…for certain series, like Foreigner. It’s a shame to let the stuff scroll off into oblivion. If I use my amazing admin powers to snatch up comments, edit them for brevity and organize them into an ongoing Foreigner Guidebook, then it become a resource that can live here permanently. There probably should be one for Alliance-Union also.
So, again using my amazing admin powers, I am going to create it, and move some data into it. I will also have a list of contributors at the top—it will be your screennames. But since it will be a steadily lengthening post, it will be harder and harder to find the comments. We will deal with that creatively when the need arrives.
If/when you consider a Wiki, there’s a number of sites to get you started. http://www.zoho.com has one that I tried some while ago. There must be others.
Here in Tulsa we had lots of rain, minor flooding in the usual places but the water retention ponds work very well and keep the creeks from overflowing. Broken Arrow has never put that scheme in place and as a result gets some flooding, as do Sapulpa, Sand Springs. We’re also saved by the Keystone Dam which stops the Arkansas from decimating Downtown and Riverside, all the way to Jenks.
There’s someone here who lives around Edmond IIRC and they’ve been flooded.
@tulrose….happy to hear that all is well with you…..hope there is not too much lasting damage. (One of our major malls is reopening very slowly after our march floods….expects to be fully open for Christmas) It sounds like you had a flood plan in Tulsa..
If you go with a wiki, use a mediawiki. Limit editing to known contributers, who log in. No anonymous comments!
Thanks for the very sensible info, all. I’m liking this wiki idea, if we can get past the PHP part…and it looks as if we can get help if we hit the wall.
I haven’t used/done a wiki, but it seems like a better solution than a blog-based notebook solution.
I’d second (nth?) the idea of a single CJC wiki divided into sections by story-universe. (If it is set for Closed Circle and given galaxies for CJ and Lynn and Jane, and any future Closed Circle authors, wonderful also.)
I would really, really like to suggest separate sections for Foreigner, Chanur, the Alliance-Union books, Faded Sun, Morgaine, Merovingen, and so on; separate for each story-universe. I’d love to know what you, as the author, have to say about Chanur and the others. (Just getting into the Foreigner series now.)
Contributions by registered members, vetted by you, CJC, with a way to submit questions and materials, sounds like a fair way to have fans help flesh out the resources while making sure the body of work is true to your (CJC’s) take on the universes.
I really like the idea of companion books that detail the universes. Those have worked really well, very popular with fans and creators alike, for Trek and so many other story series, and the quality is clear, extremely shiny. 🙂 Doing that in print and in ebook form, taken periodically from a website source like a wiki? — I don’t think that has been done, except perhaps by the Unicode standards body or the folks at A List Apart. Heck, it’s worth a shot! (Right across the port bow?) (I’ll forego the requisite Trek filk, 😉 )
Wonderful idea!
Hmm…. Would an in-print publisher like the idea too? More profitably, would self-epublishing be the better route, though? — Never mind, I’m just thrilled you’re considering doing something cool like this.
*** Side Note: It’d be great if you get the urge to write another Chanur / Compact Space book. Hani, mahen, whatever those pesky humans are up to, you know they’re trouble. Even the stsho might be up to something interesting. The kif? Well, they’re kif, after all. And who knows what lurks in the minds of the knnn, tc’a, or chi? ***
Yup, I’d love more Alliance-Union stuff too.
Aw heck, we want more. Brand new and original or in story-universes you’ve already written in. We’re hungry for stories. 😀
“Banned from Argo”, anyone? 😀
Um, and… Have you ever considered a historical-era novel in fiction? Greco-Roman? Western US? Whatever era? I have a strong feeling you’d be good at it and fans would get a huge kick out of it. (Not to sidetrack the thread, but just offering a wishlist item, there.)
I tried writing a historical set in Bronze Age Greece, but everything anybody did or had was not readily explicable without footnotes, I swear, and I just couldn’t do it without info-lumps. I was a very young writer at the time. Now maybe I could handle the info-flow a lot better.
An historical could be a different beast altogether, because readers already have preset notions about culture, background, etc. Lots more opportunity for argument …
The PHP is not a big deal. You can find it . The reason I recommend MediaWiki is because it’s what I finally ended up using for my research site after trying some others. Security is a big issue, but you can populate the initial editor list from your registered users. Since one of my reasons for running my wiki is to keep up with events in the security world, I can advise as needed.
Whoops–malformed html. Sorry. Click on the back end of the message for access to the PHP site.
@Chrondite, you rat! Now I’ll be singing that all day! I was going to ask which version, but I only know the words to the original!
PHP is just a mystery to me, and I think to Jane as well. I’m going to have to talk to Lynn, who is the one who did the research on Joomla!—
I don’t think we have to re-invent the wheel via PHP here. Through our hosting service, we have access to three different “Wiki” products — MediaWiki, Wikkawiki, and PMWiki, all of which appear to be non-premium (which usually means there are no additional costs to implement them). Wikis might be the easy answer here. I’ll poke around the manuals and demos to see if any of the three is a clear winner, but the Wave-riders have opinions, I’d be eager to hear them
Aha! The cavalry has arrived! So glad to see you back!
Since I am mostly a newbie to anything beyond html and some css, I have no idea what a notebook is — but would you need artwork?
I have a lot of Foreigner art — be glad to share it with this project:
http://resa-challender.deviantart.com/gallery/#Cherryh
You might want to take a look at some of the pre-built turnkey solutions.
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/
We use turnkey’s Joomla appliance and it was ridiculously easy to set up; download the ISO file, burn it to a CD, boot the server and let it do its thing.
They also make virtual machine versions if you’re running VMWare, Xen or Hyper-V hosts.
Turnkey has pre-built setups for MediaWiki and TWiki.
On a related note:
I’m a network admin guy, so I’m a little vague on the differences between a wiki and a CMS application like Joomla, but Joomla seems to be pretty easy to work with when it comes to working with content.
Don’t know how involved it is when it comes to customizing its look or layout.
I know someone with Joomla experience, amounting to several months with an online newspage (lots of content editing there). Said person also, I think, has MySQL experience, and writes HTML in Notepad.
Things I noticed in the new book: talking about the aiji-dowager’s company losing one, when it was two before;
and the number of children nand’ Pairuti has.
(I remember there was some misaddition when the paidhi-aiji was setting up his office, too.)