The Department of Useless and Ill-Informed Opinions

We have gone live! The

We have gone live!

The plan was to spend last weekend doing a final eval of Geeklog, and then to spend this week either running final prep on the Blogger/XMB setup or do the full setup on Geeklog.

And then the Yankees traded for Alex Rodriguez.

The biggest baseball story in a long, long time. Mike and I had a conversation on Sunday, and decided that we needed to make our final decision and get the site up and running immediately, which is what we did.

In the end, we went with the Blogger/XMB combo. Geeklog had a lot more to offer, in terms of functionality, but I'm going to be doing much of the maintenance, and I just couldn't grasp a lot of the heavy technical aspects of it. I was constantly looking at a sheet of paper with printed out instructions with a perplexed sort of stare. XMB is much, much easier to run.

So I spent Monday, yesterday, being off from work for Presidents' Day, doing those final steps and getting everything online.

The root URL of this site, http://www.inactualsize.com, is now the blog portion. Mike and I will post articles, with links at the bottom to our forums, located at http://www.inactualsize.com/forum, where there will be a discussion thread for that article. At the same time, people are encouraged to start tons of threads of their own. We're hoping it takes off, and gives people a great outlet for their opinions.

So yeah, it's up. Please check it out. Please head over to the forums and register. And please post some comments. This site has the potential to have a great, active user community.

I sound like a fucking marketing brochure.

Just as all this is happening, things at work are finally taking off as well. If the schedule stays as planned (and it never does), between tomorrow and March 12th, I'll be in the office for anywhere from one half day to 2 and a half days. I'll be around for about a half day tomorrow, and then I'll be in Vegas the rest of the week on vacation. I'm scheduled to be at a client here in NYC for all of next week. The week after I'm scheduled to be at a client in Houston for Monday through Wednesday, but it may extend through the entire week. And the week after that I'll be at a client in Miami (tought gig, right?) for Monday through Wednesday, and then I'll stay through the weekend to visit my family (which had already been planned oddly enough). Lots of travel. Lots of airline miles, hotel points and Amex Rewards points. Always nice, because I'm a milage whore.

So now clearly, the novel is taking quite the backseat. It's not exactly prudent to travel the country for business with my printed-out first draft taking up the laptop compartment of my briefcase... Thankfully, I can easily do the baseball site from wherever I am, as long as I have an internet connection.

That's all for now. I'm off to bed, because I need to be in early tomorrow.

-Jordan

The baseball commentary/discussion site is

The baseball commentary/discussion site is moving. Right now, we're evaluating yet another package, called Geeklog. It has all of the elements that we liked in Slashcode, specifically the ability to post an article on the front page and have people post comments that are linked directly to it.

Geeklog looks good, and has a lot more options than XMB, but it's also harder to customize in comparison. I'll probably spend some time this weekend giving Geeklog a final and thorough review, and weigh in with my opinion early next week. Mike is very impressed with Geeklog, and is all for it.

Still no new editing work on the existing novel, but I was hit with inspiration earlier this week. I woke up in the middle of the night, around 3:30am, having to use the facilities. As I was sitting there letting my eyes adjust to the light, I was smacked in the face with a nearly fully-formed concept for a new novel. I already had 2 other ideas sitting idle, waiting until I finished this one. But I think that this new one will trump them, and I may even opt to push aside the current novel I'm editing to begin work on it shortly. It'll require some amount of preparation and research in advance, so I can do that while still working on everything else (the current novel and the baseball site). I'd love to say what it's about, but I'm not 100% ready for that yet. I've told a couple of people, and they both looked at me like I was writing a horror/suspense novel. Which I'm not.

Either way, I should get back to work on one of these novels. Now I have an entirely new form of procrastination: I can debate internally which one I want to work on.

-Jordan

Things are actively underway now

Things are actively underway now for the baseball site. Unfortunately, due to server limitations from my web hosting provider (at least relating to the cheap package that I'm on), Slashcode won't happen. It's a shame, because it's a great package that'd allow for that immediate and article-specific talkback, but that's ok.

Instead, we're setting up a blog (the original plan), and are also going to use XMB Forum for that whole forum-type thing. My provider has some sort of site license thing, that allowed me to literally click one button and have them installed. We're working on customizing those now, although I'm looking at doing an upgrade before we actually go live. Apparently the version that my provider installs is an older version that XMB has discontinued due to major security flaws. Sounds like fun. The next step is setting up the blog and customizing that to match the forum pages.

