revision99

In case anyone was wondering, the server for revision99 was down for 24 hours, ending (I hope) at 10 PM PST tonight (Thursday).

But I’m still here.

revision99 was down for much of yesterday.

I don’t know exactly how long because, hey, whaddaya think, I obsessively check the site every ten minutes day and night? Well, maybe I do, but I was at work when I discovered that the site wasn’t loading, so all I had time to do was try it in a couple of different browsers, go to another site that I know has the same web host as me (it was working), check my FTP access (no dice), check to see if I had exceeded my bandwidth quota (no problem there), verify that I had paid my bill (yes) and wring my hands for ten minutes.

Finally I called my web host — on the phone. A nice man named Peter looked up my file and told me that they were moving my server, the problem was on their end, not mine, and everything would be fixed “by the end of the day.” The server was going to be located in Missouri, so shout out to Jack: My site should be quite zippy for you now, buddy. I didn’t think to ask them where the server was being moved from, or why it was being moved. Anyway, things seem to be OK now, since about 10 PM on the west coast. Let me know if you find any problems, OK? (jones at revision99 dot com)

Web servers, huh? Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.

UPDATE, Friday Afternoon:  APPARENTLY THEY ARE STILL SCREWING AROUND WITH THE SERVER.  SERVICE HAS BEEN UP AND DOWN TODAY.  I’LL MAKE IT UP TO YOU, I PROMISE.

You people are not showing me any love.

I mean, can you not see my Christmas tree? (Hint: Top of the page, to the right of the banner. Blinking.) I spent at least an hour trying to set it up right in that spot and get it to blink at you, to brighten your holiday blog reading.

Hope you like it.

Later for Gravatar.

I must apologize to Blue Girl, Theresa, Ron and everyone who went at my insistence to gravatar.com and got their own Gravatars. I have been forced to disable Gravatars on revision99, because it was causing the site to be verrry slow. It went like this:

Once I had enabled Gravatars on this site, every time one of you Precious Few would leave a comment, the machinery in the basement of revision99 World Headquarters would call gravatar.com and request an image. If there was an image, it would retrieve it and display it next to your comment. If no image, well, we still had to go look. All of this took time. And even though revision99 saved a copy of your image and reused it instead of getting it fresh each time from gravatar.com, there were still those who didn’t have a Gravatar, and we had to go check that out every time. And I suspect the system actually went and checked for images even if all you wanted to do was view a page. And because the Gravatar server is overloaded and overworked and stressed out and bogged down, all of this image searching and retrieval was taking a long damn time.

The result was that I lost almost all my readers (I think), because no one had time to wait for this procedure to take place just to get a chance to see the latest stupid stuff I was writing about. Can’t say I blame anyone, but please come back!!!

Don’t worry — if you signed up for a Gravatar, you still have one, and it will show up in Haloscan comments and other sites that have Gravatars enabled. And in the future I will give gravatar another try, because they claim to be working on an upgrade that will make everything speedy again, or maybe because I will try a different way of enabling them that doesn’t take so long to work each time. Stand by for that announcement, but don’t hold your breath.

In the meantime, revision99 — minus the pictures and Sock Puppet Bunnies — is quite snappy these days. No need to make a pot of coffee before checking it out, and as always, my heart beats only for you.

I’m all puffed up and pleased with myself because finally,

…after about a year of thinking about it, I have made the revision99 Archives list into a dropdown menu. You can see it in the sidebar, under the heading “Archives.”

I’ve been thinking “Jeez, that list is so long, no one will ever see what’s at the bottom of the sidebar. I have to think of a way to shorten it.” In the end, which was just two days ago, I didn’t excatly “think of a way.” Instead, I looked at the page source of someone else’s Wordpress blog (someone who was using just such a dropdown menu) and found the code that makes this happen. Then I copied it and stuck it in my own sidebar template.

Cool, huh? Forgive me. I am easily excited. Go ahead. Click on it. Read something from my past. All my best writing is there. All my commenters are there, too.

Dear Blog Diary,

I’m sorry I haven’t been posting lately.

It’s not that I don’t love you anymore, really. You see, what happened is that my computer sort of died. When I turned it off on Saturday night, it was working fine. But when I tried to start it on Sunday morning, nothing happened. Oh, there were a few whirring sounds, but none of the reassuring beeps it usually makes as it’s booting. So I switched to a different computer, but had a hard time finding you on the internet, Blog Diary. My other computer (the one that died) knew exactly where everything is, and it even remembered all my secret passwords and stuff. Without it, I had to figure out how to get my email, how to get my work stuff done and how to log onto you, dear Blog Diary.

And all the while I was distraught about my dead computer.

I figured out that my computer was dead because the motherboard broke. When something that cost $150 and contains 10,000 teeny tiny little components breaks, I have found that it’s best not to try and fix it, but to get a new one. But I had a little hitch in that plan: It seems that in the three short years since I built the computer, technology has advanced far into the future and all the motherboards that are currently available to buy won’t work with all the rest of the stuff in my dead computer, like my memory and my video card. It took an extra day to find a store that still had a replacement motherboard that wouldn’t force me to buy $1.6 million dollars worth of new peripherals.

Even then, I had to buy a new processor. Can you believe it Blog Diary, the guy in the store laughed at my “old” 2.8 Ghz Pentium 4. “A Socket 478,” he said. “Hey, guys, come look at this old thing!”

To avoid further embarrassment, I immediately purchased a Pentium D chip to go with my new motherboard. It is much faster, plus it is “dual core,” which is the modern, high-tech way to say there are actually two processors in it.

