It's been too long since I've said anything to reassure people that I'm still alive, though I appreciate that no one has been so impatient with me as to complain.  Things are moving along.  Troublingly, my parents (who worked for the same corporation I did) were in the middle of buying a house when our location was shut down, so things have been hectic, to say the least.

I still haven't gotten a new job, but I haven't really had a chance to look too hard as of yet.  It's not really any sort of problem in the immediate future; mostly I'm just busy, and when I'm not busy I'm too tired to be in the right state of mind to write what are probably the most important chapters of Sharing the Night.  

It'll happen though.

For those that were interested, I've released the custom front page layout I mentioned previously.  The timing may seem odd, but I've actually been sitting on the mostly-complete version for a few days now to make sure nothing breaks it.  It's hard to be sure, but it seems to be working well enough to release.

No Title Image is a separate style.

Get the script for Greasemonkey (Firefox) or Tampermonkey (Chrome)

Get the style for Stylish (Firefox) or Stylish (Chrome)

Note #1: To make full use of this style, the companion user script is required.

Note #2: This style overrides the background color to #03081a, but leaves the background pattern and image alone. Visit this page to change them if you desire. I recommend the "plaster" or "waves" patterns, with no image. Sadly the stars do not work well with the transparency. Hindsight is 20/20.

Features:

* Super-snazzy color scheme vaguely resembling the princess of the night (Ie. It's blue.)

* Displays the featured stories all at once, and makes them the focus of the front page.

* Layout dynamically shifts to accommodate various resolutions (not tested on mobile yet, sorry. Let me know if you do try it.)

* Appends the remaining "popular stories" to the same list, in a more compact format. (Script required)

* Allows expanding featured stories to view their non-truncated descriptions. (Script required)

* Moves the latest stories and new stories lists to their own tabs and allows each to be refreshed individually. (Script required)

* Loads higher resolution covers for sections that weren't using them. Loads are deferred until needed. (Script required)

Un-Features:

* This style includes the recent news box if used with the user script, but does not show the Twitter box. Subscribe to Knighty on Twitter if that's your thing. This may change in an update, in which case it will share space with the recent news box and allow toggling between the two.

* This style ONLY changes the front page. As such, the appearance of the user toolbar will not be consistent with the rest of the site. Sorry. I started to make the theme work with the rest of the site, but quickly realized that doing so would be a whole project on its own.

I, um, I may have gotten a little carried away with the whole javascript thing.  And the transparency thing.  They might not go together too well on some systems .  Separating each section into its own separate refreshable "front page" seemed like it was worth it, though.  The transparency, on the other hand, is kind of just me being lazy.

I was going to have multiple themes and everything, but things don't always go as planned.  I've marked the style and script as public domain, so if anyone wants to base things on it, feel free.  All of the styles for colors are at the bottom of the stylesheet, so it should be pretty easy.

I'm not completely happy with it from an aesthetic standpoint, but you do what you can with what you have.  Overwriting styles and working in the framework of existing HTML is far from an ideal development environment.

Anyway, I hope it's useful to someone.

I've just been informed that as of this Friday, no one I know locally will have a job.  That includes me.  I know me.  The corporate office is closing our location down entirely.  This, uhh, might have some effect on... you know... things.

In all seriousness though, yeah.  It's a thing that happened.  Not sure yet how much it'll interfere with my writing, but I'm just putting this out so everyone knows what's going on.

So, I made this thing for my own personal use.  It's a custom layout for the front page (and only the front page, note) of the site that shows all the featured stories at once and displays the "popular stories" with larger covers below that.  The layout dynamically shifts for use on lower resolutions without losing any content.

The catch is, I had to resort to javascript to move a few things,  allow the user to expand the featured stories for their full descriptions, and fetch the larger covers for the merely popular stories.  Technically, it actually works okay without javascript; the site news box and popular stories are simply not displayed in that case, and the featured stories cannot be expanded.

So, the question is, is anyone interested enough for me to bother cleaning it up and testing it for public release?  More importantly, would you install a greasemonkey script in order to use it?

(No, I didn't do this instead of starting on Sharing the Night: Chapter 8   I'm working on it!)

Chapter 7 is officially off to the prereaders, so here's a bit of banter that didn't make it into the final chapter for various reasons.

Five ponies, one dragon, a deck of cards and no answers.  It was either the beginning of a  bad joke, or the end of a long night at the library.  Somewhere along the line, somepony had scribbled in “P’s” over the aces’ “A’s,” and Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy were splitting the pot after both playing five of a kind since nopony could agree which princess was considered the higher card.

“Ah’m telling y’all this is ridiculous,” Applejack groused as she hoofed her cards over to Spike.  “Twelve princesses in a deck is just asking fer this nonsense.”

“Preaching to the choir, AJ,” Rainbow Dash assured her as she stacked up her chips with her teeth.  “–but hey, I’m not complaining.”

