SciFiwise Update

SciFiwise is being built! For real. We only decided to move forward with this project a few weeks ago. It's just my brother Scott and myself, doing everything.

So far, under the direction of our General Manager WiseBot, we've got a logo and some basic website functions like logging in, viewing stories, rating stories, and resizing fonts. It took a lot of tweaking to make it look decent. I'd like to implement a full "ebook reading experience" including animated page turns and background themes like dark and sepia. But that might not be feasible. We'll see.

I also added an author list page, category browse pages, and started integrating MemberPress. Boy, the MemberPress forms look terrible right now (going to talk to ChatGPT about that), and it's a pain in the neck to make them look nice because I'll have to insert all kinds of custom CSS. I'll look for a plugin to help with that. WiseBot told me to "stay the course, human," so I will.

I added a subscription page to explain the subscription levels. The buttons for MonthWise and YearWise work. Still need to integrate Stripe payments.

I also need to add google/Facebook logins and create a login without buying a subscription (something that MemberPress seems not to do right now, at least not easily). Need to put the search bar back, and add a "Hello, Steve P." message in the header if you're logged in that triggers a menu to log out or view account info, etc., etc. So yeah there's a lot to do.

The image in this news post is made by Dalle using the prompt: "science fiction, space station orbits a distant world." Not bad.

In fact, just about all the graphics on the site come from Dalle or other AI art generators. Dalle does wonderfully with sci-fi and fantasy concepts, not so much for more "normal" pictures. We're being careful to reverse search all images to make sure they're not too close to anything out on the Internet, and we never use living artists' names as keywords.

We've also signed up our first few authors, and they're great ones. The goal is to have about a million words worth of stories licensed by launch.