It’s done! It’s done! It’s done!

Well, kind of. It’s not everything Feast was meant to be, but you can’t always get what you want. Martin chose an interesting way to deal with the seemingly enormous girth of the book. He could have merely split it in half, right down the middle and sold it as Feast 1 and Feast 2. However…

We decided not to do that. It was my feeling — and I pushed hard for this, so if you don’t like the solution, blame me, not my publishers — that we were better off telling all the story for half the characters, rather than half the story for all the characters. Cutting the novel in half would have produced two half-novels; our approach will produce two novels taking place simultaneously, but set hundreds or even thousands of miles apart, and involving different casts of characters (with some overlap).

It’ll be interesting to see how it turns out. I can’t say I’m not excited. Looks like I timed my re-reading of the initial books almost perfectly!

UPDATE: Looks like Amazon has a July 26th release date. That would work. That would work well.

Remember this? Thanks to Gregory for tooting his own hornpointing out his plugin, Twilight Autosave, that would have saved me the frustration I experienced yesterday (yes, tooting horns is perfectly acceptable where it’s this damned useful). It essentially saves idiotspeople like me from themselves. Remember the “save early, save often” mantra? Yes, the one I commonly ignore, that one. Twilight Autosave is a choice bit of Javascript that does just that for those of us too dumbbusy to remember to hit that little Save as Draft button.

While eating my lunch recently in an almost empty restaurant my brain suddenly and inadvertently began registering some of the words of the two people sitting behind me. As I listened it dawned on me that, regardless of how I may think, there are people that think very differently on almost every subject. This really should come as no shock to anyone but somehow it struck me forcefully. Here was this conversation between two ordinary people within smiting distance of me in relatively hushed tones that I really never thought I’d hear.

Their conversation was a moderately heated discussion over whether or not we are currently experiencing the End Times. Oops, not enough emphasis there. The End Times. Yes, those end times, biblical stuff, dogs and cats living together and all that. And this wasn’t merely idle chatter, they were really laying down their cases back and forth, slinging Matthew this and Thessalonians that and — to be expected in any rational discourse over whether the Rapture is imminent — Revelations something else. The poor woman seemed convinced that we are indeed living out The End Ti… erm, The End Times and the man was gamely spinning the facts to paint a different picture. The woman worried about “the wars” and “children disobeying their fathers” and the man essentially said “wars schmars” and “kids are always rebelling that doesn’t mean the Apocalypse is nigh.” The gentleman assured her that things would keep along their current track until you could “point with certainty at the Antichrist.”

This was all rather interesting to me — pulling me from my beloved “A Storm of Swords” even — as I couldn’t even tell you what I had for lunch last Thursday yet these guys were aching over the implications of the phrase “falling away” in this one verse in this one modern translation of this historically revised version of something someone wrote down after hearing someone speak it 2000 years ago. Wild.

Personally I think we’re golden until Dominic Monaghan is elected President of the United States. On that day the heavens will roil.

Ignoring the spicy innuendo of the name — well, at least to my mind, maybe you Puritans are unfazed — FEED ON FEEDS has become my new aggregator of the moment over the previously mentioned Lilina. Lilina had me at “hello” until it silently failed on several malformed feeds. That wouldn’t be so bad if it survived such indignities but it didn’t. Instead my entire aggregation page would simply not load and the only notice I ever got that something was awry was the PHP error_log in the aggregator directory. No, that won’t work sweetcheeks.

So, skippy mentioned FOF on the #wordpress IRC channel and I decided to give it a spin. Hell, it couldn’t be worse than Lilina after all. As it turns out, it has all the advantages of Lilina — save, perhaps, for the ability to collapse posts — along with some much-needed usability enhancements. Oh, and it admirably handles malformed or dead feeds which damn near makes it a runaway champion right there.

Give it a shot. Note that FOF requires the use of a MySQL database unlike Lilina so if your web host doesn’t swing that way, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Since I so rarely update my plugins any more — and please don’t ask me about the core code contribution for the paged posts and comments functionality — when I do update one of them it is cause for awe and celebration. Such is the case for the update I’ve released for the Image Headlines plugin. Many people have asked for the ability to clear out the cache of images that the plugin creates so I’ve gone ahead and done just that. Here’s the relevant section from the plugin documentation:

Image Caching

You have control over how long the plugin will store images in the image cache. Why does the plugin cache images instead of generating them on-the-fly every time? Because it takes work to generate those images… sometimes — especially when using those pretty soft-shadows — a lot of work. Asking the web server to generate those images from scratch every time is burdensome. So, the plugin saves the image upon creation. The next time that particular title is displayed the web server can simply return that previously-created image and save a lot of work.

There’s a trade-off though, of course. Storage. Those images take up space. And if you have, say, 600 posts, that’s 600 images that would be stored. The plugin lets you decide how long to keep those images in the cache based on the age of the image. The default is 14 days, meaning that any image that was created 14 days ago will be deleted sometime today. This simply means that if someone views an archive post from, say, last year it is likely that the plugin will need to recreate the image before it can be displayed. Once created it will hang around in the cache for the configured time and then get deleted again. You can select any number of days to suit your needs. Please note that all of this caching and the management of the image files within the cache is transparent to you and to your readers.