Zikula
Road to Hell: Creating Arunstoun
This early sunrise malarkey is really messing up my sleep patterns: I keep waking up at 5am. As a side effect, I appear to be having very vivid dreams: I’ve had some great ideas for a new location for Cthulhutech and Call of Cthulhu, as well as a short story or two. It’s a fictional place called Arunstoun, up in the Pentland Hills beyond Balerno – a bit like Ramsey Campbell’s town of Goatswood. I can have some major fun with the area, as I know it fairly well – if you’ve travelled the A70 from Edinburgh to Lanark, you’ll know what the countryside is like along the “Lang Whang” (I’m sure some twit will have sniggersome comment about the Long Wang). Arunstoun came into being after a particularly vivid and weird dream.
Last Saturday, I ran Black Ice, a D6 Star Wars adventure on Saturday at ORC. Wasn’t my best session, but I think we all had fun playing it – including LSD in her first ever RPG! We did pretty well considering we were out at the Voodoo Rooms the night before and didn’t get back until 2am.
Talking of nights out, the ORC birthday bash was pretty good fun. I’m wondering if I should make the “Horde” a regular anniversary! Not a huge lot of folk turned up but we all enjoyed ourselves immensely at the Bongo Club then the Banshee Labyrinth. I think it is definitely something we should do more often – although without the dancing. I started off a bit of trend with the pole-dancing in the Banshee Labyrinth later: those involved, you know who you are!
I’ve got a lot of interest in Against the Odds, my 4th Edition D&D game setting, and although ORC is not at the Meadow Bar during August, I’m going to use the time to plan this campaign out and fill in some of the blanks in the wiki area for Ashes of Freedom.
I’m also going to see if I can improve the website backend software. I’m not totally happy with Zikula.
Fear is the key
If life is a game; I’m rolling ones. It hasn’t been the best of weeks – work has been hard-going, and I’m not feeling too good. Possibly after the shenanigans last weekend!
I’m going to be updating the ORC website soon. I’ve planned to try and upgrade the key components, but I’m not looking to make any major changes initially – although I will patch some parts of it. As the ORC website uses Joomla! as a backend, it will take a little getting used to. I’ve setup a test area and it looks like the transfer itself will be straightforward enough. I’m planning to upgrade the EventList plugin to use an RSS feed as well, so that events can be published to the ORC Facebook page perhaps, and also to my own blog. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to be that straightforward – and the site (shlu.net) developer forums appear to be largely offline. Still, no hurry. I can still update the other parts of the site, such as transforming the current Fireboard forum to Kunena, and upgrading the uddeIM components. I’m getting pretty adept at this kind of thing now! Long-term, I’m not sure what I should convert to: phpBB3 or SMF forked with Zikula, or just to stick with Joomla!
It has been a pretty crummy week, and I’ve not really achieved anything: I’m either too tired or too stressed. The lock on the main door of the flat appears to be sticking (I struggled with it for 10 minutes on Tuesday) and I hope that’s not going to be a problem in the future! Last thing I need is to be unable to get into my flat! I’ve taken a day off today, as I need to clear my head.
Trapped Under Ice
Well, I couldn’t get into work yesterday – the snow and ice were such that the road was closed at Hillend, and a traffic accident blocked the other route out to Straiton. So I stayed home – just as well, as work closed very early too. There’s about a foot of snow at my work, and that is now mostly ice, although the roads are passable again today. There’s two-foot icicles hanging off the roof while I blog on my lunch hour – pretty but lethal! Town itself is starting to become easier to navigate although it can be pretty dicey where the snow has re-frozen after thawing. Baby steps needed – my shoulder still aches a bit!
I did some pretty major changes to the website yesterday – creating a Dreamweaver Template that pretty much removes the need to update each page individually. I removed some of the defunct Javascript and updated the Google Analytics script. Despite the template, I still need to update the Wiki skin, the Zikula and the WordPress templates manually – but that’s nothing major. I also moved the Shadows Lengthen and Ties of Blood PBM pages to a new section, the Archive area of the wiki. The Archive area is something of a dumping ground for my ideas and former projects (and diabolical plans!) that never came to fruition. I tried to get short URLS to work with MediaWiki, but that seems to be too difficult – the hacks I tried didn’t work or bollixed up the site – short URL s would be pretty but they’re not essential. Meh.
Hmm. What else is going on? I’m also turning Ties of Blood into a board game although this is still in the early stages! I also need to get the next Ashes of Freedom game written. More and more folk are signing up for it, and I’m not sure if I can sustain it next game if more than seven people want to play!
