Right in the middle of NaNoWriMo, the server got the hiccups. First, the blogs stopped responding. Then the main site went down. I did what any stressed dev might do and restarted the server. Bad mistake! The MySQL server refused to come back up. Just totally refused. After some time …

For a project for a writers’ group called Sunday writers, I spent most of yesterday making a game – Word Bingo. I wrote the code in one day, this is how. The idea was not one that I came up with, the host of Sunday writers had the idea but …

We have identified a possible fault with the sign-up process for Author Buzz. It only affects people signing up with email but not with WordPress.com. The fault appears to be that the email for new accounts never arrives. Sometimes. Possibly. Problems like this are a nightmare to debug because they do …

Today was nothing if not frustrating. I spent hours looking for ways to set up a simple user-badges system and got nowhere fast. Given the huge number of pre-existing plugins that cover this task, I thought (wrongly as it turns out) that I could simply install one of them and …

This post, unlike most of our dev posts, is not about Author Buzz but about some software that I hope will be hosted on Author Buzz one day. About three years ago I realised that if I was going to make it as a professional writer, I would need to be …

We’ve put our dev blog on a news footing. As part of our efforts to make sure that blog beta users get a great selection of themes, we have updated the dev blog with a new theme. While this might not be the most exciting news in the world, it …

We’ve been adding a bunch of new stuff to Author Buzz. A lot of it is hidden away in preparation for launching an awesome set of new features but some of it is available for general use right now. New QnA forum for writers Writer’s help – a QnA forum for …

Everything should be working again but I managed to break everything quite badly today. First I installed a new plugin which ended up causes a network-wide server error. I then disabled all plugins which was a bit of a sledgehammer approach. After I removed the broken plugin, I had to …

In case you thought we had all upped sticks and vanished without a trace. Here is a general update on Author Buzz. The focus of the team has of late been divided into two broadly equal categories. Participating and establishing the community Coping with the heat Content Updates Now that …

We can finally announce some forward progress in the area of modifying member profiles to do what we need them to do. This is almost entirely down to one man who I have never met.