Entries for archive: 2007-02

Found 10 entries.

A Descriptive Challenge

I have added a new challenge in Kiwi Writers, is small and simple. Why don't you join us?

Have a look at my latest challenge on Kiwi Writers., It is A Descriptive Challenge.

It's only small, will take only half an hour per day over this coming Friday, Saturday and Sunday and is really easy. Why not come and Join Us and join in the fun.

Progress can be posted in the writing forums and usually there are people offering encouragement there too.

What are you waiting for?

Labels: kiwi-writers, challenge, writing

Inserted: 2007-02-27 23:37 (3 years, 6 months ago)

KiwiWriters' expanding Horizons

KiwiWriters is going from strength to strength. We now have a number of people who have joined up, an active forum section, lots of resource links and a new interview section.

Following a great interview of Michelle Waitzman by Travis, we now have the start of an interview section, which I think is a great stepping stone in furthering Kiwi Writers development.

Also, I have a couple of new features in the pipeline which need to be finished off.

One is a new section which is specific to KiwiWriters and the other is something which will be added to the Forums. In both cases, they will test Zaapt's capabilities further and make sure I'm still on the right track.

Labels: zaapt, kiwi-writers, writing, interview

Inserted: 2007-02-27 23:32 (3 years, 6 months ago)

Resources for Writers

Kiwi Writers now has a great Resources section for Writers, go check it out.

These Writing Resources aim to collect together a number of different web pages which might be of help to the aspiring Kiwi Writer. Go take a look.

Labels: kiwi-writers, writing

Inserted: 2007-02-26 23:23 (3 years, 6 months ago)

Twilight Cinema a Shambles

The Twilight Cinema came to Wellington for the summer. Like most of their audience, they really needn't have bothered turning up.

Two weeks ago, myself and a couple of friends went to watch the screening of An Inconvenient Truth. When we got to the Twilight Cinema we were told that for technical reasons the screening wasn't showing and instead some other (already previously shown) film was to be shown (Dave Chappelle's Block Party).

We had no interest in watching it.

We went home.

Tonight, we went to see Little Miss Sunshine. One of the best films to be released in recent years, with a load of other people, all laughing together at a truely great and funny movie. At least that's what we hoped.

We should have known better.

Before we were even inside, the lady came along the row and said that they were having some technical difficulties, but it would be starting just half an hour after it's scheduled start. If that didn't work, then they would show An Inconvenient Truth instead.

So I thought, "Ok, I'd like to see that too" seeing as we hadn't seen it the last time we went.

By well over an hour after the scheduled start time, we saw something happen on the projector. We could see the film being put in though it wasn't quite in properly. The light from the projector then proceeded to burn a hole in the film and before our very eyes, it disintegrated. 'Oopse' we thought. I hope that wasn't the film.

When the film did finally come on, about an hour and a half late, there was no sound. Ah great, another hiccup. Fifteen minutes of the film were shown with no sound before they then told us that they were going to pack it all in and show the alternative instead.

By this time it was late and I was tired - tired of the whole thing. The pre-show entertainment wasn't really entertainment (though you couldn't hear the first person since she had no microphone) and by this time I wanted to go home.

All in all, the whole event was a complete shambles and it has completely put me off going to any of their events again. They gave me a ticket that I could use another night, but now I wished I'd just asked for my money back.

I mean really, if I went again, it would be a complete waste of time like the previous two times before. I had heard that they were not enjoying as much success as they'd hoped and from what I've seen, they really don't deserve it.

If anyone has any good experiences I'd like to know.

Labels: twilight-cinema

Inserted: 2007-02-17 23:23 (3 years, 6 months ago)

My First PerlMongers Meeting

For two years I meant to go to PerlMongers, but always convinced myself that I just wanted to go home. I went the other night for the first time, now I wish I'd gone earlier.

We had a Lightening Talks meeting where we had a number of speakers (see 13 Feb and had a good chat afterwards too.

It was also really nice seeing a few of the old faces and hope to see them again...

...in fact, I've signed up to do a talk there next month. I'm not going to tell you the title of the talk since it is still a work in progress, though I will tell you it has to do with Perl/Mason and a few things I learnt implementing Zaapt.

Labels: mason, zaapt, perl-mongers

Inserted: 2007-02-14 23:13 (3 years, 6 months ago)

I'm a Winner in wwwW

KiwiWriters.org has just finished it's first site-wide challenge, the wwwW - Waitangi Weekend Word Wace.

And here is my icon to prove it :-)

The idea of wwwW is to write a short story of 7,500 words in just four days over Waitangi Weekend.

It was a lot harder than I thought it would be and I think this is for two reasons. In comparison to NaNoWriMo, because you only have four days, it's a huge amount harder to catch up if you fall behind - a trap a few of us got caught out by.

But the other reason is also because, instead of writing to 'fill out' the novel (as you have to doing NaNoWriMo), you can't pad as much - you have to keep the story rolling and every scene has to count. This means you have to think more about it. I might make the suggestion that we spread it over a little more time next year, dunno yet.

