Elf Life by Carson Fire, with new costumes by Kaichi Satake.

Carsblog
Wednesday, 14th of January, 2009 12:00 pm UTC

Arkiv

Carsblog has returned (you might not have noticed it was gone).

I was going to include a lot of the previous posts from the last year, but, man! Depressing stuff. Every other post is about the electricity getting cut off.

To include these posts, all I would have to do is dump the old files into the new folder, but I've had enough of 2008. I'll repost the few art posts over time, and anything else important, but not now. Let's concentrate on the here and now, and what is to be. My biggest gripe about the internet is the idea that everything--everything--must be archived forever and ever. Lord love a duck, what a drag! Do you want every stupid thing you ever said in your whole life bronzed? An important function of the brain is to move on, to not always dwell on the stupid, the embarrassing, and the painful.

I've had a string of really, truly awful years. And it's not like I've posted entertainingly insane rants about it. My misfortunes tend to make for pretty dull reading.

So let's move on. 2009 has to be better.

I have finally mothballed Kipper. It was sad, because I worked really hard on it. It was my first serious scripting project, but it grew too big, and it had too many moving parts.

Complaints from readers about the archive played a part in the decision. I had this bright idea--like many of my ideas, it was a bright idea, 'cept it didn't work--to rig an archive that could create any number of archives automatically by reading every folder in a master directory.

It's not quite right to say it didn't work. It worked like a charm. But the resulting output I think helped confuse readers. Every archive was structured something like this:

The "one folder" approach was confusing partially because not all archives should be equal. I didn't see any reason not to use the system for comics, blogging, and other information equally. Other sections weren't "archives" at all, but included because I was excited by just how much Kipper could do.

With good intentions, the idea gave me too much freedom. I wanted to divide Elf Life into books, but I divided them too much. Eight books, to be precise. The new structure:

That's the entire series up to the wedding in one archive, and the huge, largely unfinished wedding in another. I still have to make a decision about some of the extraneous stuff, like Babes in the Woods.

Some other procedural mistakes: running the thing on-site, like my own private Autokeen. PHP writing files on-site is something akin to having a monster loose on the premises. Permissions and file ownership is a constant problem. With PHP, it seems to be a lot more trouble-free to FTP the output, instead. That way, you're logged in; no permission problems, period.

I am using a new system that I put together much faster (thanks to what I learned with Kipper), that does not rely on a master folder, manages archives separately so that there can be more per-archive customization, and uploads only the finished files from my desktop. We'll call it Arkiv; it's an archive-enabled version of Sidor.

So the website is once again secure, and there are no piles of hidden workfiles being left lying about.

Copyright © 2009 Carson Fire
Privacy policy