dduane:

(There, that’ll do as a placeholder image for the time being. In a while I’ll work something out with the Wizard’s Knot in it.)

First of all — some of you visiting the various YW websites six hours or so ago might have noticed that the servers were down. They’re fine now: the nice people at FutureQuest were updating us to a new version of PHP.  (Seriously, if you’re looking for hosting, I recommend these folks. They are small enough to be immediately responsive and helpful but big enough to handle anything within reason. They are also splendidly proactive — they caught nasty people hacking the EuropeanCuisines.com site the other day and took it down immediately. My heroes.)

I’ve just spent a tiresome couple of days doing strictly technical stuff to the various YW-affiliated websites (upgrades, etc, mostly under-the-hood stuff that doesn’t show) and have had time to spend thinking about some changes I’ve wanted to make for a while. So here’s how things are going to go.

First of all, the Errantry Concordance. Maintaining this has increasingly become a pain, partly due to the essential (and kind of unavoidable) clunkiness of the wiki markup, partly due to changes in my local workflow, partly due to the difficulty of integrating MediaWiki with other apps.

So what I’m going to do over the course of November is move all the ErrantryWiki content into a wiki-styled WordPress installation. This will mean all exterior and interior links will get translated into standard URLs instead of the usual MediaWiki markup — not that this matters to anybody but me: it’s just simpler to work with. Some attempt will be made to keep page addresses the same, but I’m not fanatical about that (and doubt anyone else is). I could care less about that site’s SEO, and Google and the other search engines will digest the new sitemap .xml files soon enough. This will also render the site capable of handling its own core software upgrades, and will render the individual pages unspammable (something to which the present ErrantryWiki is sometimes vulnerable, especially as regards the “talk pages”). The overall effect will be to make this more like an encyclopedia / static resource and less like a wiki. I’ll kind of miss that aspect of it, but now that there are more effective and easy-to-use note-taking and -storing options like Evernote, I don’t really use the wiki as idea storage any more.

The most useful thing about this change of platform, though, is that it’ll make it possible to directly load/share YW meta that’s originally published here on Tumblr into the Concordance via IFTTT. I won’t have to worry about finding time to spend cutting & pasting: life’s too short, and I have enough on my plate right now as it is. Along the line I’ll devise ways to tag material exported from Tumblr as canonical, noncanonical, or under review, so that nobody gets confused. (At least any more confused as I am about any given issue.)

As I said, this won’t be an immediate thing, but by mid-November it should be all taken care of.

Which leads us to something else: the Young Wizards discussion forums.

They have been very quiet for quite a while. Not that this is unusual, between books. But when you get barely fifty or sixty page visits a week from only a few of a pool of ten or twenty people — outside of our friendly sysops — you start wondering why you’re making the ever-vigilant staff spend their valuable time keeping an eye on the place, and (additionally) why you’re spending your money on the storage space to keep those gigs and gigs of messages live for the very, very few people who look at them, let alone join the discussion forums and engage in, well, some discussion.

The online world has changed a lot since the Forums opened up in… 2005 or thereabouts? I can’t even remember any more. A lot of people do their discussing in/on less static platforms (like Tumblr, for one). There are those who say that the forum concept is over with. I’m not sure I’m willing to go quite that far.

And there’s this too. Tumblr, with all its virtues, is not all that great for long detailed discussions. For those of you who want to hash out YW-based issues with other interested parties, the vBulletin forum format really has tremendous strengths and advantages that are worth availing yourself of.

So here’s what’s going to happen. Over the next month or so the Forums are going to be tidied up, categories updated and shuffled, and the place generally improved as we get rid of some useless features and put in some new ones (especially things associated with the upcoming publication of Games Wizards Play).  I encourage those of you who might not have thought about the Forums before to wander over there, kick the tires a little, do some searches and see what kinds of things people have been talking about for all this long while. See if it’s the kind of place you’d like to participate in.

After that, as 2015 sets in and the GWP release date starts drawing nearer, I’m going to give it a few months to see how the stats behave, and to give me some guidance on whether to keep the Forums alive or close them down. So that issue’s in all your hands now.

And one more thing, something new rather than old: the Games Wizards Play Tumblr. If you’re interested in the book, you want to be following / keeping an eye on this, because this is where I’m going to be rolling out something new. I was going to call it Fragment Friday, but some people are already doing that, so let’s call it Figment* Friday.

Every Friday between now and the release of the book on February 2, 2016, the GWP Tumblr will feature a fragment from the book. Might be a big piece, up to a thousand words… might be small, just a line or so. Might even be an outtake (but those will always be clearly labeled as such). The postings will always happen at 23:59 pm Irish time (normally 6:59 PM US Eastern or 3:59 PM US Pacific). I will not routinely be reblogging those postings at my own Tumblr unless the spirit moves me for some incomprehensible reason, so if you’re interested… follow the GWP Tumblr. (Or follow the GWP Twitter account, which will tweet a link to the mirror of the Figment Friday posts at the Games Wizards Play website blog.) On this side of things the tag will be “Figment Friday”: at Twitter it’ll be #FigmentFriday.

First figment / fragment goes up tonight, October 24th, at 11:59 PM Irish time. It’ll be the first thousand words or so of the first chapter of Games Wizards Play. So if you’re interested, or know someone who might be, please reblog this post and get the word out.  🙂

And one final note: next Friday, but only next Friday, there will be no figment, because we have something a bit more special. Next Friday, Halloween, sees the return of the YW 30-Day OTP Challenge series with post number 17: Spooning. And not one but two special guest stars…

*The word implies more than our normal/common usage as in “a figment of the imagination.” It means “a fantastic notion, invention, or fabrication”: from the Late Latin figmentum a fiction, from Latin fingere to shape.