For those who are subscribing to the RSS feeds for this site, entries now link to the individual articles, rather than the main page.
Geek Alert
When Final Draft won’t open under OS X
I’m posting this in hopes of saving other screenwriters a few hours of potential frustration with Final Draft. After installing the OS X version, or upgrading your system software, or sometimes for no discernible reason at all, Final Draft will occasionally refuse to open. It bounces one or twice in the dock, then quits. Sometimes it gives you a message; other times it doesn’t.
Obviously, you can go through the help forums at Final Draft to look for an answer, but if you’re using the OS X version for Mac, first check for one specific thing: a corrupted font file.
In the “Fonts” folder of your account’s “Library” folder (that is, John/Library/Fonts, rather than the main system-wide Library) look for the file “Courier Final Draft.” (Confused? Click the thumbnail to show you where to find this file.)
Drag the “Courier Final Draft” file to the trash. Log out, then log back in. Try to launch Final Draft. If it works, problem solved. Go to the website to download a non-corrupted version of Courier Final Draft, and put it in the main library’s fonts folder.
If that doesn’t work, make sure you’ve updated to the most recent version of Final Draft, then start digging through the support forums.
Archives and individual entry pages rebuilt
Given Dreamweaver and a couple of free days, pretty much anyone can put up a website. The more difficult thing, I’ve realized, is keeping it updated. To that end, I’ve been using Movable Type, the remarkable blogging software sent down from Heaven. With Movable Type, it’s easy for me to add short articles like this, or new Question-and-Answers.
The problem is that Movable Type works fundamentally differently from the rest of the site. It insists — quite reasonably — on storing articles in places where it can find them. When Google’s indexing-spiders visits the site, they store these locations rather than ones I might prefer. So a person searching for “Big Fish script” gets taken to an ugly article entry that in no way resembles the rest of the site.
No longer. Over the weekend, I updated the templates so that you get the standard navigation bar throughout the site. Hopefully, everything feels consistent, although on deeper level, there’s still two different systems at work. You’ll notice that new Q&A’s have comments; old ones don’t. Archives should show properly. Also, articles now list their permalinks. This is the address you should use if you want to link from another site.
Please leave a comment if you find broken links, or things that don’t work as expected.
New RSS Feed
This site now has an RSS feed, located here. If you click on the link, you’ll see that it comes up as badly formatted text. That’s because it’s designed to be used by something other than a standard web browser. Depending on your level of jadedness, RSS is either a brilliant new solution for content management or a hacky kludge using outdated technology. Either way, here’s what it does.
Every time a new item is added to the front page of johnaugust.com, a tiny file called index.xml is updated with a headline and summary of the information. This file is called a “feed.” Other sites and programs (called aggregators) can read and process this feed, allowing a user to keep track of dozens or hundreds of sites without having to visit each one every day. Since the user only needs to click through to the stories that interest him, it saves a lot of wasted time and bandwidth.
I use NetNewsWire for Mac OS X, but there are dozens of programs for every kind of computer. If you use MyYahoo, you can even add feeds to your home page. For more information about using RSS, including programs, look here.