Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Jade’s Voyager fic “Human Interaction” is now up, along with her BRAD story and a new fic, “One Time Too Many.”  See her home page for links. As announced yesterday in the FicML News blog, all of Jade’s fic was converted to FicML. Her pages were output automatically using an XSL stylesheet. Now they all include the preference picker, which you can use to set font size, background color and more.

I’ve been catching up on Season 1 of Stargate, so now there are five new drabbles listed on my fic page.  Two last Season 1 drabbles and a Stargate/Voyager crossover are coming soon.

Word count: 100

Umpteen spellings of Setesh have been added to the Repository, along with screenshots. Also, two new drabbles are up on the fic page.

I stumbled across this clunky Hieroglyph translator - you have to click on the little buttons, since typing doesn’t work. Then I did a search for better ones: Isidore of Seville has a list of translators and Hieroglyphs.net has nice tools. The UPenn translator is the prettiest.

Word count: 1137

Three new drabbles are up on the Stargate page, This Worm a God, Heliopolis Lost, and Fish Story.

I’ve also been working on the preferences database for ficml.org, but that’s going more slowly than expected. I was hoping to write more, but I spent most of the day helping Veronica move. I didn’t know I was tired until I opened Colony and muddled through the first 300 words. Tuvok is behaving strangely…

Word count: 100

As you may have noticed from the new splash screen, the name of Jemima’s Trek is changing to Jemima’s Chevron. I’ve had a chevron theme since Jemima’s Trek first opened for non-commerce three years ago. Since my Buffy phase I’ve wanted a more generic site title, and while Buffy still isn’t covered by chevrons (unless they’re especially wooden and pointy), they are coincidentally a Stargate theme as well. If you don’t like the new name, feel free to suggest something better, such as “Jemima’s Pointy Things.”

Along with the name change and splash screen, I’ve tried to get everything over here from Freeshell except the (non-SG1) fanfic. The About/Style section has been slightly updated, though the blog is still a better place to find most of that information. Random pages like the Borg Plot Classification, B’Elanna’s Award Shelf and the Section 31 FAQ are here now. I think I’ve accounted for all the broken links, though I’m sure a link or two must have gotten past me.

Finally, two new drabbles have been added to the Stargate page: Just Testing and Baseball. Yet more drabbles are on the way.

Word count: let’s not and say we did

Today was a big day for Jemima’s Trek updates. On the Trek front, the recent filk, Goodbye to VOY, is up in the VOY section, along with a new C/7 vignette You Think that the muse popped out of retirement to write for Die J/C Die II. A few links have also been fixed in the Trek sections.

More exciting by far is my first Stargate fic, a drabble based on the fifth season episode “48 Hours” called To Russia with Love. I also made a new Stargate SG-1 page with plenty of handy links. That also meant adding a new tab. While I was at it, I put title attributes on the tab links, so if you hover over a tab, you get a link description, at least on the pages I’ve updated.

The cool layout is based on the CSS tricks at css/edge. You won’t see the full niftiness unless you use a standards-compliant browser like Mozilla or Netscape 7. In the ideal browser, the pattern (the Earth glyph from a standard Stargate font) matches exactly between the edges, the middle and the tabs, even when you hover over a tab. All the pattern colors should be fixed like a watermark, so the text scrolls over the pattern. I hear the pattern scrolls with the text in IE, which is a pretty minor offense as Microsoft goes.

The CSS for the home page has been altered to better match the main FicML site design. I also did some work on ficml (which inspired me to make the change), but most of that was behind the scenes. FicML progress is recorded in the other blog.

Word count: 1055

I’ve finally put Holodeck Hero, formerly just a blog entry filk, up at Freeshell.

Seema’s entry on the neverending title rant got me thinking about my titles. For filk, the title usually comes directly out of the song, but for stories I tend toward the blunt, one-word style of title. They may not be very artsy or creative, but they have the advantage of high recognition value. “Lurking,” for example, is an easy title to remember once you’ve read the story. “The Museum” is unlikely to be confused with another fic. My titles may not be “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed,” but they get the job done.

You can see some typical filk and fic titles in the sidebar (if you’re at the main blog page - click the blog button if you aren’t), and as an extra updating-day bonus, the links now work!

Word count: let’s not and say we did

I’ve managed to move all of Jade’s stories from Freeshell. I was going to be especially industrious and move some of mine, but I got mired in fixing just the broken links that are already here.

Well, the post ID’s have been laundered and the blog has moved again. (Previous moves were from Blogspot to Freeshell and then from Blogger to MovableType.) Look up at the location bar and you’ll see that you were transported to the new host without even knowing it. Blog-related links should work, but almost all non-blog links are currently broken - check the main page on Freeshell if you need something that isn’t here yet.

Peep of the day: Gimli

The tab demo has established at beachhead for Jemima’s Trek at Irth.net, so if you feel the need to click back and forth between tabs, you can do it there without maxing out the bandwidth here. Other content will be moved as I get it sorted and rearranged slightly.

Jade has a new story up, Over the Threshold, which won second place in the Romance category of Ripples in the Pond.

I’ve been exceeding my allotted bandwidth on Freeshell. This happens at an odd hour of the evening which corresponds to midnight GMT, at which time I’m usually eating a late dinner rather than trying to access my site. Seema first alerted me to the problem, and the link from Kalsey Consulting has driven me over the edge for the past few days.

Not that I’m complaining or anything. I’ve been meaning to move for a while now, and the tab-induced sad state of my bandwidth affairs has brought me to the attention of Irth Networks. (Check out their tab implementation.) If all goes well, I’ll be moving the site over there soon.

In the meantime, I’m still playing with PHP. I upgraded my binaries with the OS X 10.1 version from Marc Liyanage’s site, and used his second image demo to make this cool button: