s! I'm getting a few people preordering the comic as well so I feel I might be doing something right just this once.
Of course, to get cost down to a reasonable level, I really need something like 50 signups so it'll be a while before I'm in the clear with that.

Woo hoo!
I've got a new webdesign over at Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan! And I'm working on a minicomic!

The full story on the minicomic is now on the ROCR front page, and I don't want to cut and paste the whole thing here. If you're reading this after Monday, April 3, the press release will be archived on the Headsmen Mini page.

The two things are of course related - I did the redesign to coincide with the minicomic's pre-launch. It was a job and a half but I do think the new look is an improvement, and I hope the mini will be a hit (defined as selling about a hundred copies, really).

Xepher, I don't use that inbox anyway, so you have my permission to look at it all you want. I'll try setting it up for IMAP as soon as I have a bit of time and energy to spare.

Right now, it's clean, with nothing new in there but cron reports. These tend to pile up but that's not a problem. I'll notify you when there's a new batch of suspect messages.