“What I don’t understand is how one of you two seems to win every other hand,” Rarity scoffed.  “Neither of you are very good at bluffing.”

“Oh, that’s easy.”  Rainbow Dash smirked.

Rarity was all ears as Spike shuffled the next hand.  Applejack was rolling her eyes, and Pinkie Pie was eying the rolls she’d brought over from Sugar Cube Corner after work.  It was honestly a miracle there was still food on the table after all this time, but nopony but Pinkie Pie had much of an appetite, and the rolls were the only thing without a grain of sugar in them, so they had so far survived the pink pony’s sweet tooth.

Meanwhile, Rainbow Dash was letting the suspense drag on, before finally declaring “It’s because pegasi are awesome!” and earning a most unladylike facehoof from Rarity.

Rarity sighed.  “I suppose I walked into that one, expecting a serious answer from the likes of you.”

Rainbow Dash grumbled.  “Okay, okay.  Look, I can’t talk for Flutters, but just look at her!”  Rainbow Dash pointed one hoof at the butter yellow pegasus, who looked up from what she was doing with wide, innocent, aquamarine eyes.  “You can’t win against that!”

“She’s got a point, Rarity,” Applejack admitted guiltily.

“I—on the other hand—have a legitimate strategy,” Rainbow Dash added proudly, once again earning her the fashionista's undivided attention.

“Really, this time?” Rarity asked, dubious.

“Guaranteed,” Rainbow Dash assured her.

Applejack wasn’t buying it.  “Alright, let’s hear this legitimate strategy of yours.”

“I—,” Rainbow Dash said, leaning in to speak in hushed, conspiratorial tones.  “—am legitimately awesome!”

Rarity and Applejack groaned.

“I’m serious!” Rainbow Dash insisted.

“I know.”  Rarity sighed.  “That’s is precisely the problem.”

No matter what I replace this one scene* with, it's not working, so I'm just gonna cut it out entirely and call the chapter done at only 9k words.  I'll do one last full read through tomorrow, and if all is well, pass it on to my prereaders.  I wish I had an extra-long chapter to make up for the wait, but it'll end up being just the opposite

* No, not the same scene the last blog post was about.  That all worked out.

Did a full read-through on my phone today, which is a thing I do to make myself actually see what's on the page instead of what I think is there.  Fixed a bunch of things, but ended up amputating a thousand-plus words that I've been struggling on the results of.  I can imagine how frustrating it must be to see delays, but believe me when I say this chapter is kind of important.  Oddly, I'm not that disappointed, myself.  It definitely feels like it's back on track now.

The internet is out to get me, it seems.  First Google Docs goes down this morning, and I can't write—so I pick a story to read, only for FimFiction to die a third of the way through and stay down for the rest of the day!

...though by then Google Docs was back up, and I did actually get a non-trivial amount of work done on chapter 7 in the end.  In all likelihood, it'll only be about 10k words, which is a little sad for being close to a month (!) late.  Seriously, how did that happen?  It seems like the moment I hit a stumbling block, it just gets harder and harder to make progress

Don't worry though, nothing can stop me from finishing Sharing the Night... eventually...  just don't be surprised if the next few things I write afterwards are one-shots

(Calling it now—Twilight Sparkle is delirious from lack of sleep; Rainbow Dash has a rainbow need to dash.  They fight crime!)

(No, seriously.  I am going to write that.)

(I have plans.  Evil plans.)

It's... a thing.  I don't exactly 'hate' it, but it's certainly going to take some getting used to the notifications/feed split.  Honestly, having blog posts in one place and group topic posts somewhere else just seems... weird to me.  I mean, it's almost logical to split the results of your follows/watches/group joins from automatic notifications, but then there's that one thing that doesn't fit that scheme.

Not really a fan of the feed page either.  Spent a while tweaking mine so it's cleaner and clearer, but I'd still rather not have to check two pages for notifications.  I really wish I could find a way to keep just the author name on the first line on the group folder notice, too, but there just isn't a good way that I know of.

I would publish the style changes I made with Stylish, but I got kind of lazy after a while and just started nudging things around with relative positioning, so it's really not polished enough for public consumption, what with complications like browsers and the site's auto-scaling, sorry.

Anyway, it's weird, but I'll live.

Well, it's been a month since the last chapter of Sharing the Night, and I've still got a bit to go on the next one.  I was really hoping to keep to at least a monthly schedule, but being sick over the middle of the month really kind of threw everything off.  I wanted to have an entry for the selfcest competition, too, but that hasn't happened either, so disappointment all around.

Rest assured, though, it'll happen—the next chapter of Sharing the Night, I mean.  I have 2500 words in the competition entry, but I'd much rather focus on Sharing the Night.  Believe it or not, things are actually going to be leading up to the final reveal soonish (over a few chapters), and I want to make sure it's done right.