Seal Beach Daily is off to a wonderful start. The mailboxes runneth over with goodness, good wishes, good contacts, good news. And I have to admit, although it is a lot of work, I am having a good time. And the SBD has hit a nerve in Seal Beach. Readers e-mail that they want this site, with this approach, and that makes me want to be part of creating it for them. I can’t help it; at some level, isn’t it every journalist’s dream to have a little hometown operation?

And sometimes nice buzz happens: An interview with Donna at LAist features SBD and a big Kateco photo. (The one above.)

Buzz update: More mentions. LA Times LA Now Blog. Michelle Vranizan Rafter’s always smart WordCount.

In the meantime, some things to be thankful for: Smart friends full of ideas; great and talented partners, smooth working relationships, and a business lithe enough to turn on a dime; a genius husband of 23 years who supports you in all you do. Happy launch day to all!

Be sure to check out the thing that made me experiment with Wordle in the first place — the Wired article that Michelle was pointing to in her reader — The Democratic And Republican National Convention Speeches, As Seen Through Wordle. Sweet visualization.

Today, we rolled out the cool new literary event search features at CaliforniaAuthors. Users can now search — right from the pages of our site — for events listed in the big-and-growing BookTour event database. CSS/php master Val did a really beautiful job with the coding and I am proud and happy with the implementation. Click here to read a nice message about our partnership from BookTour.com’s Kevin Smokler. Click here to give our new search a try!

On another front, Val’s back seized up yesterday, giving his spine a disturbing “S” shape and essentially immobilizing him. So we spent the morning visiting Claudio, getting x-rays, etc. Val is icing tonight for more of the same tomorrow. So this evening we’re having comfort food: this deeply good and supremely easy mushroom soup from famously cranky TV chef Anthony Bourdain. We made ours with shiitakes.

Think you have a tough job? Join the military. Here is my new desktop, made from a photo of a jet engine at the March Reserve Air Force Base, Airfest 2088. The Airfest is a type-o-rama of warnings and designations. This one seemed like just what I needed during the last days of the CaliforniaAuthors relaunch. Val and I have prepared a nifty Flickr picture gallery of these desktop images, suitable for use in your high-pressure job situation.

Visit the Flickr gallery, and if you see an image you’d like for your desktop, click the “all sizes” button above the image and download it to your computer. These images are available under a Creative Commons License, so download and enjoy!

The newly re-designed CaliforniaAuthors.com is up and running. I always say — in terms of design and building — there are no small websites, but this one really doesn’t qualify as small; in fact, it’s big, with its 70+ author essays and excerpts, its many pages of directory-style resources, and its more than 1800 posts going back to 2002. It was a hell of a lot of work: Donna made the content fresh, Val made it all go, I designed it and did the thousand things to make the crufty old site fit into its shiny new suit. It’s nice to see it out there. It is especially nice to see it done.

We’re celebrating the re-launch with another cool book giveaway: Harry, Revised, the brand new novel by top LA litblogger, Mark Sarvas. Learn more about the book here. Then go over to californiaauthors and enter the drawing by sending us your e-mail address via the contact form, with the words Harry, Revised in the subject line. Enjoy! [Check out Mark's great blog, The Elegant Variation, here.]

In other California book news, the official pub date for Donna’s book, Great Escapes: Southern California was May 5. On that day, the LAist gave it this sweet preview. Kevin Roderick also talked about the book on KCRW and at the renowned LA Observed. Learn more at Donna’s SoCal So Cool blog. Congratulations, Donna!

On the M&M visit front, boxes of beef arrived at my door today. Grass-fed, aged steak from the Hearst Ranch in central California. A gift from Michelle! Let the feast menu-making begin!

