Scott Matthewman » About this blog

New page: theatre reviews

Scott Matthewman — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 09:03:51 +0000

If you visit this blog, rather than just read the RSS feed, you’ll see a new link at the very top of the page to a list of all the theatre reviews I’ve so far written for The Stage.

…and you’re back in the room

Scott Matthewman — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:53:43 +0000

Apologies for this site being offline for the last few days. My hosting provider, the otherwise excellent Site5, has been migrating clients over and somehow things got a little screwy in the move.

It wasn’t helped by Site5’s initial email, notifying me that my account was being migrated, promising to follow up with additional emails once the migration was complete. Those emails never arrived — and judging by the support forum set up to cover migration issues, that’s something that a number of clients have experienced.

Most of the time I have zero issues with Site5’s service, which is why the failures in transition have been so disappointing. Still, it’s done now, so fingers crossed normal service can be resumed from hereon in.

A 100-word biography

Scott Matthewman — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 21:42:58 +0000

As I mention on my About page, I’ve recently been lucky enough to have received a commission for my first professional piece of fiction — a short story for an anthology based around a certain TV show.

The story itself has been approved, is currently being typeset and the (small but historic) cheque has long since been cashed. The book itself will be out in a few months, but today, my editor emailed me asking for a 100 word biography for the frontispiece.

Initially, I couldn’t really think of what to include. My name, of course. Great. Only 98 words to go. Beyond that, though, what? It’s not like I can do what many other writers do, and wax lyrical about their wife, three kids (mention them all by name, it all adds to the word count) and sounds-palatial-but-I’m-a-writer-so-it’s-rather-more-squalid-than-that house somewhere in the Home Counties. And as this will be my first fiction work, I can’t list any previous achievements in that field.

So I figured the best thing to do is to concentrate on what writing achievements I have made (establish my credentials), make a passing reference to the subject matter at hand (signifying that I do, in fact, know what I’m talking about) and end on a joke (so that it’s not completely dull).

So this is what I came up with:

Scott Matthewman is Assistant Editor of The Stage, the British newspaper covering all aspects of the performing arts. In 2004, his website covering gay issues was named Best Political Weblog by The Guardian, and he now contributes on a regular basis to TV Today, The Stage’s blog about British television. He specialises in coverage of Saturday night entertainment, even when it doesn’t involve a time-travelling police box — although he remains convinced that musical theatre reality shows are part of a devious plan for world domination by aliens with jazz hands.

Tell Me You Love Me is Scott’s first published fiction.

Fingers crossed that’ll do.

Mint statistics and a ’406 Not Acceptable’ error

Scott Matthewman — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 22:00:45 +0000

This blog is hosted on a Site5 server, and earlier today suffered a major outage when the shared host it sits on had a severe hardware problem.

Thankfully, that problem was rectified with the technical team’s usual good speed. Everybody’s home directories had to be restored from an earlier backup, but this blog is so low usage these days that it wasn’t really affected.

The only that troubled me was that, as soon as it was back online, my Mint installation, which collates web statistics locally, was failing to register any page impressions. I also have web bugs installed for Sitemeter and Google Analytics — yes, three is overkill for a small blog, but it helps me field test changes on a site that doesn’t matter before I do anything too meddlesome on commercial sites that do — but those were still picking up page impressions.

Safari’s useful (but often ignored) Activity window showed that Mint’s web bug was returning a response of ‘unacceptable’ — double-clicking the request’s line in the Activity window passed me through to a standard window showing that the full response was a 406 Not Acceptable error.

A quick google, and I found this thread on the Mint forums, which provided the solution of adding the following lines to the Mint directory’s .htaccess file:


 SecFilterEngine Off
 SecFilterScanPOST Off

which did the trick.

I’m not sure why I need that fix now, when before the failure I didn’t, but I’m at least relieved I found it. And I’m mainly blogging here to increase the chances of anybody suffering the same fate easily finding the same fix.

Adding back some golden oldies

Scott Matthewman — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 18:15:37 +0000

So since I relaunched the site, I’ve been monitoring which pages have been triggering the most 404 Page Not Found errors, and have ported a selection across to the new site. I definitely prefer doing it this way, even though it’s more labour intensive: I’m ending up with a clean blog with much less cruft.

Unfortunately, as part of the whole cleanup operation I’ve scrapped my original Feedburner feed, which was sharing an account with various feeds I’d set up for The Stage. So it means I’m effectively going to be building up a regular audience from scratch, which I suppose is no bad thing in its own way.

Anyway, to celebrate this blog being back on its own two feet, I’ve published Requiem for a Songbird, a Doctor Who short story I wrote for Big Finish’s open submissions competition a couple of months ago. A previous draft of the story has previously appeared on this blog as The Nightingale’s Song, but this pass took on a number of notes I’d received from various authors in the intervening years. I hope you like it.

Starting from scratch…

Scott Matthewman — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 17:44:33 +0000

Apologies that this blog has been so quiet of late. Most of my spare time has been taken up with either TV Today, or research for the same (yes, yes, that means watching TV). Also, I was recently commissioned for my first piece of professionally published fiction. It’s only a short story, but it’s taken a lot of my time and that isn’t over yet. I had my first set of notes from my editor today, so I have another weekend of rewriting to look forward to. More on that project anon. In the meantime, I do still have all of my old posts, but to be honest most of them are either out of date or were never read by anyone else anyway, so there isn’t much to be lost by trashing all the old links and starting from scratch…