Just wanted to point out that if you were a member of the City of Roses Facebook group, it’d be easier to find certain special surprises and treats, is all.

Copy this sentence into your LiveJournal if you're in a non-same-sex marriage, and you don't want it "protected" by the bigots who think that gay marriage hurts it somehow.

• Take a picture of yourself right now.
• Don’t change your clothes.
• Don’t fix your hair
• Just take a picture.
• Post that picture with no editing. (Except maybe to get the image size down to something reasonable. Don’t go posting an eight megapixel image.)
• Include these instructions.

pnh

I’ve updated the interests listed in my LiveJournal profile, in an effort to clarify it to avoid the appearance that I am soliciting or encouraging illegal activities. —If we were all to revise our interests lists with a modicum of care and consideration, we might avoid situations in which community-moderating media companies, badgered by self-appointed defenders of the innocent, find themselves forced to “suspend reported journals that do not clearly and substantially object to these a reasonable person would think supported these activities. while at the same time portraying them.”

Do consider clarifying your own LiveJournal interests, won’t you?

Tomorrow (yes, it’s past midnight; so what) is my 38th birthday. —Tonight (yes, for it is still tonight), I thought I was heading down to the Bowery to watch the second disk of the second season of Veronica Mars. Instead, a roomful of friends from a bewildering variety of contexts all leaped out of the same room and yelled Happy Birthday, and then some of the best cartoonists in the Western Hemisphere handed me their interpretations of various City of Roses characters.

—Also, spinooti gave me a copy of Lord Breaulove Swells Whimsy’s The Affected Provincial’s Companion, Vol. 1.

I’ll have to figure out how best to share this bounty over the next few days; tomorrow, we’re driving out to the Shire for the day. But until further notice, let me just rather woozily say:

Additional kiplet content available via LiveJournal:

• shortpier: the Long story; short pier feed.
• city_of_roses: the City of Roses feed.

Also, I do want to point out the chapbooks. —What you do with this knowledge is entirely up to you.

So I’m trying an .htaccess redirect for the various RSS feeds for the pier that people might have subscribed to, to keep them from having to resubscribe again, and it seems to have bollixed up the works over at Bloglines, though the redirect itself appears to be working fine.

Maybe it’s just Bloglines hiccupping again. Beuller? Bueller? —LiveJournal, apparently we’ll have to wait till, um, 2006-02-07 02:23:05 on whatever clock it uses to see if it works there or not.

Anyway, all works well, and everything should light back up again. Doesn’t, and, well, maybe you’ll have to resubscribe again.

—The one thing Movable Type let you do that I miss? Let you build your own feeds. Designate the URLs they’d appear in. I like having one feed for excerpts and one for full dress. Gives the audience choices. I like being able to pick where they pop. Gives me choices. WordPress and TextPattern, not so much. In this particular regard.

Okay.

So I was using DreamHost for webhosting. Not a sausage of a problem for a good long while, but the first sign of trouble and they yanked my site without warning. Couldn’t even get at the thing to figure out what the problem was or how to fix it.

Such details as I have been able to glean are available here, if you are so inclined.

I’m in the process, today, I guess, of moving everything; I’ve got backups of the blog’s database in a variety of formats, so that, at least, is not to worry, knock wood. After some little examination and comparison, I’m currently leaning toward A Small Orange. Anybody know any better, please, feel free to speak up.

And heck, while I’m at it, let’s maybe add something else to the plate. I moved the blog from Movable Type to WordPress for a variety of reasons, and it caused (or excused, yes) some of the interminable delays last year; I still haven’t been able to wrap my head around exactly where to start with building WordPress out the way I wanted. So I’m poking Textpattern to see what happens. It has fewer features, perhaps, but it thinks like I think, I think, and so it will be much easier to work with; the irony, of course, being I would have jumped to Textpattern last year had I not in an intemperate moment leaped on DreamHost’s outrageously cheap storage-and-bandwidth-and-easy-WordPress-install. —I just need to work out some permalink issues for the legacy stuff (attempt at which discussed here); I get that taken care of, and we’re off to the races.

So: the pier stuttered back to life for a few short weeks and is now being shuttered again. But for a brief spell! We hope. Watch this space.