So now I have to put all this together and get it talking to the RAM and the AGP card and the modem and ethernet port and all the drives. Remember, Blog Diary, when I was a computer geek? Those were the days, eh? I carried a screwdriver in my pocket protector at all times, and I could assemble a P3 in the dark with one hand. Well, the computer world has passed me by, and I must now struggle with this thicket of cables and parts and arcane terminology like a newbie.

So that’s why I haven’t been writing, Blog Diary, and if I don’t write much for the rest of the week - same reason.

But at least I’ve found most of the blogs I like to read, and I’m keeping up with them. Talk to ya soon!

Congratulations, precious ones!

It was a long wait, but everyone who tried to entertain me by getting their own globally recognized avatar has, at long last succeeded, and may I say I am thoroughly entertained now. You are all beautiful: Theresa, Ron, Blue Girl, Emma Goldman and Blanca (and need I add Laurie, Jayne and Shephard, the original three? I didn’t think so.).

If I had known how long this would take and how frustrating the process would be for some of you, I wouldn’t have brought it up a second time. Although it seems to me that if anyone really loved me they would have paid attention to my first post on this topic, instead of waiting for me to beg.

But, bottom line, Jones is having a thoroughly good time with this, and I thank you all for playing. The second post has so far generated 40 comments, which might be a record for this blog. No doubt most of the comments were just folks typing any old thing, just to see if their new avatar was working yet, even though I think I mentioned in the post and in a comment that you don’t have to do that - your avatar will show up on your existing comments once it’s approved and activated. If you were really just sharing some love, all the better. I salute you and I smooch you. Except where inappropriate. Then I just shake hands with you.

Now go forth to other blogs and impress other, better bloggers than I with your avatars. Just don’t try it on Blogger. And speaking of Blogger - now that I’ve left that fold, I think they should buy gravatar.com and install new servers for it so it wouldn’t take two f*cking weeks to get a picture of yourself on your comments.

And now, here’s my alter-ego, the first picture I took of myself with my web cam, and from which I derived my own avatar.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Krazy-Eyed Killer:

Hardly any of the Precious Few who read this have gone and gotten their own Gravatar, so I hereby decree that you shall all be SOCK PUPPET BUNNIES until I change my mind.

Jayne, Shephard and Laurie, three who almost never comment here, have gravatars, so they will be represented by their own self-created (or at least self-chosen) avatars. The rest of you, go ahead and leave a comment (or go to a previous post and look at your comment), and you will see that you have become sock puppet bunnies.

To avoid this fate, just go to http://www.gravatar.com and sign up for your own gravatar. It’s free, and then you won’t have to be a sock puppet bunny. (At other sites, your default persona might be even worse!) If you don’t have a picture you want to use, there’s a huge library of free avatar images at Avatarity.com. Pick one and download it from there, then go to gravatar.com, sign up (with your real email address) and upload it there.

I’m tempted to try to explain what a Gravatar is. Let’s just say it’s a picture that represents you when you comment on blogs. Not all blogs have Gravatars implemented, but this one does, and more will follow.

It’s fun, it’s free, it’s kicky!  You know you can do it, so come on, get to it!

revision99 is now set up to display gravatars.

Gravatars are pictures that represent you the blogger or commenter. Not necessarily a picture of you, although it could be. But it could just as well be a picture of a fire truck, or a symbol, or an electric guitar. Think of the profile picture in Blogger, and how it shows up on your blog and in any comments you make to other Blogger members on their blogs. Gravatars are like that, only they work outside of Blogger. Like here on revision99, or on any blog that uses Haloscan for commenting.

Since a picture is worth a whole bunch of words and I seem to be having a hard time explaining this, I’ll make a comment on this post, and you can go look at it and see my gravatar. Then you’ll understand what I mean.

So if you have already signed up and created a gravatar for yourself, when you comment here your gravatar will appear near your name and comment. If you haven’t already signed up (and you know you want to, because it’s fun), go to gravatar.com. All will be explained to you.

Take a picture of yourself. or use one you already have, or create a tiny piece of artwork. When you sign up at Gravatar you can then upload the image and soon you, too, will have a gravatar! A few tips: Don’t do what I did and sign up with an email address different from the one you type in when you comment, because your user ID is your email address. Your email address is what links you to your gravatar, so you have to use the right email address. That took a few weeks for me to figure out. Also, make your artwork square, because they have to be square, preferrably 80 by 80 pixels, but it will be shrunk to that size, so that’s not as important as making it square.

There are avatar creators out there on the web - sites that allow you to make an avatar for yourself, no artistic talent required. Try Mess Dudes, for example. If that one doesn’t float your boat there’s a long list of other such sites here.

Or maybe I should just say “Gravatars are now supported on this blog.” If you know what they are, that would be enough. If you don’t know what they are, chances are you don’t care anyway.

Thanks to Skippy at Skippy.net for the gravatar plugin.

UPDATE APRIL 28: I forgot to check these gravatars in Internet Explorer. Now I see that IE displays an ugly red “X” if you don’t have a gravatar. I use Firefox so I didn’t notice until now. I’ll have to see if I can do something to make that look a little nicer, and not so, you know, accusatory.

UPDATE DECEMBER 20: As explained in this post, I’ve disabled Gravatars until further notice.

I haven’t had time to write Part 2 of “Just Like A Little Girl” yet,

but I have managed to post a new song for your listening pleasure, or pain, depending on what you like.

Or, while you wait, Sacre Bleu! Now you can enjoy revision99 in French!