See my announcement about Short Story Month Contest 2012. :)

Hugs,
Erin

(Fixed Link - Piper)

We've added two new sets of categories, one for fiction (also story, wysiwyg, storylink) and one for blogs.

Three sorts of limitations apply:

Sometime between 11a.m. and noon, PST, this morning, we hit 20,000,000 visitors on the site counter. Since that only goes back to June 15, 2005, we really had probably a million visitors in the six years before that. At the current rate of visitors coming to the site, we'll hit another 20 million in about three years. :)

If you have a problem post, please don't repost. At BC you can edit previous posts to correct errors, such as all the tags disappearing because of a caching glitch. This situation is likely to clear up by the end of the weekend. Remember, if you repost, your reads and comments on the previous version will have to disappear.

I do realize that sometimes the problems cause duplicate posts, but not hours apart.

Hugs,
Erin

This is a refrence blog of things that people have mentioned to us as being broken or different.

Item's that have been "fixed" or we have decided to not fix, are marked with a strike through.

Why did you get rid of the single "Authors" list page?

Why did you get rid of the "Sortable Story List"?

Why did you get rid of the "Quick'n'Easy Picks" list pages?

First off, I'm going to start this posting with a description of how Drupal works traditionally and how BigCloset works now. Some of this information is a copy and paste of a Comment I made on a blog.

Traditionally everything in Drupal is stored in a MySQL or similar database.

...check out Stardust, it's got lots of new facets and it's faster, fastest, fasterest!

This feature is coming to BC as soon as we can get it to work on our much larger and older database. :)

Hugs,
Erin

We have a few more things to try but it looks like this is working. :)

Hugs,
Erin

I need the following people to please email me whether they want a US Postal Money Order or Paypal their winnings to them and where ->

Buy, one get one 50% off.
Use code: SECONDHALF305
Offer ends January 15, 2012

This will be good on all the books offered through Lulu.

Hugs,
Erin

Writing here is for amateurs, amateurs in the original sense of people who do what they do for the love of doing it. If you're not happy about how long chapters are or how often they are posted, be polite and kind because if you simply make demands you might as well kick the authors and tell them to stop having fun.

I'm getting very frustrated with this stuff. I would actually pay for some polling software but not one of the free versions offered by various polling companies works correctly, so how do you know which one of the paid versions will work?

Hugs,
Erin

Blame sinusitis and recalcitrant polling software. I spent two hours preparing a poll and it does not work. I hope to do this tomorrow but will not be able to even look at it till late afternoon.

Hugs,
Erin

Start of voting on contest delayed due to local emergency. May get the voting up later today, may be tomorrow.

Hugs,
Erin

Have you read about the new hydraulic bikes? You pedal them and a liquid transmission sends the power to the wheels -- they're going to market them under the name The Viscous Cycle.

:)
Erin

Cuddles is back home and she ate as much dinner as the vet said she was allowed and I gave her her meds. Twenty minutes after giving her the pain pill, she is sound asleep and snoring. :)

The other night I noticed Cuddles squinting with her left eye and I looked at it closely. The white was all red and she had an "eye booger". I cleaned that up and decided to keep an eye on it. Last night, she was still squinting but I couldn't see anything wrong. When I got home from opening the bookstore this afternoon, the eye was completely white.

The vet says only a rapid infection could cause an overnight cataract and I will have to take Cuddles to the ophthalmologist as soon as I can, Monday or Tuesday to be sure to protect the other eye.

Cuddles and I need some hugs. :(

Hugs,

Doing the administration here is not easy, keeping things friendly and focussed on stories, storytelling, reading and commenting on stories. Maybe I should do away with the blogs.

Twice today I have had to remove comments for being unfriendly, both times because some reported news event and someone's fairly innocuous comment sparked replies that got political and maybe a bit unfriendly. Whenever this happens, it has nothing to do with my own politics, sometimes I have to remove posts that I agree with because not doing so eventually leads to flames, in my experience.

This is a frequently asked question and I thought I would put this up and let everyone who wants to take a crack at answering it.

Hugs,
Erin

Now till Wednesday, use WINTERSAVE305 code to get a 30 percent discount at Lulu on DopplerPress and all other US sales. I think the code is WINTERSAVEUK305 in the UK.

Hugs,
Erin

Had another of my patentable weird dreams. This one was about a fictional high school in Malibu known by the nickname of Surfer High. In the dream, I was pitching this as a cable TV show.

One of the exec types says, "I like what you've done there, with the double meaning in the title. It's not a double entendre unless it's dirty, right?"

Some problem with the data center connectivity. Took almost an hour to fix, really unusual. But all seems fine now. :)

Hugs,
Erin