Creativity Resources

Update: The error appears to be fixed now. The Alvador Project website appears to be working as expected.

I’ve been out of town for the weekend, and I just discovered that the Alvador website is having problems. Unfortunately I’m not in position to do anything about it at this time, but when I get home late afternoon/early evening I’ll try to get it taken care of. Please be patient. Thanks!

The Alvador Project site seems to be having a problem right now, but the problem does not appear to be with the site itself. When I registered the site through GoDaddy, I changed the primary DNS servers from GoDaddy’s servers to the servers at my host (www.hostmysite.com), but I made the mistake of leaving GoDaddy’s servers on the list (albeit farther down). Apparently, some kind of hiccup occurred because suddenly today when I put in my domain’s URL, I get the GoDaddy parking page instead of my site. I don’t know if all three of HostMySite’s DNS servers were offline at the same time or what the problem is.

The point of all of this is to tell you if you go to the site and all you see is the GoDaddy parking page, the problem is a DNS caching problem that will hopefully be fixed shortly.

Thanks for your patience.

When Creativity Resources was founded, the purpose of the company was to help creative people be creative. With that in mind, we are happy to launch our first official web property: The Alvador Project.

The Alvador Project is a shared universe for fantasy writers. While Creativity Resources owns the website and all of the software that runs it (except as noted), the setting of Alvador is owned by the Alvador Project community, which means that the community can make any changes they want to the setting. There are, of course, some guidelines to be followed (mostly they break down to “be polite”).

The site features forums for discussing the setting and the stories, a wiki with information about the people, places, and history of the continent of Alvador.

If you are interested in contributing to the setting, or just in reading (and rating) the stories submitted by others, we welcome you to visit The Alvador Project.

I’ve been pretty quiet lately, both in this news area and on all of my blogs. The reason is because I’ve been writing software like a madman (including the cackling laughter and wild eyes).

The software I’ve been working on has mostly been a reusable framework for a number of websites I want to develop, along with integrating that framework in to the first of the websites. The framework contains common data access and business rules elements, along with some new custom web controls that will be usable across all of the websites. The custom controls I’ve created so far are controls for authorizations (logging into the websites), forums (a category list, a thread list, viewing the messages in a thread, and posting new threads or replies to threads), and advertising (Creativity Resources is, after all, a commercial venture, in spite of the distinct lack of income over the past two years).

The good news is that I’ve made tremendous progress in the past two weeks, and for the first site (more details later) I am now working on steps three and four of my ten-step plan. Hopefully I’ll be able to announce the launch of the first of Creativity Resource’s web properties in a few months!

Stay tuned here for more details as the launch date comes closer.

UPDATE: All of the disruptions should be in the past now. Thanks for your patience.

I’ll be transfering the site to a new Domain Name Registrar (www.GoDaddy.com ) because Register.com is too expensive and GoDaddy provides the same services for considerably less money. For the price of a one year registration at Register.com (or Network Solutions, for that matter), I can get four years at GoDaddy.

What this means to you is that there may be some slight disruptions in site services over the next couple of days as a result of the transfer and DNS updating. If the site is unavailable during that time, please check back in a few hours or a few days.

Thanks for your patience.

Arthur C. Clarke once said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (also known as Clarke’s Third Law). A lot of technology in the modern era would pass as magic to someone from even several decades ago, let alone centuries.

Take wireless phones, for instance. The ability to communicate with someone else—to hear their voice, see their pictures and videos, and read their e-mail messages—when you are on opposite sides of the planet would seem truly mystical to people not inured in our modern culture.

With that in mind, thanks to the magic of modern technology, Creativity Resources is happy to announce the launch of Sufficiently Advanced Wireless, a new wireless phone company. The marvels of modern technology have allowed Creativity Resources to partner with Sonopia and Verizon to offer wireless service to the world at a reasonable rate. All calls travel across Verizon’s network, which I have personally found to be the most reliable network around.

Right now, we are offering a Motorola RAZR phone (a $299 value) for only $49.95 with the purchase of a two-year service agreement. In addition, we are offering an exceptional plan for only $39.95/month that includes:

• 450 anytime minutes
• Free nights and weekends
• unlimited domestic long-distance calling (airtime applies)
• No charge for domestic roaming (coverage not available in all areas)
• Voice Mail (airtime charges apply when leaving/retrieving message and for setup)
• Call Forward
• Caller ID
• 3-Way Calling
• Call Waiting (airtime charges apply for each call)
• Includes SMS, MMS and Data services. Web SMS is available at no extra charge when sent to other Sonopians or within the network
• Free 911 calls

Other service plans are available with more minutes, including individual plans and family plans. Check out our plans today!

The first test version of the new Gemini re-write went to Pat last night. The basic functionality is there, and so is a workable (but not very good) interface. There are some functionality tweaks that I still need to do, and we’ll tweak the interface quite a bit, but we’ll hopefully have it to our limited set of alpha testers within the next couple of weeks.