Jonny Atlas Writes.

Online, that is.

There would have been many, many updates since the last one, if not for the domain name catastrophe of ‘08. Short and sweet, my old domain name (jonnyatlaswrites) was a gift, and Namesecure told the person who bought if for me that in order to transfer ownership to me he should just let it expire.

Yeah, they really told him that.

So Namesecure and I had some words, and I got this domain name through GoDaddy, who I have never had problems with.

Hopefully I will be able to get the old url back soon, and can rework these sites into a triumvirate of awesomeness.

Sites, you say?

Yes. Three of them. JonnyAtlasWrites(blog), JonnyAtlasInc(company) and JonathanMCJordan(business). Hopefully this will all be up and functioning in a month’s time.

All that said, life has been good. The road trip was awesome, as was being off work for 3 weeks.

LA is awesome. The people here are VERY different than the people in Orlando. In some ways that’s good, and in some ways not so good. I almost feel like I don’t know how to interact with the people here sometimes. Many of them are so guarded you can’t even see who they are, let alone get to know them beyond surface. Perhaps that will change with time.

I have formed a screenwriting circle that starts next week. If you are not in one, and you want to be a screenwriter, get in one. None where you are? Create one. Seriously, it’s imperative. I’m looking forward to the group. It should be very helpful for all involved.

I’m close to finished with my latest screenplay. The midpoint was giving me some issues, but after a good friend helped me dig deeper into my characters, I broke through the wall. It was all about finding that one thing that would really push the protag beyond the edge. That one thing that does him so dirty, hurts him so bad, he just has to go and do what he winds up doing. Of course, the answer was found in the story if his life. My next blog is going to be about that. You characters, their lives, their relationships, and why they are so damned important.

Also, I will be posting pictures from the trip soon. Be looking forward to that.

Popularity: 100% [?]

My site is not going to become a tech blog, I swear! I just want to help out anyone who has to go through what I just went through.

For those of you who may be updating WP and using or installing the Popularity Contest plugin, I thought I would help save you some pain and suffering. As is, the plugin won’t work with 2.5. Thankfully, some brilliant people have figured out what to do.

Andrew Daum gives you step by step instructions on how to fix the php for the plugin itself. It’s a quick and easy fix.

If you’re like me, and you decided to install Pop. Contest AFTER updating WP, well… you’ve only just begun. Thankfully Ken McGuire had this to say:

…in running the plugin locally I found that after making the changes in order to get the plugin to activate, it wouldn’t create the two tables needed in order to run, so these had to be entered manually (via phpMyAdmin). To create the tables, you’ll need to run the following SQL queries.

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `PREFIX_ak_popularity` (
`post_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
`total` int(11) NOT NULL,
`feed_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`home_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`archive_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`category_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`single_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`comments` int(11) NOT NULL,
`pingbacks` int(11) NOT NULL,
`trackbacks` int(11) NOT NULL,
`last_modified` datetime,
KEY `post_id` (`post_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM;

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `PREFIX_ak_popularity_options` (
`option_name` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
`option_value` varchar(50) NOT NULL
) ENGINE=MyISAM;

Note that PREFIX refers to your Wordpress table prefix, in most common cases it is simply wp_ unless you’ve got multiple copies of Wordpress running in the same database.





If your webhosting doesn’t provide you write access privileges in phpMyAdmin (like mine), there’s an easy work around that. Just create a new text document in notepad, copy the code from above, paste it into the text doc, save it as wp_ak_popularity (or whatever), and use the “import” function in phpMyAdmin. It will run the code and create the tables.

Hope this helps!

Now back to my standard topics…

Popularity: 44% [?]

I’m messing around with the layout today, so if things go spotty for a sec, my bad. You may also see some random “filler” text from the code as I’m working on it. Should be done soon.

Popularity: 42% [?]

Just a quick note before I head off to work. I changed the blog’s settings, so you don’t need to get an account in order to post comments.

Also, If you get tempted to watch “The Prodigy” when you’re walking through Blockbuster, don’t. Yeah, the cover looks cool. Too bad the movie doesn’t hold up. The biggest problem is the cinematography. It makes a lot of the movie tedious to watch. The story is okay, but overall I just didn’t care about anything. Especially the characters.

Popularity: 32% [?]