The Night Land Journal
Hail, good readers.
It's going to look like nought is happening for a time. But it won't — the Almighty willing — be so. I'm at work.
About a decade ago I took over the Night Land website. It was crufty old table-layout HTML with some CSS, and it wasn't mobile-friendly. ('Responsive design' is the insufficiently specific buzzphrase.) Its founder, the late and sorely missed Andy Robertson, never had the time to rework it.
I decided that the right way to adapt the site for mobile browsing was to convert it to a content management system — mostly because the prospect of converting every page by hand looked daunting. It would, I thought, take too long.
I picked Joomla for the CMS — which was the right choice, given its flexibility, the varying layouts of the site's pages. I've had no need to employ "WordPress delenda est!" as a habitual sign-off. Minor updates have worked flawlessly.
The current Joomla version has reached end of life. It's time for a major upgrade. I was making one in the test site. That worked, too, in the sense that all the site contents came over just fine. But a couple of the add-ons I use didn't get upgrades. I could live without one, and shift and rejigger the other — which rejiggering would be a blasted time-consuming nuisance, because this isn't my specialty. I could do it, though.
Will I be able to do it ten years from now? What about the next Night Land webmaster?
That is to say: while Joomla was the right content management system if we were going to have a content management system ... we don't have the right use case for a content management system.
The Night Land website isn't a business, where someone (employee or indepent contractor) is paid to attend the site. It's always been tended by literary enthusiasts who might be techies in their day job, but who don't necessarily have the free time to hurry up and fix it if some part of the tech stack breaks. (I might not have been able to fix a serious problem in a timely manner through the late 2010s.)
A CMS gives productivity gains if someone's diligently maintaining it. It runs on top of a whole bunch of other packages, which all need to work, which all need to be the right versions. Backing the site up means the whole teeter-totter must be in working order one way. Restoring means it must work again the other way. Do both operations still work if something got updated? Am I sure? If I don't test every so often, I'm risking discovering, after some disaster, that I don't have a backup I can restore from.
Contrast that to HTML and simple CSS. The HTML websites I wrote in the 1990s are still completely legible and useable on a desktop, laptop, or tablet. On a phone, you have to scroll and zoom, and one of them is uncommonly annoying ... but you can still read it.
30 years of rapid tech change, and I could put those sites up tomorrow, and they'd pretty much work.
Also: you can always pull a complete copy of an HTML & simple CSS website down from the front end. The browser sees everything. Nothing depends on a database you can't see, and can't reach if you can't log in.
A website made from HTML & simple CSS is not fragile. It's robust. It might show some degradation of function if somebody decides to render it in a way nobody ever rendered websites before. But it can survive prolonged periods of benign neglect.
So, with recent hindsight, it's obvious what, a decade ago, I should have done. I'm doing it now.
Little or nothing will change visibly for a while, while I write the skeleton of the new HTML/CSS site, and a sample of every kind of content page we're going to need. Then at some point you'll see the major structural pages switch all at once, followed by relatively rapid reloading of content pages.
The design is going to retain some features of the current pages, for mobile browsing. But in some ways it will call to mind Andy's original site more than the Joomla template does.
I have no set time to finish. It will probably happen over the next few months.
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- Written by Kate Coady
- Category: This Site
A Mouse in the Walls of the Lesser Redoubt is complete
I have a few more stories and articles to bring back, and an article series to finish.
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- Written by Kate Coady
- Category: This Site
A long time ago Nigel Atkinson's Night Land novella A Mouse in the Walls of the Lesser Redoubt was complete on the original version of this site; but our original editor, the late Andy Robertson, took the complete story down and left a teaser up, for the publication of Night Lands Volume I: Eternal Love. The Night Lands printed books (there was also a Night Lands Volume II: Nightmares of the Fall) were print-on-demand, and never cheap. Now, since the publisher of Night Lands Volume II, Paul Brazier of Three Legged Fox, has also died, the second volume is sometimes unavailable altogether.
I've decided to bring A Mouse in the Walls of the Lesser Redoubt back here to the website in its entirety. (Mr. Atkinson, if you should stumble across this, I don't have your email address.) I'm working on it presently.
I have a few other existing works to bring back, and I'm going to get to work on them. I want the website stories to be complete (except for John C. Wright's stories, which he has republished in his ebook Awake in the Night Land).
The Internet Archive has taken to archiving this site on the Wayback machine, but so far I haven't been able to turn it up on the Wayback search without giving the domain name 'nightland.website', unfortunately. There is a copy of Andy's version of the site (the domain was nightland.co.uk) from 2007.
I liked, and still like, the look of the old version. The only reason I switched is it's all HTML. I spent some time maintaining that version before Andy died, and the site had gotten big enough to be a formidable amount of work, and had a fair amount of cruft because it needed that much work. So I moved to a Content Management System. But finding the old one somewhere besides my hard drive brings back good memories.
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- Written by Kate Coady
- Category: This Site
I fixed the Image Galleries. They weren't displaying.
I replaced the links in William Hope Hodgson's Fiction Online, as two of the best old sources had disappeared. The link to the Carnacki stories still points to those on Forgotten Futures, the Scientific Romance Roleplaying Game, but they also may be found on Gutenberg.org.
I have also linked to a new Hodgson weird sea story, and audio recordings of some of Hodgson's stories.
'The Baumoff Explosion' is also called 'Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabacthani?'
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- Written by Kate Coady
- Category: This Site
Henrik Möller runs a weird fiction podcast usually Swedish; it's called Udda Ting. In Udda Ting Episode 13 he interviewed Sam Gafford, John Linwood Grant, Nick Owen, Katherine Ouimet, and Kolja Aasgier. The opening of the podcast is Swedish, but the interviews are in English. English starts at 4:09, for listeners who don't speak Swedish.
I was asked, but, alas, couldn't make it.
This is still 'olds' rather than news: I've got some other posts to make about Hodgsonian projects people told me about when I was buried with other problems.
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- Written by Kate Coady
- Category: News
M.S. Corley is working on a comic called Carnacki, Recorder of Things Strange. He's planning to release the first volume later this year. It looks quite good (obviously).
John Linwood Grant has a new post on Carnacki at Grey Dog Tales which gives a good list of the new Carnacki stories published; and he also discusses Thomas Carnacki as a character with more human weakness than one commonly finds in the occult detective genre.
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- Written by Kate Coady
- Category: News
If I posted very much about H.P. Lovecraft, I could easily drown the weaker William Hope Hodgson signal. Nevertheless, most fans of Mr. Hodgson are also interested in Mr. Lovecraft's work.
Considering the sort of discussion that used to take place on the Night Speech bulletin board, I think some of you will appreciate Fred Lubnow's Lovecraftian Science blog, in which he frequently considers Mr. Lovecraft's works from a scientific point of view.
He has published The Journal of Lovecraftian Science, Volume 1 in paperback and ebook format, and is presently preparing Volume 2.
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- Written by Kate Coady
- Category: News
