Intermission
a creative coffee break from writing the play

I’ve added a new feature to ItsTheIntermission.com that allows readers to receive updates to the site via email subscription.

It’s easy to subscribe and unsubscribe, and it affords an easy way to know when there is a new posting.

The feature comes via Feedburner. (Does Google already own the world?) So far it seems to be working very well. If you have issues or problems subscribing or unsubscribing, please drop me a note.

To subscribe click on “Get Updates via Email” above this post next to the coffee cup graphic.

To get on the email list for the 2nd Monday of the month OMCCB Meditation, that page is here…

Note: This entry is for Mac users. In fact, it’s only for users of Leopard (AKA OSx 10.5.x).

I did a little review this week on the submissions I made this year, and in that process revamped my tracking system. It’s not just because I’m a data geek that I feel it’s important to track submissions. Once upon a time, I sent a submission out to a place I’d already sent one to some months before. The theatre had a strict policy of only one submission per twelve-month period. My submission was shredded. No matter how nice they were about it, I was embarrassed by my mistake. What an amateur…

And so, I keep track of the scripts I send out. I used to design databases for a living, and while I enjoyed that for a long time, it was work. There’s nothing fun about creating some complicated system for personal use. Well, sometimes. Except I’m too busy. So, off the shelf software was where I began.

I used to use software called Power Tracker than ran on OS9. I received it as a freebie the first time I bought Screenwriter in a very early iteration of that software. Power Tracker was built to track screenplay submissions, and handled stage play submissions, too. I chugged along with that until Apple abandoned OS9, and I needed some other way to track my submissions. I remembered we had a copy of FileMaker Pro somewhere. The Beloved had won a copy of it in a raffle at MacWorld some time ago.

Bento is a neat, cheap, and unsophisticated data management tool.

With FileMaker I went a little overboard designing reports for myself. I like slicing and dicing information in every which way. The only problem with FP really was it was at least two versions old, and not supported by Leopard. FileMaker 7 crashes in Leopard. Some days, FP7 crashes a lot. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to spend nearly a couple of hundred bucks to upgrade, when I only use FP for my little tracking program.

Excel is a great option. MBH uses Excel, I think, to track his submissions. Very easy to sort, group, see what you’ve done. I thought about that. And then I downloaded the trial version of Bento.

Bento is not FileMaker lite. It’s hardly a database. Yet, I think Bento may be my new solution to my script tracking. If not, I’ll just move over to a spreadsheet, and keep an even simplier list.

Within about an hour, I transferred my data from FileMaker into Bento, and using it in conjunction with Address Book, and iCal, I got back to not thinking about software.

How I set Bento up:

My data is now found in these places…

• Submission places (theatres, grants, festivals, workshops, etc.) are kept in Address Book.
• Submission deadlines (for festivals, workshops, competitions) are kept in iCal
• A list of “projects” or scripts is contained in a Bento table.
• A list of submissions made is contained in a Bento table.

Within my Bento, the primary table and display form, is the list of submissions, or the “what’s been submitted” info. That table is linked to the Address Book, which holds the “submitted to where” info. The submissions table is also linked to the Bento projects/scripts table.

A secondary table, or display form, is a list of upcoming deadlines for things I might want to submit something to. This form contains some Bento fields so that I know if I have made a submission to this.

In an ideal database world, the Deadlines table/form would be able to automatically link data to the Scripts Submitted table/form when I click on “Submission Sent.” Bento doesn’t do this type of task. The deadlines table does not contain the theatre name or the dates associated with it. These two data items exist in iCal alone, and Bento doesn’t allow more sophisticated manipulating among Bento tables or forms. There is no Apple script for Bento, or programming code in Bento. A downside of this psuedo-linking is that I cannot search on the theatre name because the theatre name is stored in iCal, or, for the Scripts Submitted form, stored in Address Book. That’s just silly, and I suspect Bento will add that searching feature along with a few other features in the next version.

Below, are three screen shots that pretty much tell you everything about how I’m looking at the data. That’s it. Not as simple as Excel, but simple nonetheless. No special reports. Just a screen display, arrowing through the records.

The danger in looking at a product like Bento is that if you want a database, Bento is not for you. Even though you can attach Address Book and iCal to Bento, and manipulate these sources, Bento is not a true relational database product. If you need a lot of scripts, data sorts, reports and all that good stuff, again, a word of caution that Bento is not for you. I see a lot of folks trying to make Bento into a kind of cheap FileMaker Pro. That’s a lot like trying to turn a hard boiled egg into an souffle.

Bento currently costs $49. It only runs on Leopard.

This is the new site for

intermission.typepad.com

also known as

writing the play

The typepad account has been closed!

This is the first in a series of posts about WordPress and Intermission’s design. As I’ve posted previously, when I decided to move the site to a WordPress hosted site, I wanted to learn how to create a WordPress theme from the ground up. The WordPress Codex contains most of the documentation needed to understand the underpinnings of WordPress.

