• There are good guys out there! In my post yesterday about This Website Business, I mentioned how much work was involved in making sure that a registration system was secure and how I thought one of those who had registered was a bit suspicious.

    Well, last night I received a very strange email. It came from Digilante – the digital vigilante. Digilante was so fed up with having their forums spammed, they bit back and spammed the spammers, taking over their email accounts, so that whenever they compromise a forum account, an email is sent to the webmaster warning them to tighten up security. How brilliant is that!

    I got straight onto my admin account, closed down the login and erased the offending registered accounts. There’s a lot to think about before I allow people to log on to the site to access extra content .

    It is weird though. It’s as though the Dark Knight is watching over me from the roof tops! I feel a little bit special to have been picked out for their protection – silly but heart warming. Thanks Digilante – I think you may have saved from a whole heap of hassle!

  • I’ve been humming and ha-ing about self-publishing for a long time. Online systems make it so easy these days and the author need not be burdened with a garage-full of unsold stock any more.

    More recently I’ve been dithering about which title to work on. The site I want to use, completelynovel.com, only has two sizes available at present. For my 48/64 page black and white readers, I’m convinced I need A format, which is not available at the moment. That is the size children are used to and they do resist that sort of change!

    So I’ve decided to republish Craig Mnure in all his cranky, curmudgeonly glory, in a slightly larger size. I’m going to think about the cover design to see if I can make it look a bit smaller than it is.

    Having made my decision, I find that the back-up disk with the text seems to have disappeared. I think it was the one that fell apart a year ago. (Better check all my other backup media!) So the first big job is going to be scanning the text from the book and OCR copy-reading it in Adobe Acrobat so I have something to work with. Then, after I’ve scanned all the illustrations, I can begin thinking about laying it out to page. I’m sure there will be a lot of hiccups along the way, but it will be a great learning process. Next time it will be easier and perhaps they will have more paper sizes available.

    Keep reading and I’ll keep you up to date with the progress. Wish me luck!

  • At last year’s Christmas party, my publishers implored us to start blogging and tweeting and doing whatever we could on the internet. Well I’ve been doing that for the last thirteen years!

    I decided that I would try and blog everyday so that I could show what a waste of time it was. If I spent a whole year working away at it, and nothing came of it, then I could prove it was pointless.

    This morning, having won yet another minor victory in the endless learning curve that is the Joomla Content Management System, I had that, “Is it really all worth the hassle?” feeling again. I’m thinking of putting all my old experiments in online ebooks back on my site, but I thought I’d make them available only to registered users. Eventually, I might think about charging for them. So I opened up my registration window to the world and immediately received a spam registration, which makes me think it’s insecure and that I should give up the idea as not worth the hassle.

    But a little research finds the information I need. More to learn and implement. Maybe I should employ someone to do this? Actually I’m enjoying it. I’m building up an incredible knowledge and confidence in my abilities as a webmaster.

    I was listening to the wonderful Bob Proctor this morning. He was going on about persistence as usual. Well, I’m nothing if not persistent, but why is this website thing such a struggle? Then he said something so simple – so obvious, it’s the kind of thing that goes in one ear and straight out the other, but today I heard it.

    If I am trying to prove that all my effort is a waste of time, then that’s the outcome I deserve! Duh! Isn’t that really, really obvious?

    So, from today, I’m changing my mindset. All the effort I’ll put into my website will be to prove my publishers right – that blogging and tweeting, YouTubing and is all really, really worth it. Watch this space!