Sunday, August 29, 2010

NYCPlaywrights - 10th year



I can hardly believe it, NYCPlaywrights, a group I founded with my ex-boyfriend will be ten years old this November. Time flies.

We started out with five people, including my ex and I, in a room rented from the National Shakespeare Company. Membership was free and in the first year we cut a meeting short once due to not enough plays being brought in for readings. But we never canceled a meeting in 10 years except for once, on September 12, 2001.

Well now there are 78 members including 25 paying members (writer members pay, actors don't) and now the biggest problem is too much work for the time available.

This is especially a problem with bad writers. Bad writers tend to be more prolific than good writers, because bad writers have no sense of whether something is bad, and so they assume everything they write is good. So they don't bother wasting time editing and re-writing, which leads to a great quantity of output.

Also, many of NYCPlaywrights' worst writers are old retired men who have nothing else to do but devote hours to their playwriting hobby. They tend to reserve the maximum number of minutes per meeting, for as many meetings as they can until I stop them, in order to force innocent people to listen to their works of incompetence, chock full of backwards attitudes about gender and race. Argh.

Anyway, so I spent the past month rebuilding the NYCPlaywrights web site after a Russian hacker attack. It was my own fault, I left the video tables open to SQL injection. I won't make that mistake again.

The earliest incarnation of the NYCPlaywrights web site back in 2001 (and which can be seen via the Wayback Machine) was a relatively simple affair, technologically. There was the javascript-driven quotes and there was the blog insert, but that's it. I still use HTML, javascript and Blogger, but now I also use CSS, PHP and a SQL database, not to mention Youtube embedded videos and the Google Adsense monetization campaign. Plus there's a whole members-only section that is interactive and database-driven.

That's some damn time-consuming work there.

Plans are brewing for a wine and cheese party for the November 2 meeting for the third hour. Whoohoo!