Sunday, May 11, 2008

CRASH!!!

Well the new story section is coming along quite nicely. It’s been available to the general public on the internet for two weeks and we already have over 2,500 visits in May and we have nine new strange stories for you to enjoy at www.MyStrangeStories.com .

Something new, I decided to not be so cheap and purchase the use of professional artwork on the site. You may notice a new header each week or so, and the genre sections have nice little pictures to give it that “real-magazine” look.

The next step is to format these columns in a similar fashion, so they are hosted by TheWeirdcrap.com and not blogger.com. I started to work on that last week, but had some problems with my computer.

As anyone who knows me knows, I likes the sweets. I tirelessly work on this computer stuff for hours on end without breaks, but I do it while shoving in handfuls of MM’s in my mouth and washing it down with beer.

Well I was really workin’ hard on the column-computer-formatting-thingy, when I noticed I had three 1lb bags of MM’s at my feet, and at least a six bottles of beer lying on the floor. I realized I had enough to drink and decided to have a soda. After finishing most of a one liter bottle, I thought a little salt would be nice to complement all that sugar and alcohol in my system. So I went and made me some microwave popcorn.

It didn’t have enough butter, so I melted a cube and poured it right on top.

Since my ol’ lady wasn’t home, I was in charge of them little tikes. My plan was simple, I opened the front door in the morning in hopes that one or two would just wonder out. Well, it turned out all seventeen kids were sick from my constant flatulence and ran out the front door like there was some kind of fire.

So it was just me, the column code, the MM’s, the beer, the soda, and the extra butter popcorn.

Speaking of the columns, that reminds me that our columns are currently hosted by blogger.com, which originally was hosted by TheWeirdcrap.com years before blogger.com existed, proving Stephen and I had been blogging years before the blogging craze. Anyway, before we hosted on blogger.com, Stephen sent me an email asking about that MySpace.com stuff and if it could be used by TheWeirdcrap.com.

I didn’t see any use of MySpace.com on TheWeirdcrap.com, but I got the idea, it would be nice to set up something that allowed our bloggers to login and have it posted automatically. At the time, they sent me an email for the column and I posted it manually.

I set up an account at blogger.com and customized it. But when I finished (this was back in 2004), I thought it would be nice to set up something similar for AlarminglyStrangeStories.com, but I couldn’t customize it to post the stories in the archives and I couldn’t get the story format just right.

I shelved the idea for the time…then three years later, with the story section in mind, I looked into the Facebook.com format and that lead me to look at the Wordpress blogger template. I found a template that with a little customization, I could create everything I did by hand…automatically.

The end result was MyStrangeStories.com. Someone can register, post a story and it will be posted in real time on the web site, then a summary will automatically post on the main page and in the archives. Using the automatic RSS feeds made with the blogging software, I have the stories posted by categories: strange, humor, science fiction, horror, fantasy, and mystery. This was an extra step I didn’t take on the old site.

In Stephen’s column this week, he gave me full credit for the creation for MyStrangeStories.com, but I have to give credit where it’s due. Had he not sent that email years ago asking about using MySpace.com, I might have never gotten the idea of having the site run using community network and blogging software.

Now I’m working on setting up our blogs with the same software. Unfortunately, last week I was working on it with a belly full of beer, MM’s, soda, and extra butter popcorn. Just my luck, as I was starting to make progress…I tipped my container of popcorn and some of that butter slid out and dripped on my computer.

When I looked down at the buttery-computer mess, a cigarette cherry dropped from the cigarette in my mouth and ignited the butter. The next thing I knew I had a computer fire on my hands.

Thinking quickly, I grabbed my liter of soda and doused the flames. Which is good, but in all the commotion my computer crashed. My column code was lost forever.

COMING NEXT…My new book, “Daddy Likes Strippers, a politician’s guide to parenting!

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