I'm off to the San Diego Comic Con! I'll have my laptop and phone along so I won't be out of touch but things won't get looked at ten or twelve times a day, more like just two or three. :) Have fun and if you're there, I can often be found hanging around Scott Shaw!s table or in one of Mark Evanier's panel shows.
Here's a thought we've been kicking around behind the scenes amongst the site managers. Our very own webhosting and publishing company organized as a non-profit corporation (NPC).
There are advantages.
Many of the sites could be hosted for less than people are paying now with possible improvements in service. Publishing contracts for books could be written that did not depend on just goodwill between author and publisher. Donations to an NPC can be tax deductible. An NPC can own things that will survive the death or disappearance of actual human beings.
Bob Arnold died and his family evidently turned the servers off. Some of the sites above were hosted on his machines and some just had their DNS (net pointer system) hosted there.
The DNS problems will be sorted in a day or so, the site outages will probably take a bit longer.
See other blogs and announcements here for news and to read about Bob Arnold and what he did for the community.
Earlier this morning we passed 15,000 stories/chapters on site and are currently adding new story postings at a rate of 90 to 150 a week. This is 2 to 5 times as fast, on average, as the next most active TG fiction website, Fictionmania, which has more than 18,000 tales/chapters in its archive. We ARE catching up. :)
Thanks to all the authors and editors who contribute their efforts and thanks to all the commenters and readers who encourage the authors.
An incident happened this morning. Those involved know what happened. I got angry and shut the site down to cool off so that I did not say things I would regret or ban anyone.
The rule here is friendly. If the comment, blog or forum post you want to make is not friendly ... don't make it. Next time, I think I will have to ban a few people. I don't want to do that so please don't test me on it.
Haven't been on most of the day due to minor computer problems. My Time Machine backup disk turned flakey on me so I had to go to town, buy a new one and, bring it home and reformat it for MacOS and install. Not really a big deal, but I got a decent drive instead of a cheapie and that took some research.
I've had something so good the last few mornings that I had to share it. I call it an Egg McMelton. :)
For each sandwich:
Chopped onion, about one thick slice chopped
Another slice of raw onion, red is really good
Two slices of crisp bacon, or not so crisp if you prefer
Some lettuce, iceberg is fine, leaf lettuce is good, or spinach
A slice of tomato, optional because I seldom have tomato in the house
An egg, the star of the sandwich
The devastation in northern Alabama seems to have affected our member Stanman who has not been onsite since early Thursday morning. Let us hope that it is just disruption of internet or electricity and that Stan is okay. There may be other BC members who are having connectivity problems in this extreme weather, remember them also.
A certain amount of unfriendliness will be tolerated here. I just remove unfriendly posts and issue occasional warnings and explanations. But willfully pursuing another poster here with an obvious intent to cause harm will not be tolerated. Two people tonight went over the line and their accounts have been suspended. These same two have done this before and undoubtedly, if I were to reinstate their accounts, would do so again.
Yes, I do. Maybe that's why BC is home to so many of them and such good ones. Who doesn't want their daily or weekly dose of their favorite serial? Well...
A peculiar noise woke me this morning -- the sound of snow sliding off the carport roof. We had about two inches of snow last night. It's bright and sunny now and well above freezing so the fluffy white stuff is not going to last till noon but I'm sure the people in the ski resorts on the mountains would rather have it up there than down here. :)
We had a great time at the picnic on Saturday and Beth and I had an adventure in San Francisco Sunday complete with phantom elevators and aggressive potholes, I'm sure it will all end up in a story by one or the other of us. :)
Thanks again to everyone who showed up and made Saturday such a lovely day. And thanks to Beth for the good company on the trip.
And thanks to Piper and Bob and everyone else who kept watch on the site while I was gone. Piper had to do a bit of rescue Sunday night while Beth and I were out with my brother and his wife for dinner. Thanks!
We had a great time at the BC picnic yesterday! We stayed so late, we had to take down the tents in the dark. LOL.
I'll let someone else who's better with names list who all made it, I'm afraid my memory would fail me and I would leave someone out.
It was great to see some old friends and meet a few more new ones in person. I think we talked about everything from document hassles to where to put the period at the end of a quotation. :)
I don't know when we can have another of these but we can probably talk about it in chat.
There's a situation that has developed with a publisher of TG fiction. This person is a member of the community and at last report is attempting to straighten things out and make things right with the affected authors. I don't think much else needs to be said here at the moment.
The comment section attached to a story is no place for long running arguments. Especially arguments that have been going on for years and have very little to do with the story they are attached to. Thanks.
Well, it's becoming more and more obvious that we need to upgrade to Drupal 6. We've got several Drupal 6 sites now running, Stardust is on 6. So, it's time to upgrade TopShelf.
We're going to do a dummy version first, probably this week and then later, in a week or a month when we're convinced it's going to work, take BCTS down while we do the conversion on live data.
See you there, we're going to talk about how to narrow the field of selections for the book, even though we are still accepting nominations. Also discussed will be naming some "captains" for the editing, that is people besides me to take problems to. :) Probably other subjects will come up.
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.
