Carsblog

Wednesday, 1st of July, 2009 12:46 pm UTC

Progress, here and there

We're still in limbo, but not quite homeless, yet. Basically, we've begged for and got some more time. My recent plea for donations raised more than I expected, but still far short of what we need (we've raised about $1000 of $5000). That might change this month; we still await news about Kai's disability claim, and if it finally goes through, he will have a check by the 3rd. The insurance on our robbed storage unit is still being processed, but we probably won't see any of that until the end of the month.

I must get my art table set up this month. It has to happen. Besides everything else I'm behind on, I have a new comic that I have committed to do in August. And I wanted a little time before then to show my writer what I can do beyond Elf Life.

I'm looking at some other ways of moving forward. The other day, I finally figured out how to get MySQL installed on my desktop. This is critical for me, because ever since I've been on the internet, I've only ever had partial access through slow dialup lines. That is, I've never been able to just get online and stay online until my work is done; I am forever having to hurry up and get out of the way.

So when I had my own WordPress installation on my Winger Comics site some years back, I tended to get frustrated by it because I could only use it when I was online. I found the interface confusing, and I finally killed the blog by accident when I tried to upgrade it.

Now, I have the latest version of WordPress installed on my desktop, and I can finally "play" with it and see what it can do. And the interface is vastly improved over the older version; you can find things a lot easier.

With the ability to test database-powered web applications on my desktop, I'm a little more confident about using them on the web. As soon as I can, I am going to set up webhosting for Elf Life, so that I can dedicate resources to it that have always been out of reach. For instance, I will set up a database-powered art gallery. In addition to handling my own art, I would love to resurrect the old Naked Faerie Wing, a community art gallery that suffered back then from the fact that I had to hand-code every single page.

Role playing has suffered, too. Elf Life fans used to RP on the tagboard, until the tagboard broke the elflife.com domain, and then the players got shuffled off to LiveJournal, where I am afraid I have not been able to moderate spam and other problems. I hate this situation. We should have our own RP. With access to MySQL and other applications, we can do anything.

That doesn't mean I'm leaving Keenspot, by the way. Keenspot allows us to operate from separate servers, these days.

We (myself and Kai) are also intent on getting DSL, somehow. We have got to get off of this dialup treadmill. We're getting 26k connections where we're at right now, and that's on top of people picking up the phone in the middle of the night to make sure nobody's using it.

Meanwhile, if I have time this morning (I might, this morning, while nobody's looking) I'm going to set up a WordPress install on one small site that I do have access to, but one where bandwidth is a concern. I am not sure what I am going to do with it yet, but it will be nice to accomplish something. And WordPress' installation is amazingly fast and reliable.