It bears oft repeating: read the WordPress Codex at Codex.WordPress.org

I hope this is obvious: The WordPress software must be installed on your server. The software comprises a lot of PHP scripts, some CSS and JavaScript files, and MySQL databases. The database aspect of WordPress, and blogging software, is what provides blogging its flexibility and instant publishing abilities. Your posts or pages are stored in a database. The old-fashioned HTML websites required your post, if you will, embedded in HTML code and then republished somehow to the web each and every time you edited your post. That’s a very clunky, very platform dependent way of publishing. With blogging software, generally you are creating or editing a database record which is then instantly displayed and formatted by your blog theme. Anywho… you can install the WordPress software and never touch it, except to update the software as needed. If you’re a little geeky like me, you might want to know more about the “core” of WordPress, and I’ll write a bit about my explorations of it in future posts.

A WordPress theme is what manages your site’s design. A WordPress theme is made up of several components: a style sheet (at least one, you can have more if you must), template files, functions, and images. Plug-ins are optional.

The style sheet is a CSS file which controls the fonts, the paragraphs, the formatting of your posts and site design. In the short time I’ve revamped Intermission, I’ve learned a great deal more about CSS and creating style sheets, and so I’ll be making adjustments to this site, or more precisely my style.css file, in order to make posts easier to read. Useful troubleshooting tools for CSS and XHTML code are the W3C CSS and the W3C XHTML Validators. (The only pages on Intermission that will not validate properly are posts with videos embedded. That’s another story…)

Template files are PHP script files. The PHP files generate the HTML and access the MySQL database for posts, pages, and whatever site information is needed. (All that WordPress dashboard stuff is stored in an MySQL table.) In theory, you only need an index.php template file, and a style.css. Ideally, you have at least the index.php, a header.php, and a footer.php. When you view a WordPress blog, the following files are called and put together to form the page you see: header.php, index.php, and footer.php.

The header.php, of course, contains the HTML or XHTML or DHTML or whatnotHTML header references (for compliant web design). Also the code for your header are included here. Thus, Intermission’s header.php contains my graphic, the website title information. The menu system, the quotation space, and the search box are also contained in the header.php because that’s where I wanted them, or where I found they worked best. Most sites would include these latter items in the index.php or sidebar.php.

The index.php contains the WordPress “loop.” A loop is a “do while” or “for” somethingorother piece of PHP code. For WordPress, you are telling PHP to do something as long as there are posts to display. In Intermission’s case, the loop displays the most recent post in full, and then the next 11 posts in extract form. If you use sidebars for various navigation items, the sidebar.php is called from the index.php. Intermission does not use sidebars except on the “About” pages.

The footer.php contains anything you want displayed in the footer. Usually this contains the name of your theme, any acknowledgements, copyright, and hosting stuff. You can put whatever you want displayed at the bottom of your pages in the footer.

You can include other template files for specific looks to pages, single posts, search, archives, etc. An exploration of how WordPress calls template files can help you determine what additional looks you want or need. The Codex has a great graphic representation of the template hierarchy.

Intermission includes single.php, pages.php, search.php, archives.php, and sidebar.php. Single.php is called when you click on an individual post. It works in conjunction with the header.php and footer.php. The pages.php and sidebar.php make up, along with the header.php and footer.php, the “About” pages of Intermission. Search.php formats the search results (if you type something in the Search input box and press the enter key…), and the archives.php formats the archive pages of the site. Finally, Intermission includes a 404.php template file for the displaying of an error message if a page you click on cannot be found.

Functions can be included in the theme, contained in an optional functions.php file. A function is a task specific piece of PHP code. Or… you can make use of WordPress Plug-ins. Plug-ins are written by the WordPress geek community, and contain PHP code, or PHP with a combination of JavaScript and/or Ajax code. Currently Intermission makes use of several useful plug-ins, which are listed on the Site Design page. For example, the Coffee House Wall uses a plug-in specific to allowing comments on a single page. I hope to write my own plug-ins as the new site evolves. I think learning to use PHP within WordPress helped me to make smarter choices in including WordPress Plug-ins. Not all plug-ins, nor are all themes, are coded well.

These posts will get geekier as they go along…next up will be a dissection of the MySQL tables.

No timeline on these, just goals for posts.

The next post, probably next week, will return to Thoughts on Developing Plays.

Now open!

Post updated 12/25/08: Unable to recover from the downturn in the economy, The Coffee House closed its doors in November 2008. Yeah, that’s it. Uh huh.

Nothing fancy. Tried to keep the space clean and simple.

The new site should work with the current flock of browsers, having been tested with FireFox, IE 7, Safari 3.x, and Opera 9.1 The site should work fine for those browsers. I wasn’t able to test for earlier versions of Safari, so let me know, uh nicely, if there are issues. Older browsers will likely face display problems. I have created an alternate menu system for older browsers, yet was unable to accommodate other possible weirdness, especially for any Mac IE5 readers. The page number navigation system totally bombs Mac IE5.

Moving the site has given me ample thought time to reflect on my original intentions for this space. Some of them will be self-evident, and some I’ll be writing about over the next few journal entries.

For now, please kick back and mess up the furniture. Just don’t tear the house down!

