In an unlikely crossover, A&E’s Longmire is apparently coming to Retropolis. Tonight. He’s getting aspirin there, or something.

Awhile back I got an email from the production company behind the show. I hadn’t ever seen it at that time. They wanted a release to use two of my posters in what was called the "Pharmacy" set in Season 2, Episode 5; and unless they’ve changed the order of the episodes, that’s tonight.

(For those like me who don’t have television it ought to be showing up at hulu.com a week from tomorrow.)

Once I’d sent back the release I streamed the show, and I like it. It’s a modern day Western detective series set in Wyoming. What they’re going to do with the rockets out there… I have no idea.

And of course the prints are just set dressing, meaning that they’ll be somewhere on the set, but there’s no guarantee that the camera will spend any time near them. So, you know, don’t be upset if you examine every inch of the pharmacy and still can’t find them.

The other print they’re using is the old version of my The Future: it’s Not What it Used to Be. Once I’d lived with that one for awhile I decided to change it; so you can’t even get that version any more… unless I forgot it someplace!

Updated: Hey! I think I got it wrong, didn’t I? It must have aired last week, and it’ll be showing up on hulu tomorrow.

Back in my years in game development ("the lost years") there were so many features added to games while they were in production that I couldn’t even begin to count the number of times it happened. It’s so prevalent that we even had a name for it: "feature creep". Creepy features most often came from the game’s publisher, or from the enthusiastic producer appointed by the publisher; but, really, creepy features sometimes creep out from inside the team. Usually from some member of the team who doesn’t have to make those creepy features happen. The words easy or simple often appear at about the same time.

Now and then, though, creeping features creep out from within. And that’s what happened to me today.

Around midday I had checked off my list all but three of my WordPress plugin’s essential features. It was a great feeling. Once those three were done, the plugin would be ready for people other than me to use: actual real world testing! I’d already started to look for self-published authors with WordPress blogs who might like to test the plugin and build their own bookshops inside their web sites. Like I said: great feeling.

Except for feature creep.

Because at about that same time I realized that I’d left something out. It wasn’t part of the original plan – it’s not like I decided not to do it. I just hadn’t considered it from the beginning. And it was something that people would probably want. Something that they might really want.

I went out to mow the lawn, and I just couldn’t get my creepy feature off my mind. This probably didn’t do much for my lawn mowing prowess which – between you, me and the neighbors – is probably not my strong suit, anyway.

And really, taking the long view, my creepy feature won’t be very difficult – it’s similar to something I built for the Archonate Bookstore. It’s just that it puts me two or three days (I hope!) farther away from beta testing. But of course the plugin will be much better for it. And stuff.

Still… not a great feeling. Feature creep: I thought it was all behind me.

And that’s a sort of creepy thought in itself.

 
 
Although I did set aside my CreateSpace Shop Manager plugin for WordPress for a week or so, I’m back at it now and I just can’t describe the savagery and carnage that are taking place in my editor.

It’s incredible.

I finished laying out the admin page for the plugin, and I patched a few leaky bits, and I stopped a few small explosions from happening; then I went back to the core task of reading the data from a CreateSpace eStore page, throwing away a lot of HTML that no (nominally) sane person would want, and flowing it into a WordPress page.

But after I’d gotten pretty deep into my new method for that I really had to go back to the beginning and think it through. I’d started out trying to build the category hierarchy from scratch as though it were all a separate program; and that, you see, was foolish of me.

Because the average WordPress user just wants to plug something in and have it behave like all the other content in the blog. Which is not unreasonable.

The upshot is that I threw out a whole lot of my earlier work and started over, using the same methods but in a new, WordPressy way that I think will be simpler and better. (It’s easy to design something complicated, after all: it’s quite difficult to design something simple.)

A lot of that work is done, but heads will continue to roll while I strip out a lot of admin settings that make no sense any more.

The whole thing has transformed from a system of custom pages into a normal set of WordPress posts, contained in normal WordPress categories, and it all makes a lot more sense now, I think.

But the cool and nifty thing is that I’ve also resolved a lot of issues with theme compatibility. At the left you can see the same bookshop page displayed in three different WordPress themes. Each page shows the same category listing with a short version of the books’ descriptions: the whole post, when you click through to it, is a complete listing for the book.

That’s the result of a bunch of stuff I did today, before and during and after the carnage I mentioned earlier. I’m pretty excited now about how it’s shaping up.

One thing I’d like to include in the demo site is a way for users to switch from one theme to another, like I’ve been doing, but the plugins that claim to do that for users are all twitchy, cranky, or downright broken in recent versions of WordPress. So it may not be possible to show off the plugin’s flexibility except in screenshots like these.

And the demo site will be a project in itself, of course. But sometime in the next few days I hope to have a testable version of the plugin and I’ll try to recruit some testers for it. With forums! And handwaving! And stuff!