Stray Dog Strut

You are in a dark and musty room. Oak barrels are stacked neatly to one side, and there is a long wooden counter that smells strongly of varnish. The room is crammed with people, heaped around the few tables and chairs. Many familiar faces and names come to mind in the friendly, bustling atmosphere. You suspect that this is a bar. A woman behind the bar smiles at you warmly.

>Take table

You can’t take that.

> sit

You are sitting on the floor

Several shadows can be seen moving through the legs of the room’s occupants. You realise the floor is crawling with rats. A mass of fat furry brown rats approaches you.

> rats, hello

The rats don’t understand because you don’t speak rat.

The rats gather around your feet. They seem friendly enough but you can never be too sure.

> Take rat

You can’t take that.

The rats ferociously attack your feet, nibbling fiercely at your bare toes. You scream in agony as your feet are devoured to bloody stumps while the room of onlookers smiles down on you. As you black out you wonder where you left your shoes..

Apologies for the little prologue there, I got a little carried away, I hope the thought of rats chowing down on your extremities hasn’t left you too scarred. Macworld reported today on a new app for the iPhone, Frotz (iTunes url), which lets you play interactive fiction on the iPhone. For those of you who don’t know what interactive fiction is and are left unconvinced by my own narrative above (I wonder why..), I would point you in the direction of this wikipedia article on Interactive Fiction and on one of the more famous IF games, Zork. While i’ve only dabbled with IF myself, I’ve always found something deeply fascinating about the simple act of gaming with words alone (later IF includes multimedia of course but for pure imagination-embellished fun you gotta try the originals).

After I watched the Apple keynote about the introduction of the App Store for iPhone developers, one of my first thoughts was that someone should try IF on the iPhone. Heh, I humbly had aspirations myself (Afaik the iPhone SDK is free/open to all?) but that would mean learning the SDK, not to mention actually understanding what gamers expect from an IF .. oh well, while I day-dreamed someone else went ahead and did it, surprise surprise=P So anyway, I simply urge you to check out the Macworld article and for all you iPhone users to try out the new app.

Similarly, through this Macworld video on writing tools (unsubtitled but the webpage links to each product), I discovered another cool Mac app today: Scrivener. It’s writing software that helps you write novels and screenplays by simply being focused on the act of writing. Previously I mentioned WriteRoom (Windows users try Dark Room) with its decluttered full-screen blackout effect to encourage distraction-free writing. [Side Note: I've just discovered there's an iPhone version of WriteRoom too. Direct iTunes url].

However, while the effect is really cool, there’s not much more to it . Scrivener has that functionality AND THEN SOME. In fact it has so many bangs and whistles that I really should leave it up to the developers at Literature and Latte (loving the title!!) to explain. Check out this vid (again unsubtitled sorry) or the product homepage. I’ve just downloaded the 30-day trial so i’ll give you a proper StrayDogStrut flavoured review soon, but from what i’ve seen, i’m thinking this might just get me writing seriously (Not to mention being a big help for screenwriting this semester!).

Later folks=)

I took the plunge today and purchased some webspace to host my new website. After much deliberation I went with Express Hosting UK, a company that offers hosting solutions to consumer and business users. I decided against going back to 1and1 because their packages are expensive compared to the features that EH provide, they’re not based in the UK (last time I left them, you had to send a fax to America to cancel your contract), and despite being aimed at consumers, their interface is really clunky and overly technical compared to the intuitive icon-based approach used by EH.

Of course it’s a bit early to tell if everything is golden with EH, but i’m very impressed so far. I got a very rapid response from their support team when I posted a ‘ticket’ to discuss my hosting options, and for a very modest sum every month I get access to lots of cool features such as mailing lists, MySQL databases and statistics trackers – the stuff 1and1 makes you pay extra for. The only limiting factor seems to be the amount of webspace EH gives, but the idea is you grow into the extra space as and when you need it.

The MySQL database and PHP support was a must so that I could host the wordpress.org software (the starter and home packages with 1and1 don’t provide this at all), and thanks to the Fantastico suite of applications that EH gives you, installing wordpress took only a few clicks. Admittedly it took me a few attempts before I was satisfied as I tweaked the database a bit, but it was all very straightforward (It turns out WordPress creates it’s own database so creating a custom one was unnecessary).

The only downside is that EH doesn’t manage upgrades so after the install I had to do a manual upgrade to the latest wordpress version, but again this is simply a case of deleting the existing files and copying over the new ones, while preserving any I needed to keep such as the configuration files.

Another cool feature that I get with EH is access to 15 email accounts. Admittedly I’ll only use a couple, but there’s a whole suite of options to forward and manage emails to your domain. I was very impressed that EH provides a little script that configures Apple Mail to access my emails, not to mention the one for setting up virtual disk so that I can drag and drop files. There’s also the same functionality for windows users too=)

Once I had WordPress set up I thought I would attempt copying over my blogger posts. This part is supposed to be straight forward but unfortunately I was one of the unlucky ones to be hit with not very much happening on the import screen (The progress shows 1/173 before “Importing..” changes to “Set Authors”). If this affects you, there’s a very simple fix to be found here that involves making a blog with WordPress.com, importing your Blogger posts, exporting the xml and importing to your self-hosted WordPress blog.

Importing the xml was easy-peasy but there is a snag: WordPress doesn’t import any pictures. So i’m chewing my lip at the moment over whether to copy some of the images in my old posts over manually..

On the whole though, WordPress has some really cool features and really easy interface (and the self-hosted version looks pretty much the same as the online version) but i’ve only really had a couple of hours to have a fiddle with it so there’s a lot about WordPress that i’m still learning. An advantage of WordPress is the ability to add additional pages – a feature lacking from Blogger that always bugged me. I had intended to create pages seperately in my root folder, but doing it through WordPress makes it super easy.

In case you haven’t noticed, i’ve reverted to hosting my existing blog on blogger while I mess around with the new WordPress version. For those of you that are interested in seeing the ‘work in progress’, you can take a gander at my custom domain at www.straydogstrut.co.uk (EDIT: I’ve added a redirect back here for now), however there’s little functional difference at the moment and I need to edit the default template which looks a bit bare bones at the moment.

That’s all for now folks.