I'm going to spend three days in San Diego, hobnobbing with some of my friends in the comics industry at a small con out in Mission Valley called ComicFest. I'll have WiFi, laptop, phone and tablet so I should be able to get online frequently and check in. Have a swell time. :)
We just payed our $1572 hosting bill and will have another smaller one next month (or maybe it is in November). Anyway, these things go on my credit cards and then I pay down the balance with the money that comes in from the Hatbox gifts. We made our goal for August over the weekend and now need to think about September.
Anything you can send will be good and if you can't do anymore than hit the kudos button on your favorite story, we all understand.
We're halfway through September and have half of our goal received for August. All gifts are appreciated and the money is being spent to either pay our ongoing hosting related bills, pay down debts accrued in keeping the site running for the last 14 years or pay Piper enough that she can forego other paying jobs to keep BC and related sites functioning. Some goes into the Server Fund intended to upgrade our hardware next year and what little is left over I probably spend on comic books and In-N-Out burgers. :) I also share donations received with other TS/TG sites and causes.
It's the middle of August and we still aren't halfway to our goal for July. There've been a lot of unexpected medical expenses and while the hardware fund has collected some money, that last $500 was from me.
I want everyone to know how much we appreciate your gifts, we couldn't do this without help. Piper's work on the servers has made BC stable and reasonably fast. If you appreciate that work and can afford to, a few dollars would be a great help.
Disrespecting anyone's profession of belief in a comment, blog or forum post is not allowed on BC. Please don't attempt to embarrass someone with public comments here. But is this a friendly place for atheists? I try to make it so.
You can announce your beliefs without dissing other people's in public. I remove comments and blogs where someone calls out their version of religion as being the only true one. You can announce what you believe or don't believe but no proselytizing. And trying to ridicule other people's beliefs is definitely against Rule One.
We made our goal and thanks to everyone who contributed. I have a couple of checks here still to deposit that didn't get done because last week I was sick and the week before I was on vacation.
This is a new extension to the friendly rule; titles and teasers that appear on the front page should be work safe and if there are non-work friendly images past the teaser, that should have a caution attached.
This means some of my own teasers would not have passed this test but I think we need to add this caveat. It applies to stories, blogs, links, and even comment subject lines. I will take what steps I think necessary to implement this, usually just modifying the teaser, tags or title slightly.
This is about my 20th time, I attended the third one way back in 72 and I've gone to almost half of them since then. I have a few friends in the industry and know even more people just to say hi to. I always get enthused about my comics work when I'm here. :)
Having been a small publisher back in the first days of indie comics (we called them street-level comics), I get a professional badge and get to hang out with the pros and drink free coffee in the pro lounge. So cool!
We got in a big check for the server fund in June but other donations for the Hatbox are very behind. The way this is going to work is that when we make the goal for the month, I will donate $500 to the server fund from the Hatbox. Also, donations that come in marked for Server Fund will go there.
So, anything you can chip in will be good. We will probably be using the server fund around October/November to upgrade at least one of the servers to a 3 to 5 year life machine. The other machines may have to wait till next year.
Not to put too fine a point on it but there's less than four days to go in the month and we are still short about $700 of our goal. (There's known money in the mail.)
Really, we're still testing it. So for now, using the search box will be limited to logged in members. If all goes well, we'll go back to allowing anonymous visitors to use it also and members can use some advanced features.
Category browser in the right column is available also and Google can be used to search the site using Site:BigClosetr.us in the search bar with your question on Google.
If you tweet or follow twitter, you can find BC news at the @spfn Twitter feed run by Piper. Besides tweeting links to posts and blogs on StoryPortal, it also tweets story posts from BC, automagically several times a day.
Due to a change in our security settings, it may be necessary to logoff and log back on in order to reset your session info so you don't get blocked from posting comments.
We hope you have noticed that things are slowly getting better as we tune the server for better performance but sometimes we blow a sour note like this morning. And the server is still a bit flakey which we are still working on figuring that out.
But we have ordered the new drives, they should be in tomorrow and so it's likely that later this week the site will be down for as much as a whole day while we install the new drives and then move the software over. And then there will be another round of tuning things to get optimum performance.
I think we may have lost a story in the database meltdown last night. We had made a backup of what was going on at one point yesterday and it seems to me that at least one story got posted after that backup which is what we just restored from. Please, I hope everyone is keeping copies of their stories before posting them and if your story posted and disappeared, you can just repost. I hope.
Many, many thanks to Piper for about 14 hours of hard work! We are up and running on a different server. Now all we have to do is acquire a new server to replace poor Magda and go through this again! No, wait...
The site was down for a few hours today while Piper and I fought off some reaper bots. We firewalled their ISPs, all of which were in China, and while we were at it, we firewalled out some spammers, too. Took about four hours of solid work.
The rumors of BCs demise were greatly exaggerated. :)
The site was up and down frequently today, the problem finally turned out to be a badly behaving server on the same subnet with us at the server farm, not one of our servers. Sheesh!
Checks can be made out & sent to:
Joyce Melton
1001 Third St.
Space 80
Calimesa, CA 92320
USA
Note: $6000 is the operating, maintenance and upgrade budget. Amounts received in excess of the $6000 will be applied to long term debt accrued over the last 19 years.
