It’s seems I’m back online again. The admins of Redbrick, the host of thedeadone.net, turned Redbrick off after it was discovered that people’s personal webpages had been hacked. Now it looks like everything is up again (if you find something a-miss on the site, drop me a comment). The admins have re-installed everything from scratch and re-instated all the user-data from back-ups before the attack. A pretty large amount of work for admins-slash-students to do.

In all the time I’ve been on Redbrick, this feels like the longest it’s been gone. And it’s a strange experience to have lost my online presence for such a longish unexpected period. I felt like I couldn’t connect or speak about anything, nearly as if I ceased to exist in an online context. Not that I would have hade much to say, having just gotten over the vomiting bug and having to work from home while my daughter recovers from chicken pox. I’m absolutely shattered. But anyway, I’m back online and I do have a small queue of posts to put up.

I’ve just released a bug fix for TDO Mini Forms v0.10.4, get it in the usual places. v0.10.3 broke Custom Fields and also prevented the plugin from running on PHP4 hosts.

Also, sbruner (Steve Bruner) posted on the TDOMF forums that he has used the TDOMF plugin to create a rather nifty Contact Manager Theme for Wordpress. It looks pretty damn cool. Well done!

Check item #7! (“Do some further work on TDO Mini-Forms”) Of course I could continue at full steam with it but I decided to slow down. Work will continue, just not as time-consuming.

Also item #6 (“Try again to get a gaming group together”) occurred without any prompting from me. I was doing some work on our roleplaying group website (moving it to a different address) and the players started to trying to figure out when they can all play next. However, it might not be until July! Must bug them again.

As for item #5 (“Move Hosts for thedeadone.net”) will occur when I make enough money from donations for TDO Mini Forms. I’m already half way there for a 1 year hosting planning…

Item #9 (“Upgrade and package the current thedeadone.net theme”) won’t happen. It’s been a maybe, but I just can’t muster the energy to do it. I think it really depends on finding a new host for thedeadone.net and getting all that up and running. Then I can think of getting a new theme and closing off the current one.

Which nicely leaves me with only one item left: item #8 (“Write-up and make available some RPG rules I created a long time back: Story Hooks and Passions”). While I think the two systems; Story Hooks and Passion, have since been done much better by Fate’s Aspects, Riddle of Steel’s Spirit Attributes and Shadow of Yesterday’s Keys, I think it’s still worth while closing them off. I did create and use them before I discovered these other systems and they are different and I hope to actually use them in my LH project. They certainly won’t be as long as TDO Fudge Combat v0.1 (short version available here) but they will probably garner about the same level of interest (which is about zero or so).

I’ve just released v0.10.3 of my TDO Mini Forms plugin. Get it in all the usual places.

The biggest changes in this version is that I’ve implemented a work around for the register_globals and $_SESSION issues. It should be noted that 99% of the time these are/were host configuration problems and nothing to do with TDOMF but I got fed up trying to support users on various different hosts who had difficulty turning off register_globals or enabling $_SESSION support. (So if this enables TDOMF to work flawlessly for you, consider donating, because it’s for you I did it. )

But moving forward, whats in store for TDOMF?
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Okay, so I managed to upgrade to Wordpress 2.5. Not as easy as I thought.

I also had to patch WP 2.5 to work on Redbrick as several features don’t work out the box and it’s still messy if your using a virtual host (like me).

The livejournal-crossposter and Slave Me 2 Wordpress plugins both break in Wordpress 2.5. I’ve updated Slave Me 2 Wordpress to work in WP2.5 as from the website for it, looks like there is zero activity. So that’s now working. However the livejournal-crossposter is dead, so no LJ for me until I fix it (again the current website for the plugin has zero activity).

Most of the other plugins seem okay. I have to update NextGen but I need to patch the version I’m currently using (like I have to patch Wordpress) so I haven’t done it yet. (I do like the automated plugin updates).

All of this cutting into actual time in work, so not good again. But now I’m all WP2.5! I have to tidy up and delete all my WP2.3.x dev and test installs now too to really cross out that item, but who’s going to quibble with me?

Of course, I may not do item 3 at all and I’ve added a new wishful-item 10, more of a way of prep-ing to change the theme of my blog.

If you see any problems with the site, after the upgrade, do tell!

Update: NextGen updated and I think I may have got livejournal-crossposter now too. Let’s see.