Finally, to tell you a little about what happened, I actually got to 6,002 words with the story and then killed it off. It was about fighting and blood and stuff like that, stuff I really don't like reading about let alone writing. In the end, I started a new story which was about toys, kids, sprouts, cabbage, Star Wars and Transformers. It was much easier to write and a lot funnier. I managed 1,600 words in not much over an hour. Prior to that, I was managing maybe 500 words an hour which isn't very good.

Just proves that you should write about what you like.

Update: 2007-02-09 11:30 - Kerryn has put her wwwW winner icon up too. Update: 2007-02-09 15:19 - Travis has also put his wwwW winner icon up.

Labels: kiwi-writers, short-story, wwww

Inserted: 2007-02-08 23:09 (3 years, 6 months ago)

What you can do "In about 10 Seconds"

Travis just made me laugh. What he said pretty much sums up how I feel about Web Development these days.

In his introduction on KiwiWriter (5th post down), he said that we (the KiwiWriters group): went from "I want to do something with writing" to "let's get a web domain and pick a style" in about ten seconds.

That pretty much sums it all up for me. It tells us that when this group of ours got together, we wanted to make things happen because we all enjoyed it so much.

Additional to that, we also went from an initial idea to an 'actual, functioning and live' website in less than two months.

It just all moves so fast and that's exactly what I like about it.

Labels: website, 10-seconds, kiwi-writers, writing

Inserted: 2007-02-06 00:01 (3 years, 7 months ago)

One Third of the Way Through KiwiWriters wwwW

wwwW stands for Waitangi Weekend Word Wace and it's a site-wide challenge on KiwiWriters.org to write a short story.

If you've never written a short story before (like me), then it's an ideal chance to try something different. A short story is generally regarded as being around 7,500 words. For this year, since Waitangi Day is on Tuesday, we're suggesting writing a short story between midnight Friday and midnight Tuesday.

So far, it's been really enjoyable though I am finding it harder than NaNoWriMo. The aim of writing a short story means it's harder to find padding to fill out the words since you really have to keep the story going. I'd never thought of this before but it has been driven home to me by the act of doing it. Also see this thread on getting the words out on KiwiWriters.org.

Overall though, I'm on course and should be able to manage another 2,500 each day to get the 7,500 needed.

Labels: kiwi-writers, short-story, wwww

Inserted: 2007-02-04 20:02 (3 years, 7 months ago)

Zaapt CMS Working under Preassure

There are two types of pressure: technical and environmental. Let's talk about technical pressure to start off with.

On the technical side, I had a bit of a personal challenge last night, but I managed to fix it up in what I thought was a nice way.

As a bit of background information. Each content type contained in Zaapt comes with a Perl Module for (database) abstraction and a load of Mason pages to render that content to the web page. So far, I have been dealing with the administration side of things (the edit pages) and the public side of things (the view pages). Most of the content types fall into this category: the news, blogs, content pages, FAQs, etc

Last night I realised there was a third category. For the Forums, I had written the view and the edit pages. So far this has worked since the view pages were only seen by people once they had logged in, but we (KiwiWriters) also wanted the forums to be publically viewable too.

Therefore, I had to think about what I could name the type of pages which can be read but not changed. This kinda threw me for a while but then realised that it was simply these pages which should be called the view pages.

I set about renaming the current forum view pages to the new category I have called user pages. After a fair bit of renaming I then added the proper view pages. And guess what, it worked a treat :-)

The best thing about it is that there is now a more formal idea about what types of pages there are. This will also come in handy in the future for things like Wikis and being able to post comments or trackbacks on blogs. It is these pages which blur the line between site content and user generated content as demonstrated yesterday with forums.

Labels: zaapt, content

Inserted: 2007-02-03 12:12 (3 years, 7 months ago)

KiwiWriters.org is Now LIVE!

Go check it out, post a challenge, wander around the forums and join in the fun.

After just over a month of solid and rapid development, Project X, oopse, I mean KiwiWriters.org is now live. This also means that the features I have implemented in Zaapt already are also out there and being used :-)

But more to the point, there are many many interesting things going on over at KiwiWriters.org. For example, the forums are already bustling and there are a few challenges already outlined.

If you enjoyed doing NaNoWriMo last November, then we'll be presenting a similar event in June for the Southern Hemisphere. It's called SoCNoC (pronounced sock-nock) and stands for Southern Cross Novel Challenge.

In fact, a lot of the site is based around Challenges and the first one we'll be presenting is the Waitangi Weekend Word Wace. The aim of this challenge is to write a short story over this 4 day weekend, from midnight Friday until midnight Tuesday. It should be heaps of fun.

Finally, other people are already posting their challenges too. For example, today we had a short Limerick Lunchtime and there will be a comedy weekend next week to try your hand at a different style of writing.

Overall it's going to be lots of fun and all of us in KiwiWriters are already proud of our achievement. I must admit however that I'm really really happy I've managed (I think) to get the site going in a little over a month or so. So why not Join Us and tell us what you think.

For other articles about the launch, see the other member's blogs:

(more to be added)

Update: 2007-02-02 12:52 - Fixed Acronym of SoCNoC

Labels: zaapt, project-x, kiwi-writers

Inserted: 2007-02-01 22:58 (3 years, 7 months ago)