It has apparently stopped disappearing everytime she makes a move to remove the ‘scaffold’, she has apparently found all the stray asterisks, located the mistake in the instruction book, and, according to Lynn…we are now attempting to handle ‘modularizing’ it, whatever that means, and test it on other browsers: ok on firefox and IE-whatever—and she says we are over the technological hump and will be able to start installing ‘content’ very soon now!
All this means—we’re going to be typing our little fingers off RSN.
Woo-hoo! Congratulations!
ALRIGHT!!!! and yes, the fun is just about to start for the rest of you 😉
*happy dance*
The astronauts can see my smile from orbit!
:DDDDDDDDD
*takes a Google Earth sattelite photo of HRHSpence’s smile*
Joins the happy dance. 😀
Lots more happy dance — hope the floor holds up 😆
(did that work?)
You’re not going to like me for saying this – but I have to say it anyway…
If you had posted a site-design project on RentACoder.com back in May (as suggested at the time), you could have paid, say, $200-$300 and gotten a Joomla expert in India or the Ukraine or New Zealand or even the good old USA, to create a professional-quality site for you in a week, complete with shopping cart and PayPal links. And using whatever graphics and site-design preferences you wanted.
An extra few months of e-book sales would have covered the cost several times over, and Lynn could still have learned Joomla later and tweaked it to her heart’s content.
Of course, Lynn wasn’t to know that various crises were coming up in her life, but it’s always a safe prediction that site-building and programming will take a lot longer than you think it will.
In any technical field there is a long learning curve. Someone who has spent a few years creating websites for a living will know all kinds of subtle details and clever tricks that a beginner could take ages to find out. He will have a repertoire of techniques and code snippets that he has used elsewhere, and which he can just quickly plug in.
Even now, if Lynn gets stuck and can’t find an answer to a problem on any Joomla user forums, it may be a better idea to pay an expert $20 to answer a question or fix a problem, than spend to days of frustration messing around with it.
I know, I know. But Lynn is a methodical sort of person who will be in charge of maintaining this thing, and we kind of started this on so steep a learning curve (this plan was hatched, sans anything ready to go or any clear concept how to do this, in a hotel room in Memphis this March) that we, and she, had no idea what we were getting into. We’ve been discovering this along the way, and the latest problem was caused by an typo in the instructional manual’s files. But the good news is, we are finally just about there. From what I gather from Lynn, she was very fast at reconstituting the site after that happened, she was able to find the typo and fix it…and that means we’re no longer in unexplored territory.
As I put it in my job: The worst thing that can happen to a project is that you don’t know what you don’t know. Either some government has just changed a law that they haven’t widely broadcast, or you find out the day before you ask the government to approve something that the designer didn’t bother to tell you about this one feature that the product has, because it’s just this tiny little tweak, when that tiny little tweak has huge implications to a regulating body. And, if you don’t know about X, then you don’t ask about X, and in a big company fingers get pointed. (You never told me about this! Well, you never asked!)
Ah, but we’re dealing with the time-honored, much beloved, Abbey Stupid Stubborn Streak (her own words, not mine! :D) On the one hand, you make a very good point, on the other, there are times when figuring it out yourself is worth it because, as a creative person, you come up with solutions that aren’t like other websites. And if we didn’t learn it now, we would always be running to Pakistan for tweaking, because we’re constantly editing as new ideas arise.
And she has big plans for her Thieves’ World project that she’s practicing for on the CC site.
Most importantly, Lynn is not new to programming and computers. We’ve all done some, in various languages. I did my first with punch cards back in the seventies. If she’d been up here, we’d have been able to work together. The things I’ve been learning about PHP and CSS through Word Press as I’ve modified my site might have been useful to her. But that requires being in the same building at the time when the problem comes up.
Besides…that content thing is Significant. You all heard about this right from the moment of “Let’s put on a show!” All this time she’s been working on the site, we’ve been trying to get things to put up on the site. Carolyn’s got a few things ready to go, but even that wasn’t ready until several months after you first heard about Closed Circle. I’m still working on covers. Haven’t even started massaging the text.
And we all had our Real Life intrusions over the past few months. You folks are just getting all the insider joys and frustrations and birth pangs! 😀
Oh, hi, Carolyn! You posted as I was typing. Great minds…similar gutters.
Good morning!
Good morning! Ready for breakfast?
Update: breakfast as usual, beside the pond. The water is looking discernibly better: cloudy, but without that pea-soup tint that can be treacherous for fish oxygenation. The fish are swimming about with high energy and good appetite. Of course they had their breakfast too.
Writing is going well. It’s been a hard summer, actually—but I’ve got my feet under me now. I’m starting to wake up thinking about my book instead of other concerns, and that’s really helpful.
“That’s one small step, … ”
If you need Mac Safari (or Firefox) testers, I can do that. Could probably do Ubuntu Linux Firefox if that’s of interest.
Glad to hear the pond is improving. I was going to inquire…and hello to my little Ari!
yes, pond sounds better, poor fishies. no news on mine as the heat continues, not quite as bad, but still in the thirties …
and as I progress through Bren and Ilisidi and Cajeiri’s adventures in the third set I realised, shock horror, that I never bought Pretender, but somehow read straight on to the next one without noticing .. anyway, a copy of Pretender is arriving today ..