I’ve been busy planning the move of Intermission away from TypePad.com. In the three-+ years I’ve been hosted at TypePad, the service has pretty much allowed me to focus on the content and not the mechanics. I’m not unhappy with TypePad, in any significant way. Sure there were times I wanted more. Isn’t that true of all relationships that aren’t meant to be forever? I’ve always wanted a header image, and always unwilling to pay more for the privilege. The only real gripe I have with TypePad is the inability to easily backup your compete post. That is, you can backup your posts just fine. You cannot easily backup your images, something even TypePad acknowledges.

It all comes down to an economic decision. When I did an inventory of all the online/internet/blah-blah-blah services we had, there was an embarrassing array of stuff that has accumulated over the years. (Hey, I’ve been online before some of you were born! Since before the Internet was born, even. Hmmm…. too much info.) A little TypePad here, a little dotMac there, a little WI-Fi everywhere… Time to consolidate with a single web hosting service.

At its best, the web is a great equalizing resource. At its worst, it’s a textual landfill.

Since I was fairly happy with TypePad, I briefly considered re-creating Intermission with Moveable Type or Ruby on Rails. Open Source was the way I wanted to go. For no real good reason, other than some of my favorite blogs are built from WordPress, I decided to go with it.

Simplistically, WordPress is a combination of PHP scripting and CSS files, which create a WordPress "theme", on top of MySQL databases. You don’t have to know any of those three things in order to use WordPress. Tons of other people have created templates you can use. Most of them are free. You can even hire someone to create a template for you. Or pay to use a canned "premium" template. Lots of options. You can even expand your theme with the use of "plugins" which help you tweak the template to do what you want. You gotta have a slideshow or images in your sidebar? Then, load up a plugin like this one, or this one.

Even with all the plug and play aspects of WordPress, I decided I wanted to build my theme from scratch. There’s a lot of documentation on the web about how to put a WordPress site together, using other people’s themes. Not really a lot about how to build your own from scratch. There’s been a couple of books on WordPress, neither of which were in the realm of geekiness I needed. Good for helping you modifying someone else’s templates, true. It’s almost as if no one really wants you to know how to start from scratch, and it feels actively discouraged on some ‘guru’ sites. The best website tutorial I found was Dissection of a WordPress Theme, written three years ago.

Fortunately, there’s something called the WordPress Codex, which contains all the documentation for WordPress. Most of it, anyway. Not always easy to find a specific picayune piece of information. You gotta read, read, read the Codex.

Why from scratch? I needed to exercise a different part of my brain, I suppose. I’m geeky enough to find it fun. None of the templates I found did what I really wanted ‘em to do. I’m capable, although it’s been many years since I designed a website. (Using the word "design" loosely, not in any pretty-fied meaning of the word.) It’s also easier to fix something if you know exactly how it’s been put together.

Once I decided to go from scratch, I knew I had to throw out my very old concepts of web site construction. I quickly abandoned my old copy of Dreamweaver, and stuck with BBedit for writing code. Long gone are the days of making HTML work by using, uh, yes, you caught me, spacers and tables.

Being the old-time programmer type that I am, I like to look at what experts feel are  "best practices" for coding. I read CSS, The Definitive Guide, and a couple of others on CSS. (I’m waiting for a copy of Designing with Web Standards to show up at my door.) The book that really helped me get back on track, because it was written in plain language with clear examples, was HTML Dog, The Best Practice Guide to XHTML and CSS. Made it possible to turn to The Definitive Guide as a good reference when needed, and especially to understand what the hell people were discussing on the CSS e-list I joined.

While indulging my reading, I re-realized how much debris is out there on the ‘net. There’s a lot of stuff on blogs and "content sites" that are not date-stamped. Many, many times I found myself engrossed in some article only to discover the methodology being proffered was sooooooooo outdated. At its best, the web is a great equalizing resource. At its worst, it’s a textual landfill.

Even though my brain is not as elastic as it used to be, not so easily absorbing new learning, I have not had this much fun with code in a very long time. There’s so much more to learn, and I feel I have just scratched the surface. Jeez, Ajax? What the hell…?

The new site is nothing fancy. I fear talking about  "coding" overhypes it. My desire is to keep it simple, easy to navigate, and hopefully be a little friendlier too. I expect to transition to the new site in a couple of weeks. My TypePad account comes to an end mid-August.

The fact that comments are turned off, is not because I do not welcome them. I do. Yet, I find the comment system distracting and potentially exhausting. I do not wish anyone to feel obligated to post comments. Nor do I wish to feel obligated to post in turn, in a never ending cycle of posting back and forth. I leave comments on other blogs when I am moved to do so. Obligations so quickly can become burdens, or can so easily sap the time away from writing plays and whatnot. I recognize Intermission is more infrequent public diary than blog. Truth be told, as sociable as I am, and I am a sociable writer, I’m much better one on one than in a group.

If you are moved to share something with me, please so kindly do.

Thanks to Malachy for alerting me that my eMail was down. Believe it works. Apologies to all who tried to write and were met with the dreaded bounce-back.

Cheers, my dears.