Zen Master: Blog

Did you know that you have comments turned off on your blog? What's the point of having a blog if no one can reply? That's very much like saying "Y'all should listen to what I want to say but I have no desire to hear your reply".

Um, have you considered having someone else look over your work before you post it? SOL calls that person an 'editor' but since you retain full control he or she is really a 'proofreader'. SOL maintains a long list of people who have volunteered to do that for other authors.

-ZM

One of the other authors here just mentioned that Wes Boyd has left this vale of tears. The only reason that "Busted Axle Road" isn't on my favorites list is that I never finished reading it so I don't know how it turns out. I couldn't. I was laughing too hard.

-ZM

One of my author buddies asked me to turn comments on. Sure, no problem, but how? It took me a while to find it. It's on the "stats" page for an individual story.
There does not appear to be a global setting for all stories. Which means that I have to open up the stats page for each and every story, to turn comments on for that particular story. Thankfully, I only have 16 stories posted here. This does not scale well, ya know? What is Aubie56 sposta do if he wants comments? He has hundreds of stories here!
Oh, and I heard somewhere that comments do NOT go to the author. They just sit there on the story's page until someone else reads them. I'm not gonna go check every story I ever wrote every day, to see if someone added a comment. Of course, that may not be true. Maybe they are sent to the author somehow. We'll see.

-ZM

I see more and more comments about ASSTR.org being down. That site, like this one, is funded by donations, and I'm pretty sure that the donations aren't sufficient to pay a full-time webmaster to keep an eye on it at all times. It has been down a lot in the last year. The maintainer has pointed out on several occasions that expenses are piling up and it is not possible to immediately pay for repairs, the site will be back up when repairs can be paid for.
The current issue appears to be that they have configured their web server to _only_ use HTTPS, to refuse to fall back to HTTP if there is a problem, and on the 14th their HTTPS security certificate expired. Until they get an updated certificate or they allow HTTP connections, the site is down even if the server is fine.
Folks, I don't think that the certificate is free. Without donations, that site may never come back. Similarly, SOL isn't free to run, either. Just sayin'.

This is a pretty well-designed website. I know, it's just a place for people to dump stories that aren't good enough to sell, right? Well, it's also a place for people to publish really good stuff that the author could probably have made money off of, but just didn't want to go to all the trouble.
One of the features that I recently noticed is an "Authors' Favorites" list, a list of those stories which are in the most authors' own favorites list.

Oh.

I've never bothered with that on my ownpage, it's just too pretentious to put stuff there because all three of my readers really want to know what I like to read, but hey there's some value here. If I populate my own author's list, that goes into the counting for that big list. Stories that I really liked will move up on that summary list that people should be looking at. Sure. For that, I'll put stuff in my own favorites list.
Only, there's a quirk. See, I don't write for others. I write for me, and I've learned that some others like to read my writing, so I post it here. I _like_ my own writing. I mean, if I didn't then I would probably stop, right? I've even mentioned before that one of my goals is to, someday when I'm senile and no longer remember who I am, stumble across this website, discover some good stories, and realize that I really like that Zen Master guy's stories. I wish he was still writing.
So, yeah, two of the stories I've put on this site are two of my favorite stories. I can't add them to my favorites list, though. Lazeez has that blocked. Authors can't list their own work in their own favorites list. Bummer, man.

ZM