Sorry for the delay.  A deadline at my day job pretty much sucked everything I had leaving no desire to be on the computer.  And then the weekend before last I was just too burned out to work on things.  So this last weekend I worked hard to get through the system and … finally … you have it.
I think it looks much better.  Hopefully it was worth the wait.

The new design is finished as I mentioned last time.  Currently I’m through about half the pages.  I had planned on working more on the weekend but a combination of computer-burn-out and other activities worked together to keep me away from the computer.

If I convert a couple pages each evening, then the new design should be 100% and I can go live with it by next week this time.

Unfortunately, I’m under deadline at work and won’t have much free time until February 15th.  I’ll try to get the new pages up before then though.

Also, there are some very cool features coming.   But don’t expect anything new (besides the upcoming new site design) until mid-to-late February.

I use the GNU “style” command to come up with the readability statistics.  I spent several hours writing my own parsers in PHP, but the stats didn’t come out exactly the same as the style command.  This led me to check some text on several different readability utilities on the net.  My thought was at least some of the stats would be the same.  Like the Flesch Reading Ease or the SMOG Index.  I discovered something interesting … nothing matched up exactly.

One reason is hyphenated words.  Sometimes hyphenated words are treated as one longer, multisyllable (and therefore complex) word, and sometimes as multiple words.  So if the word counts and syllable counts don’t match, then nothing else is going to match because of this.

Another reason for word count discrepancies could be ellipses.  How are ellipses treated by the parser?  Does it actually determine the difference between omission ellipses, beginning ellipses and ending ellipses.

There’s bound to be another dozen reasons why the figures weren’t exact matches.

Generally the number of sentences matched up.   And that’s about it.

I believe these statistic generators can be pretty useful.  But comparisons between different implementations of the same algorithms sometimes varies much more than one would expect.

I looks, well, okay.  Just okay, not great.  I think it looks better than just using a generic theme, but site design isn’t really my forte.  Maybe in a few months I’ll hire somebody to redesign the StoryToolz site.  Until then I’ll live with the current look and feel.

One thing I don’t like though, if somebody signs up with WordPress for the blog portion of the site, the person signing up may think they have a StoryToolz account, but they don’t.  Or, another variation of the problem, someone may sign up for one thing (blog or StoryToolz membership) and then try logging on in the other.   Hmmm, not sure what to do there.  I’ll have to think about it.

I’ll integrate it a bit more tightly into the StoryToolz site tomorrow. But now that I have the blogging portion working then I’ll be able to explain better what’s going on. Plus it gives people a place to comment if they so wish.

And … I can write lengthier notes instead of my little, one-sentence blurbs I’ve used up to this point.

After a long, mostly sleep-deprived weekend, StoryToolz is live. Everything should work. Signup and have fun!