Alexandra Erin

Man, after some serious trial and error, it seems that the number one source of unnecessary processor usage on Tales of MU was, of all things, the plugin I used to insert the “previous” and “next” links into the page. Yeah. That’s all it does. However, it did this by using a bunch of php calls to insert lines into a bunch of different files at different points during the page rendering process.

I never really looked at it that closely before because it seemed like such a simple, dinky little thing compared to things like the spam blocker and the caching module and so on… but of course, the plugin’s a hacky little shortcut to something any php coder should be able to do for themselves with no effort and somebody like me could do with a little effort. But… you know… effort. My one weakness! So I just slapped the plugin and called it good. I’m sure it’s fine for people whose blogs are ready by a couple dozen online friends or whatever, but clearly it was not meant for somebody with tens of thousands of hits in a day.

So, I’ve disabled it and now I’m working out how to put the nav links back in myself. Fun. Shouldn’t be too hard, though. Most Wordpress themes have them coded in already… I just picked a really basic one to modify and it was really basic.

I guess I should take this as a lesson, or something.

Tales of MU may be going briefly offline for a little bit, so I thought I’d re-post this here: after a series of disappointments with my new host and a new, fairly major issue, I’m moving it again. It won’t be quite as big a headache this time because I’m taking it back to Dreamhost… they finally came through with the private server, which hasn’t shown any appreciable issues (it’s currently running this site and my forum and most of my smaller stories). Anyways, the upshot of this is that there won’t be a new Tales of MU today, though I will make it up during the week; five total updates, as usual.

UPDATE:

I’ve got the site copied over and all, and now I’m just waiting on the DNS stuff to update. This will not happen for everybody at the same time, meaning that some people will still be looking at the NFS-hosted version for the next day or so (hopefully less than that). If you’re looking at the page and comments are disabled on everything, you’re getting the old version. If comments are open, you’re looking at the new version. I also tagged an “(old version)” onto the top of the sidebar.

I always try to mention when a “big name” in some artistic field makes an online independent endeavor, because that’s a good trend, but of course there’s plenty of people out there who are using the internet to make a name for themselves in the first place, and that’s also a good trend.

Case in point is the band advertising on my leaderboard banner (right this moment, anyway. If you read this post later, it’ll probably be something else), Echo Slightly. I have no idea what specifically brought them to advertise on my sites, but I’m glad to see them up there. The album’s pretty good, too. You can listen to it off the sales page and buy it in mp3 format. They apparently get a 91% share of the money from CD Baby.

Been a while since I just blogged about what I’m doing, instead of what some other artist is up to or the problems with my hosting service(s). Well, I’ve got some time now… which is noteworthy in and of itself.

As some of you already know, I took a little mini-vacation to Des Moines this past weekened. It was a last minute thing, and a chance to relax and unwind a bit. Because it wasn’t announced in advance, I took my laptop with me so I could be sure to get Tales of MU updated, if nothing else… and just lately, that’s pretty much how I’ve been updating: Tales of MU and nothing else.

Well, the vacation turned out to be a godsend. I ended up typing the chapters on my laptop, using it the way God intended: on my lap, slumping back in a comfy chair. Because this laptop is old and lacks function in several popular letters of the alphabet, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to produce a story on. I had to re-map creatively. But it opened my eye to several possibilities.

A lot of the reasons I’ve had a hard time keeping up a work schedule come down to the way my workspace is arranged. The big thing is, it’s in the bedroom. The first piece of advice anybody gives you for insomnia is to avoid doing things in the bedroom during the day. Well, I was not only in the bedroom all day, I was sitting on the edge of the bed, because that’s where my computer desk is. No back support, not all that comfortable, and if I get the temptation to lay down for a mid-day nap… I’m already there. Bad set up, for both getting work done during the day and getting to sleep at night.

I’ve had the laptop, but it was old and crappy and befoe I actually tried typing with it on my lap in a comfortable position, I was under the impression that there was nowhere in my apartment I could really use it even halfway ergonomically. After my experience in the hotel, though, I came home and bought a newer, less broken laptop and set it up in the living room. For most of the days this week, I had Tales of MU done by late afternoon and Void Dogs or 3 Seas done by late evening, and Tribe updated before midnight. Today, I had MU done before noon and Void Dogs and Tribe both done before 4:00 p.m. There was one day in the middle of the week that I ended up taking a nap, but still got everything done.

I don’t really have an easy way of plugigng the laptop in when I’m sitting on the inordinately comfortable living room couch, so to conserve power I have to kill its wireless connection until it’s time to update. This also helps me avoid the trap of constantly watching my e-mail, site statistics, ad performance, and so on.. and makes it easier to avoid being drawn into pointlessly entertaining arguments.

This also lets me spend more time in the company of my cats. As a stay-at-home writer, this is absolutely critical. No, seriously, though, it’s good because they get along with each other better when there’s somebody to pay attention to them.

So, all in all, this is a very positive development for me. I’ve always had wonderful work habits when actually at work, but with a clear separation of home life vs. work life. I think that’s why I’ve stumbled so often since moving my work into my home.