]]> http://thenitenote.com/2008/04/18/know-when-to-fold-em/feed/ 2 http://thenitenote.com/2008/04/14/paying-my-code-debt-with-interest/ http://thenitenote.com/2008/04/14/paying-my-code-debt-with-interest/#comments Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:00:32 +0000 kate http://www.thenitenote.com/blog/2008/04/14/paying-my-code-debt-with-interest/

It’s crunch time on the californiaauthors.com redesign. [sketch] Thanks to Val, the shiny new site is already living and breathing on the test server and I am filling it up with the copious content CaliforniaAuthors has built in six years of operation. Val made the blog-port from Graymatter to WordPress look like a piece of cake. (Wow! almost 1800 entries — Go Donna!) And, this weekend, I was going move the more than 80 author essays and excerpts now posted at californiaauthors into the new system. Piece of cake? Not so much. And, I have no one to blame but myself.

Mea culpa! Look at all the sloppy stuff in pages I built myself! How is it that almost none of these pages — which look alike to users on the web — are alike under the hood?! They all require such cleaning up for our new, more orderly, publication system which likes nice clean valid code. (Who doesn’t?)

Opening the pages is like taking a core sample of the last six years. Here in the code are markers pointing to how the web has changed, how browsers have changed, how I have changed. Here is the history of css stability and my stability. If you know how to read them, they show that these six years of californiaauthors updates contain five of the most stress- and depression-filled years of my life, the years of my long-estranged and very angry sister’s illness and death. I would have abandoned the site a hundred times, but Donna kept coming up such with good and useful content and projects that I couldn’t walk away. And the site’s readership kept growing and it was so obvious that it was doing good in the world that — as crazy as I was — I couldn’t let it go. I was not at my best, so I just did what I could.

Last night, Val leaned against the wall in the heat (95° in April in Long Beach — wtf!?) and listened to me explain why the job of getting the content into the new site was taking me days longer than I planned. “Every page is different. This one has all these hard line breaks. That one closes every <p> tag; this one doesn’t. This one is different from paragraph to paragraph! And it’s because, in that moment in 2002, I just wanted to get that goddamned update done. Stuff came from different sources, multiple files, e-mails or Word docs from many creators. I cleaned it up just enough to get it up there and working on the web. Sometimes I was half crazy; sometimes I was a zombie. I definitely wasn’t thinking about the future. It’s all right there in the page files. And now I have to touch every individual file to clean it up.”

“Ah,” said Val, “you’re paying your code debt.”

So right, as usual. In the programming world, code debt is the debt of time you incur when you don’t do it right in the first place. If your code is not pure, correct, neat, well-commented, fungible, you might get it to work today, but one day you will have to correct it or abandon it. The moment you produce something sloppy that works, you incur the debt. One day is the code monkey on your back. Progress has thumb-breakers and if you want to move ahead, you’ll have to pay up. And, it looks like my debt is due now.

So this morning, I am about two-thirds the way through code purgatory and cleaning as fast as I can. The new site is looking heavenly, correct on its face and deep in its insides, that only Val and I will ever see. I am already feeling shriven. And I have learned my lesson: coding is always about the future.

I should also say that I am feeling very proud of CaliforniaAuthors and thankful to Donna for all her work in gathering such wonderful stuff to put on the web. And for keeping me involved in something so good and good-hearted during all those hard years. Late last night, with my back hurting from a day of mousing, I was a real crab, grousing to myself about the scut work I had loaded on myself. Then, I opened the file with the cool essay Janis Cooke Newman wrote about cooking her way into the mind of Mary Todd Lincoln while working on her book Mary. A nice piece written just for CaliforniaAuthors. One of so many nice things on the site, reminding me why we keep working on it, lightening my mood while I lightened my code debt, one page at a time.

I’m looking forward to the CaliforniaAuthors re-launch in the weeks to come. As I work through the pages, I am keeping track of my all-time favorite californiaauthors.com content and to celebrate the re-launch, I will post a list here. It runs the gamut from Mrs. Lincoln’s cake recipe to this excerpt about bank robbers’ nicknames. You’ll find them all at the new californiaauthors, beautifully coded, of course!