meomeoim

Generally speaking, I never endorse deploying an application to a production environment unless it has been built from scratch in a clean environment. This means that building a portlet factory WAR from the eclipse IDE is not the way to do a production build, even though it is really convenient. Building with Ant Apache ant has been around for a long while now, is an excellent framework for building WAR files and is the tool that WPF uses to build its own WAR files. In older versions of WPF the build process was somewhat lacking, but the team at IBM has really done a great job with the latest release of the product (I think this improved build may have been available in 6.1.5, but we skipped over that and went straight to 7.0). Below is an example of how I've taken the sample build.xml provided with the product and modified it to pull code from CVS and allow for project specific settings. The build.properties is mostly unchanged: CVSTag=HEAD # Build source root directory !NOTE! T...

You may or may not have read the fun piece by Strawberry Saroyan in the New York Times Magazine today. (If you haven't, and you'd like to, here's a link: Amanda Hocking, Storyseller .) I thought it was a very nice piece, and Strawberry was super cool to hang out with and talk to. The interview was actually very serendipitous. An editor from the NY Times emailed me about doing a story on me sometime in February (after I posted the blog on the amazing William Fichtner , because he talked about Fichtner in the emails). Eventually, Strawberry called me, and we set up a time to meet. She just happened to pick March 24th, which just happened to be the day St. Martin's Press announced the book deal for the Watersong series. I had no idea those two events would occur on the same day, but they did. The one bad thing about it is that both events happened on Eric's birthday (March 24th), which made me feel really guilty because I pretty much hijacked his birthday, since the da...

My poor neglected blog. It's been over a week since I last posted. I don't know where my head's at. I guess I like to save up days so when I blog, I feel like I have a lot to talk about (even though I don't. Not really). First up on things I'm talking about today - my friend/fantastic author J. L. Bryan just posted a great blog and included some insanely cute pics of his brand new baby boy. Here's just one snapshot of the adorable Bryan Jr: Jeff also has these words to share with you all: Here's how you can help with the baby: 60-70% of each book I sell goes directly to providing for him.  This would be a great time to try Jenny Pox or any of my other books, conveniently available on your favorite e-reader platform (or Smashwords if you really want a good deal--you get all ebook formats, so that's handy if you decide to change e-readers in the future). He talks about more stuff in his blog , including some hints on the third book in the Jenny Pox seri...

I've been sitting on some mighty exciting news that I've been dying to share. Like literally dying. My internal organs were combusting with my attempts to keep this a secret. (Combusting organs is a new disorder that is so rare, I'm the only person that's ever had it). I'm going to be on a YA panel at Comic-Con in San Diego in July. The Comic-Con I have been pouting about being unable to attend and sulking over as I watch G4 the past several years. I will be there. On a panel. With lots of other super rad YA authors. Who are these other authors, you ask? Well, I'm glad you asked. Kiersten White , author of Paranormalcy and the upcoming Supernaturally Andrea Cremer , author of Nightshade and the upcoming Wolfsbane Stephanie Perkins , author of Anna and the French Kiss and the upcoming Lola and the Boy Next Door Laini Taylor , author of Lips Touch: Three Times and the upcoming Daughter of Smoke & Bone Tahereh Mafi , author of the upcoming Shatter Me The p...

Questions I get from people a lot are "Do you outline?" and "How do you outline?" I was trying to think of ways to show people, but I didn't know how to use books I published or planned to publish because I didn't want to give away spoilers in the outline. But I finally figured out a way to do it. I'm using an unfinished book I wrote called Reckless Abandon . It's not very good, and it's insanely long. I was a little over half-way through with it when I quit, and it was 114,000 words. (In comparison, Switched is just under 80,000 words). I also realized it was boring and nothing happened. I did quite enjoy the writing of it, though, and it was a good exercise. According to my notes, I started writing it back in 2008, before I wrote My Blood Approves or any of the Trylle Trilogy. I'm scanned my outline and the notes I made, and I'm going to show you the first couple pages of the book, too, so you get an idea of how translates. You'll ...

I'm reading old blogs from previous blog incarnations of mine (namely, myspace.) And I'm making myself laugh. As a result, I've decided to clip and paste some of my favorite parts. This is really best I had to say from 2009. There's some stuff about me writing books, too. Which is fun. "I do really hard things every day. I'm like a super hero. I know they're really hard things because nobody else can do them. For example, there was ketchup spilled on the counter, but it was so hard to get off, that people had to leave it there so it would dry and get hard and then I could clean it off at 11:30 at night. That's how hard it was. Good thing I'm such a super hero. Otherwise that ketchup might have been there until the end of time." *          *          * "Here's the thing: CGI is just like Keanu Reeves: it looks good, it's useful in moderation in action movies, but there's no substance. And puppetry i...