Authors Abode

Apologies for the latest server kerfuffle. More details are available on the Winds of Storm Server Status page, which is hosted on LiveJournal so I can update it when the server is offline. Please check there before emailing me for information, and please email me rather than dropping me a private message on forums such as RD, which I don’t always check daily.

Thanks!

I noticed that a few spam blogs (splogs) were getting created, so I went and switched CAPCHA systems to help try to block them. Hopefully this doesn’t cause any problems with real new user signups.

I also updated Morgan’s Progress Meters to 0.4.2, which should help fix an SQL error from appearing on every page. Oops.

I installed Morgan’s WIP Manager, which I’m finally releasing as version 0.1. Please let me know here if you have any trouble with it.

I fixed an error with the Ocadia theme so it should now be working correctly. Sorry for the delay on that, I know it basically disabled the blogs of people who used it during the interim. I’m not sure what caused the trouble, I just worked around it instead.

Anything else I need to work on?

I’ve updated Morgan’s Progress Meters to version 0.4.1 here at Authors Abode. This new version is mainly a minor upgrade to add in a widget to allow you to show off your meters easily without having to muck with HTML at all. Feedback would be quite welcome– either in this thread or over on my tech blog.

I’ve also installed another plugin called Lightbox JS. This is a handy little plugin which you may have seen around the net on various other WordPress blogs. Basically if you click on a link to an image, rather than having your browser navigate away from the page, it fades out your current page and then loads the image on top. You can then close the image and go back to the page in a snap since there is no “back” page refresh time.

I’ve added in the MU-Admin Bar to the site. Please let me know what you think of it. I rather liked the one that WordPress.com has, but it doesn’t look like they’re releasing that code publically. MU-Admin Bar gets very close to it, however.

I’ve also been tweaking some widgets. Take a look at the New Blogs / Active Blogs / Updated Blogs, as well as List All Posts. This will let you keep track of your fellow Authors Abode folks a bit easier. I’m also tweaking a friends list plugin as well.

Just a post to let you all know that I’ve moved over all the interviews we did over at Evolution Writers to its own Authors Abode blog.

Take a peek, we had a good collection of authors participate:

http://interviews.authorsabode.com

Still waiting on the interview back from Jim Butcher, I’ll have to email him again and see if he has the time to do it still.

There was a bug with the progress meters where you’d be seeing other people’s images where you expected your own. I’ve fixed the bug, however your old URLs will not be valid. (That was part of the problem…)

What you need to do (and I’ve done this for a few folks) is go into your admin panel, go to Manage > Progress Meters, and click on every Embed link. This will regenerate all the images with the new URL syntax. Afterwards, then you’ll want to update any links that you have to the new URLs. The old ones looked something like this:

• http://x.authorsabode.com/wp-content/progress-meters/meter-3.png

The new ones look like this:

• http://x.authorsabode.com/wp-content/progress-meters/meter-3-1.png

Sorry for the confusion, I wasn’t thinking ahead properly for the multiuser setup. Mea culpa.

Added a few new themes to the site, per Emma Blake’s request:

• Orange 1.0
• Cirque 1.0
• JD-Nebula 1.0.0

Please let me know if there are any problems with any of them, or if there’s another theme you’d like installed. Thanks!

After some discussion back and forth on the WPMU forums, I went ahead and tested my theory and it did indeed solve the problem. I’m leaving my fix in place for now, and have posted the code for them to review. They may decide to implement things differently, in which case when the next version rolls out I’ll take a look to see if their code actually works correctly or not.

In the meantime, you should be good to go with creating new blogs again. Sorry for the problems, folks.

I went ahead and got StormChat set up here on Authors Abode. You’ll need an Authors Abode account to log in, much like you needed an Evolution account to use it over at Evo, etc.

More tweaking definitely needs to be done; I’m going to try to match the look of chat to the theme I’m now using for the main Authors Abode homepage. This should be a fairly neutral theme for those looking to host author chats, etc. And if you’re going to do something like that, please feel free to drop me a line so I can post a news post here letting everyone know about it.

I recently updated to WordPress MU 1.1.1 and it appears that there’s a bug with creating new blogs. I’ve helped with WPMU folks isolate the problem and hopefully they should have a fix rolled out soon. I’ll apply it as soon as I see it available, and post an update letting y’all know that it’s been resolved.

This should not affect existing blogs, just those trying to create new ones.