All in all, I figure we're about a week or so off from being able to bring it up, which is sweet. Now that it's rolling, it's going fast.

As for the novel, which if you'll remember was the entire purpose of this here blog, I still haven't touched it. It's been weeks now. But that's ok. I'm completely secure in taking a little hiatus from the novel, particularly since I'm working on this new thing. I'll get back to it sooner or later.

-Jordan

Well the baseball thing appears

Well the baseball thing appears to be the way we're going to roll with the site. Initially, I was going to build an actual site and post articles and all that good stuff. Then setting it up as another blog was going to be the way. Mike has now introduced me to Slashcode, which is the software that a site SlashDot is built on. They allow for us to post articles, and then for visitors to post comments to our articles. It's a great idea. I love that it becomes a forum for free-flowing discussion (on baseball anyway), and not just us spewing forth our asinine theories on the game.

So I've been looking into getting it setup. It's harder than I'd imagined, and certainly much harder than setting a blog, but that's alright. Mike's all sorts of smart when it comes to this kind of stuff, so he's been helping me step by step. Basically, he's doing it even though I'm entering the actual keystrokes... Right now we're waiting for my provider to install what's known as CPAN modules that we need to run the software. What are CPAN modules you ask? It beats the shit out of me, but Mike understands them.

Once we get the Slash site installed, I'll work on the configuration and design changes, and then we can start rolling. I'd love to have it up and running in time for Spring Training.

On the novel front, movement is still firmly at zero. One of these days, in the very near future, I'll get back down to it. Maybe even today...

-Jordan

Holy crap, it's been 2

Holy crap, it's been 2 weeks since I last updated around these parts... I knew it'd been a while, but I didn't realize that it was quite that long.

To start off, I'm through with 70 of 234 pages for this second draft. The entire jump from 46 to 70 happened on the weekend of January 10th-11th, and I haven't touched it since. Things have been crazy. Work has finally picked up speed again, and so I'm getting busy. At the same time, I've been interviewing for my boss's job (he's moving on to another job internally, not leaving the company or anything like that). That hasn't been a time waster or anything like that, but it's been preying on my thoughts and my concentration levels for the past couple of weeks. Tomorrow is also my birthday, and I'm having a party on Saturday night. So basically the distractions are piling up, which are really just ways of formulating bullshit because I just don't feel like sitting down and marking these papers up.

At the same time, as I spend less and less concentrated time working on the big, bad novel, I'm starting to think about alternate uses for this blog. I'm looking down now at the update prior to this, and that thing is fucking weak. Truth be told, there's not much to say about my editing process that I think would be of interest to most people. There really aren't anymore plot twists or major new concepts coming to light. So I wonder what else I can talk about that might be of interest, both to me and to you.

Initially I'd bought this domain name last February, when I was out of work and was planning on starting up a monthly witty commentary magazine with some friends, but we quickly scrapped that idea when we discovered the sheer time committment that would be required of that. Plus everytime we told anyone else about the idea, the response was always something along the lines of "Oh, you mean like The Onion?" No, not like The Onion. Or at least we didn't think it would be. The second idea (which is still brewing in my head, and I may run with) was baseball-related. My friend Mike and I are insane baseball fans, down to stat comparisons and everything. Whenever we go out the conversation inevitably turns to baseball, which thrills his wife to no end. He and I discussed the idea of using this site for just that purpose, to turn our intelligent and funny back and forth about baseball into a commentary site. I still think it's a good idea, but what keeps happening is that new, big baseball stories keep coming and going, and we keep commenting to each other via AIM or e-mail, and we don't post this stuff online. So maybe we're idiots. Or maybe somewhere in our heads the we realize that the world has enough Rob Neyer's and Jim Caple's.

In the end, I think that the baseball thing is the way to go. I certainly have zero intent of going back to the magazine idea. It'll either fall to baseball, or something entirely different. Whatever it is will fall into the main root of this site, and not in this NaNoWriMo subdirectory. That's not to say though that I'll end this, since it'll be a vent for my personal shit.

Really, I have no fucking clue what I'm doing...

-Jordan