The main things are:

1. Always use the same pattern.

One picture tells the story:

Traffic on BC is up. Way up. Like 20% above last week's record traffic. I have to assume this is due to FM being down.

I've suspended google ads on BC until after the election due to offensive and misleading political ads.

Hugs,
Erin

There are only four entries in the All Souls Day Contest at Stardust and only two at Fictioneer.

Yes, that beats the previous record last January by more than 15,000 visits. October has been a wild month.

I'm doing my music homework which involves listening to drums and writing down the rhythms. The dog thinks someone is at the door. :) I'm going to have to use headphones. :)

Hugs,
Erin

Bob has set up a micro blogging site for TG readers, Nova. Check it out! You can leave it open in a window and check it now and then, carry on quick conversations. Looks best in Firefox, BTW. Bob and I will be looking in often. It's quick and easy to sign up for and use. (Kind of like Twitter and other microbloggers.)

For logged in members, all the advertising on BC now has off switches in your |My Account| tabs. At least, all of it does if I did it right, I'll be checking.

Hugs,
Erin

I hope people are following the "Skin Horse"* comic I now syndicate at the bottom of the blog pages. :) Today's fan-drawn episode features Tip, the crossdressing hero(ine) of Skin Horse and Wil Smith as MiLBDs so I've added it to the bottom of the front page, too. :)

Hugs,
Erin

Site has still been under attack. This is getting ridiculous.

-- Erin

The site went down this morning for a bit and when I brought it back up it seemed to be under a denial of service attack. So, I took it down and put up an error message while I investigated. Turns out it must have been a Google crawler that got a wild hare and kept hitting the same page, several thousand times.

in the path of Hurricane Ike: Be safe and we'll see you next week.

Hugs,
Erin

I made a change in how the site looks over the weekend and no one commented. I'm curious, did anyone notice? If you're using the Reversi theme, I didn't make the change to it yet. :)

- Erin

Voting on the Summer Romance Contest is delayed because the fucking voting software does not work. The old software worked, poorly but it worked, the new stuff does not and the old software is not available now.

I've spent two-and-one-half hours on this and I've got bupkiss. I'm going to bed.

Hugs,
Erin

You know, I haven't been able to keep up with reading all the postings on BC for over two years. So Much Good Stuff. I want to say thanks to everyone who posts stories, makes comments, blogs or helps me out with tech knowhow, front page assistance or freelance editing.

It just keeps getting better.

Take care all of you, hugs,
Erin

Downloaded a tool for keeping track of updates and upgrades to the software we use here. Looks like I've got two or three days work to do to get the current version up to date

While trying to create a random pick of old stories, I stumbled across this neat little capability in Drupal. For now this little list will go in the top of the left column on the main page and will show stories from about one year ago, plus or minus 24 hours. I may be able to expand this to include stories from two years ago, three years ago, etc. And maybe not. :)

Hugs,
Erin

Until the days Sun to Wed, that didn't get updated scroll off, then we'll go back to three days.

Hugs,
Erin

Here's a link on a name site to a discussion of crossgender name equivalents. :) It's fun.

- Erin

I just upgraded the core software for BCTS. Everything seems to be operating fine, I re-hacked the code in a couple of places where I had customized it. If something that did work no longer works, let me know and I'll investigate.

Hugs,
Erin

I had the experience of talking to an acquaintance recently who confessed to me that her secret desire was to be a canine dental hygienist. That's someone who cleans the teeth of dogs. But, she had ended up getting married, having kids, raising them, etc, a process that took many years and still wasn't over.

Ran across this pic which has sharing code, so I decided to share:

... who posts that they don't like serial stories, or don't like drabbles, or don't like stories with crossdressing or magic or bodysuits or superheroes or you don't like stories that have lots of keywords or not enough keywords -- there's such a simple solution I'm surprised no one has thought of it.