If the message from our beta testers said anything, it said, “simplify things some more”. Of course, life being what it was, simplifying also means more complicated. The problem with putting everything you might want all within easy reach is that you pretty much end up putting everything within easy …

Time for a developer ramble about the state of things here at Author Buzz UK, bug tracking, progress, and article length. Solving Bugs We reported that a potential bug had been found with sign-ups. Thanks to some truly amazing beta testers we have found that there probably is no bug …

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 …