Man, it has been a crazy year. I went from working for myself, to working with some other guys, and now I am back on my own again.

Life is nothing if not interesting.

With all that being said, I think I will be returning to my site here, and writing more. I love to write, and haven't been afforded much of an opportunity lately. I am still working on my new WordPress book, but progress has slowed as I have shifted what little writing time I have to my first novel.

That's right internets, I am writing a novel.

This month is NaNoWriMo, which I have been doing, on and off, since its inaugural year. I have been absent for a while now, but this year felt like the right one to come back. I am working on the first book in a trilogy, that currently has no name.

Book One of the "Unnamed Trilogy" is Hinterlands. In a nutshell it is a supernatural thriller that I have been working on, plot-wise, for the last 10 years or so. It deals with Vamps, Weres and Ireland.

How can you go wrong with that formula? I will be posting more about it soon, and since I am planning on publishing it, there will be a site, with art from the always amazing Anton Peck, living there. Anton has graciously agreed to create the cover art for the book.

This thing just got real up in here.

As I have mentioned on Twitter, my wife and I are writing a series of books together. Although I have written books before, this is the first foray into serious fiction for me, and as such it has been a serious learning experience.

Having to weave a cohesive story together, full of characters that are believable, even when you throw in the fantasy bits is an incredibly difficult challenge.

Humble Beginnings

I am horrible at organizing my thoughts when it comes to writing. My best posts on this site where stream of consciousness, so of course that is how I tried outlining.

Continue Reading ]

Hot off the presses, Frequent Reference for WordPress. Check the project page.

I don't know about you, but I find myself referencing the same companies and sites over and over again .

The idea

Quickly it becomes tiring to add the bits of HTML to each reference to make them into links. Usually I just get lazy and leave them hyperlinkless. This cannot continue!

To that end I have written a new plugin for Habari Project called "Frequent Reference" that allows you to make a list of all the companies/sites that you find yourself referencing again and again in your posts, and have them automagically hyperlinkified upon output to the browser.

How it works

Effectively you will write the HTML for your references one more time, and after that anytime you reference the site/company the plugin will take care of making it a link for you.

Once you activate the plugin, you will need to configure it via its customize panel:

As you can see you simply type in the word you will reference followed by the URL. You separate these with a comma. That's really all there is to it.

By way of example, the link to Habari in the above paragraph was created by the plugin. I simply wrote the word Habari. You will also notice that when I reference Habari in this paragraph, it isn't linked up. The plugin links up the first occurrence of the word, not all of them

There are improvements that can be made I am sure, but I think that for now it is ready for some more use out in the wild. I will eventually have this hosted in the extras repo, but until then you can grab it right here.

Or more correctly, the book it will become. After being asked again today when my book was coming out, I have decided to pull out the manuscript, dust it off and add a chapter or three about WP MU to it.

I am not sure when it will be published, or where really. I also don't know how it will be distributed. What I do know is that it will be done, and you will be able to buy it.

Look, more work for Chris!