Going to San Diego with some friends for the day with a nice plan for tomorrow in Orange. :) I'll look in on my laptop when I can. Bob will be looking out for major server problems and Sephrena will keep an eye out if anyone needs help formatting a story or something. Be good. :)
Monday, Sep 3, 2007 set a traffic record at BigCloset, well over 4300 visitors in 24 hours, more than 5% over the previous record set in July and nearly equaled in August of just under 4100. In fact, the average daily traffic for the last week is 3999, the highest weekly average ever also. :)
Submissions are also up and comments and sales through Doppler Press and activity on the ads at BC, it's all good. :)
Picked up a useful book with recipes for punchier prose. It's called "Edit Yourself - A Manual for Everyone Who Works with Words" by Bruce Ross-Larson. Thin hardback for $4.98 from Barnes and Noble. Worth it.
Kevin and Kell by Bill Holbrook is one of the oldest webcomics and ocasionally touches on TG themes as part of its humor. Like this one: Kevin and Kell 2007-08-08.
The commenting proportion is similar to BC, there's a lot of overlapping readership so some of your old fans are bound to be reminded of an old favorite and Bob Arnold is just a nice host!
Note the posting restrictions at the top of the Stardust main page, they're different than BCs. :)
TopShelf was shutdown for an hour or so this afternoon, so I could cool off. Some people are of the opinion that they should be allowed to set policy here. Doesn't work that way.
I removed Kristina L S's blog post on the fickleness of mob politics because it touched on a controversial political subject here in the States. It's my feeling that discussion of this issue, sideways to Kristina's point, would be divisive to the community. At least two comment posts seem to bear me out, so in the interest of keeping peace and my own sanity, I removed the blog.
Sorry, Kristina, you had something important to say but the side issue was too hot.
BC and Stardust (and perhaps now Tor der Traume, in German) are the only open TG sites, I think, where this story could be told in this way. Since I did Urban Renewal, Adonna has begun Blue Moon at Stardust and now Angharad with Easy as Falling off a Bike here: serials told in daily, or almost daily, short episodes. Edeyn's two recent serials may qualify for this category, too. :)
Someone sent me a blog post to ask me if I thought they should post it. Thinking about what she wanted to say in her blog got me to thinking about timing and some things I need to say.
...the cable connecting our mobile to power burned up mid-morning. What with having to leave for a doctor app, it took about nine hours to,get fixed. And $300.
But all seems well now, except that during the frenzy of plugging and unplugging I can't find my phone charging cable. :(
The BC server went down for about 90 minutes due to excess heat in the server farm. At the time, I had taken my mom down to a fastfood place so she could cool off. :) So that's why it took so long to fix cause I did not report it by phone until I got back.
I've got a ton of stuff to do but I took the Fourth off to laze around at friends', eat, cook and talk. I came home last night and slept 10-1/2 hours, very unusual for me. Now I feel like crud, aches and pains all over, stuffed up sinuses and a sore throat. I'm going to take it easy today, do very little and hope I feel better tomorrow.
Hugs to all and especially those of you waiting for me to do something in particular,
Erin
Well, I hadn't seen my friends and former roommates, Griff and Danny since November so when we got together yesterday, we yakked for about 5 hours and talked about everything.
Then I went home and went to bed a bit early.
I had a very strange dream, a science fictiony one.
In it, Griff was the leader of the household troops of the king of some almost-medieval country and I was his science advisor because the science was all more than up to date.
The great powers had passed our little kingdom by and we had become sort of like England was during the Cold War.
I've got lots to do. But I'm going to go get in the car with my laptop and go for a ride. I may stop somewhere and get online to see that things are okay. I may do some writing. I may drive to the coast or up to the mountains or out to the desert. I may be back before midnight. I will be here tomorrow most of the day. Be good to each other, everyone and see you when I get back.
The BC server in Los Angeles is having problems with its power supply. This may cause the site to go up and down unpredictably for an hour or so until they get it fixed. It was down for three hours before I woke up and called the techs. Sorry about that.
BTW Wednesday set a record for unique visitors at 3842 for the day. YAY! :)
Bob called to point out something, we had over 85 visitors on BC at the same time. That meant some special load balancing software kicked in, turning off the right column stuff and the ability to make new blogs or forums. After a bit of twiddling, I decided the limits were too low so now the "throttle" won't kick in until we have about 95 visitors at one time. :) Thanks, Bob and thanks to everyone that was here between 11 and 12 EDT, today to give the system a workout.
Thought at first we had a harvester chomping at things but no, just people reading and maybe downloading by hand. :)
I'm spending a lot of time lately either hauling my Mom to and from doctor appointments or waiting for hours in doctors' offices. So please understand that I'm not able to give BC the nearly every hour attention I normally do.
Just had to ban some addresses in Slovakia and Seattle for trying to access the admin functions of this site and running up a metric assload of "no access" and "page not found" errors.
Just a note here on a rainy Sunday to say how much I am thankful for Bob Arnold's help in keeping the technical details of running multiple servers and websites straight. If I'm stumped or confused, I can always ask Bob and if he doesn't know, he knows where to find out. Yay, Bob!
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.