Okay, first of all, Tales of MU is back up. If you’re still getting error messages, please clear out your temporary files. Never mind that this shouldn’t matter. It seems like half the host’s equipment is still down an they’re doing something weird with proxies in order to make up the gap, which has led to incidental weirdness including a glitch that risked exposing readers’ email addresses to each other when they posted comments. I have that prevented for now.

From their description of what happened, it really seems as though this was patently not NFS.net’s fault, and I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on that… but if the problems linger on and/or more stuff that’s not their fault keeps happening, then I can’t really afford to stick with them. To that end, I’ve put myself back on the waiting list for Dreamhost’s private servers. Yeah, I know. Unfortunately these are the only two companies I’ve found that fit both my technical and philosophical requirements.

If everything goes back to wonderfully with NFS.net from here on out, I won’t actually need the Dreamhost server, but if this proves to be the start of a trend, I’ll move Tales of MU back onto Dreamhost and see how the private server handles things.

Tales of MU is mostly* back up, but some kind of weird caching error was causing it to display the wrong (i.e., other people’s) information in the comment field. Until I figure out what’s going on with that, people will have to retype their information each time.

*It seems that the aliasing system is still off line, so talesofmu.com isn’t working. http://talesofmu.nfshost.com/ is, however.

Thanks for everybody who e-mailed me to let me know about the outage. Here’s the skinny from my webhost:

We are recovering from an unannounced, botched power maintenance performed by the owners of the building where our equipment is located.

We are working to restore member sites to service as soon as possible.

Our site will be last; we will be restoring member sites first. No member site data has been lost, however our internal master database server is in bad shape and we may have to revert to a backup.

Note the “our site” there refers to the host’s own business site.

I’m having stuff pile up on me this week and a kind of planned-at-the-last-minute trip coming up this weekend, so I’m not even going to try to update anything but Tales of MU (which will update normally) until next Monday (the 10th), when come hell or highwater I’m going to work an uninterrupted eight hour work day with everything done on a set schedule.

I can kick things out like you wouldn’t believe when I do that. The part that’s hard is actually getting started. It seems like such a little thing, but it’s hard to do when you know that there’s twenty-four hours in the day and technically you can do your work during any of them.

Before you know it, you’ve gone through about twenty or twenty-two of them…

That’s not how it is for everybody, I’m sure. Some people probably have an easy time starting but a hard time focusing. Some people can just decide to do a task and get it done. Call it a matter of willpower if you’d like, but I think of it as a matter of personality. When I was literally “on the clock”, I was one of the most focused people on the floor. I need to tap that work ethic for my writing if I want to get the most use out of my time, and as they say, time is money.

(No, I’m not going to make the “failed his saving throw vs. death” joke. For one thing, everybody else has already done that. For another thing, I already made a much more creative “needs 5,000 GP of diamonds” joke in another venue, not realizing said venue included his god daughter. Power Word: Awkward.)

E. Gary Gygax, trailblazing pioneer of the modern tabletop roleplaying hobby and creator of Dungeons and Dragons, passed away today. He’d suffered a period of poor health which left him “semi-retired”, though he kept working on the games he loved right up until the end. He’s a role model for me in that, having turned his hobby into a career, he never seemed to lose sight of why he was doing it.

Of course, I owe a very specific debt to Mr. Gygax’s legacy. Without Dungeons & Dragons, there would be no Tales of MU. While I have something of a bias for GURPS, some of the most fun I ever had roleplaying was with old school D&D and I appreciate the enthusiasm for clean, simple, fun rules which Mr. Gygax championed in his later projects. The gaming world has lost a powerful force today.

I was listening to the aforementioned Ghosts I-IV (the site was jammed all day and I couldn’t get in to order it until 2:00 a.m.) when a correspondent dropped a note in my inbox.

Singer-songwriter Jill “We Had A Drink, We Had A Smoke” Sobule is asking her fans to finance her next album. Where most musicians doing the digital route are taking a lower-fi approach and then selling the product, she’s trying to do a full production with a price tag of $75,000 and is offering an interesting array of enducements, ranging from a free download of the CD to the chance to sing on the album.

The article’s got some interesting quotes (emphasis added):

The’s another example of a musician taking control of her career as the business crumbles around her

and from the artist herself:

“The old kind of paradigm, where you’ve always waited for other people to do things, you’d have your manager and your agent. You’d wait for the big record company to give you money to do things and they tell you what to do. This is so great. I want to do everything like this.”

This is why it’s an exciting time to be alive, and a great time to be an artist… or a consumer of art. I remember when “the information superhighway” was fresh and new and there was a lot of talk about the democratization of information and leveling of the playing field and so on, but now we’re really starting to see it.

People are producing amateur TV shows on YouTube. Obviously, professional-quality TV shows have larger practical requirements than other media and thus higher barriers to entry, but if a studio album can get direct financing from its fans, then how long do you think it’s going to be before folks like Tim Minear and Joss Whedon (assuming Joss has any interest in coming back to television) start marketing their ideas directly?

Jill’s website.