First of all, Merry Christmas to all who want to celebrate that holiday and Happy Holidays to those celebrating some other day and Seasons Greetings to everyone else!
I set the donations goal for November at only $1000 so we could start December at $0 instead of continuing to be a whole month off. November also completed our 14th year of running BigCloset!
Weather in the Denver area interrupted power and connectivity to the server farm. They worked on the problem for quite a while then it took even longer to get all the servers rebooted. Looks like we are back online. :)
I'm feeling better now but I woke up at 330 AM last night with diarrhea and vomiting that lasted till a bit after noon. I kept drinking things like lemonade and Seven-Up and hot tea and water, to keep my fluids up even tho a lot of time they just came back up. At noon when I thought I could keep it down, I took an anti-diarrheal pill.
Contributions to the Hatbox continue to be what keeps Piper and I able to keep this website and a dozen others used by the TG community active and running.
Angela Rasch's "Voices Carry Over Water" is now available to contributors to the Hatbox and we will soon have the revised version of "To Alleviate Suffering" there, too. Thanks very much, Angela. :)
Okay, Christmas is just around the corner, and I am still designing the official Contest page. My medical condition has worsened and money is very tight. I am currently offering $400 in prizes as of the moment. It may increase depending on what I can do between now and the end of submissions.
We're going to try a new capability here after a recent request. Now you can subscribe to your favorite authors to be notified when they post new stories. :) At least, we hope this works. Consider it to be in test mode right now.
Back from the con, I had a great time. I'm working in the bookstore today and have a writer's group meeting tonight but I will be on and off. And Piper and Amy had their baby!
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.
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.)
I'm going to use this as a place to discuss search, how to use it and what people want to use it for.
A few things:
When you use multiple words in a search, the default is to perform an OR search. Searching for curly perm will turn up both curly and perm and will list first results that have both terms.
Searches are case insensitive. Perm, perm and PERM are all the same.
Searches are made for roots, so perm, perms, permed and perming are all the same. But permanent is a different word.
A plus symbol in front of a word in a search means that word is required so curly +perm will return only results that have some form of perm in them and will prefer ones that have curly, also. +curly +perm results must have both words though not necessarily next to each other.
A minus sign means do not include the following word in results so perm -curly would return results that matched perm but would not include ones that also had curly.
Quotes around a phrase will search for an exact match, but will still ignore case. "curly perm" will match Curly perm and lots of variations but both words in that order must be present.
Comments are regarded by search as part of the post.
The sidebars allow you to restrict searches to posts that match various criteria, like type of post, audience rating or authorship. At the top right is a sidebar that allows you to control how the search indexer orders results.
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.
Just an FYI, that the new search server has been configured, and seems to be working fine. We are doing preliminary testing, and working on indexing the site.
What happened to the Search box on the banner/masthead of the home page? Ever since switching over to the new server for BCTS, after the server crash last month, the Search Box on the upper right-hand side of the banner/masthead of the home page has been missing. At first I had thought that it might have been relocated else where, but after spending several days looking, it seems that it has gone AOL. I miss being able to do a quick and simple word, phrase or title search. It was a search tool that I used often and hope that this convenient search tool will be restored soon.
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.
I was having difficulty yesterday in accessing an older story with many chapters, so took my older computer and connected it and using AOL Version 1 instead of 9.6 that is in my newer computer, was able not only to access Authors, select the Author, and open and read all the chapters, in "Rules...." by Kaleigh Way, and even the page headings were in full colour like BCTS was until the Problems began.
Perhaps if others simply returned to earlier versions of their internet service providers' programmes, they too could find access easier ?
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.
For those that saw it, sorry about the cache glitch. We are constantly trying to tune, and improve performance of the site, and sometimes we break things as we go.... In this case, the cache layer, decided to break something.
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.
We couldn't wait any longer so today I ordered drives and memory to upgrade our three servers that do most of the work of running BigCloset and other sites so important to our community.
We use the terms Spider, Crawler, and Reaper pretty much interchangeably here.
You see, they ALL cause traffic.
While Robots/Spiders/Crawlers/Reapers are about 1/3 of our traffic on BigCloset, most of that is VALID traffic.
Sites like Google, Bing, Baidu and other search engines, LOVE to index our site. Because we have a lot of inbound and outbound links.
While we have had spammers, and nasty bots crawling the site, and poking around (we ban them fast), we have not been the center of a targeted attack in recent months.
The sidebar with the kitty has been updated for April, we've already raised $690 dollars for this month's goal. And, we have a new story in the Hatbox Premium directory, Angela Rasch donated a story called "Alleviate Suffering." Here's the blurb:
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.
