So, as threatened, it's a new site!

The observant will note that while the design's changed, the actual content hasn't, much. In no particular order:

• Yes, the look's a lot more spartan. I hope this won't annoy people too much, but I'm feeling more Zen these days.

• The ability to "navigate" by monthly archives is gone; it's kind of silly to have something like that for a site that gets updates a few times a year at best. I'm looking for another way to do an index by story title, too.

• Stories now have "tags" associated with them that will hopefully make it easier to find them.

• Tagged stories also have "related stories" blocks at their end based on associated tags, which will claim to take you to stories that might be similar but generally aren't. Yay tags.

• Images for stories are now in the stories they're for. Why didn't I do this before? I have no idea.

So to answer a few Anticipated Questions:

• Is anything new? Other than the mechanics, not yet.

• What about the macrophile roleplaying article you mentioned? It's coming along shortly. (Really. I promise.)

• Are you going to do the long-threatened blogging thing? Yes, although this time no promise about scheduling.

• Did you really delete stuff? I did, albeit minimally (two pieces). That doesn't mean those stories might not be back in rewrites. Why I did this is, well, a good topic for a future blog post. There's also a post or two about long-gone site maintenance removed.

• Crazy idea: are you ever gonna write a story again? Yes. No promise on schedule here, either, but I have ideas again.

(N.B.: I'm aware some of the styles look a little wonky in some browsers; I'll fix that shortly. Sorry!)

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If you came to the site in the last few days and got a huge list of errors, I apologize. The site's sysadmin is apparently doing a long-talked-about server move, and one of the WordPress plugins I use broke on the new setup. The new machine and old machine are both running currently, and while browsing to arilin.macrophile.com was last night directing to the new site, connecting to macrophile.com via SSH went to the old site. So I spent about an hour debugging files on the wrong machine. ("I can delete the broken plugin and it's still there! Aaaah!") A check just now as I wrote this showed the site now going to the old site, where the plugin is (probably unnecessarily) deactivated--so if you're seeing the text look a little strange, with underlines around words that should be italics and URLs in the "refurbished" message below instead looking like footnotes in [brackets], it's because the plugin that converts from my "Markdown" text formatting to HTML isn't working. On whatever machine you're currently seeing this on. Which if it's broken is the old one. Unless it's not. Unless I fixed it.

Some comments I approved on the old machine didn't show up on the new machine last night, either, because the new machine's database copy was apparently older than the old machine's. And I have no idea which database will be used when I post this. (I think I've approved those comments on both machines at this point, and I'm still not sure all of them are showing on... whichever machine I'm looking at now.)

Confused yet?

Anyway, while the comments below weren't entirely unanimous about the wisdom of wading into the dangerous waters of the "community site," nobody seemed to think it was a bad idea. Chaswari wrote, "The obvious thing to do would be to introduce memberships to this Giants' Club thing. That way you could have stuff like profile pages of members of a message board." He went on to opine that "would be rather pointless, since Giants' Club members can meet at the Giants' Club," but for people who aren't on FurryMUCK, the site is the Giants' Club. (Except of course that right now it's my blog, so it isn't.)

Mega suggested "a heavier emphasis on IC-ness (or at least 'worldbuilding')" to differentiate it, "so it's not just Yet Another Macro Message Board." This is certainly an interesting idea. And indeed, even though YAMMB is a great acronym, it's not what I want. The question, then, is "What do I want?"

I think a good way to answer that is to ask, "What do you, the prospective users, want?" I can't have the site be all things to all people, and I think there's often a temptation when one contemplates these community things to try and do exactly that. But a lot of existing sites are pretty good at what they do; throwing in an image gallery and a blogging module and what have you might not be the best use of resources.

So. What do you want?

(N.B.: this should not be construed as a promise of anything, nor a time schedule for any implementation. But I definitely want input!)

Well, maybe, at least. It's fair to ask, "Just what the hell happened? You've been AWOL for over a year, giant cat lady!" I don't have a particularly good excuse, but I'll give you the honest one.

The thing is, what basically kicked me in the ass to write macrophile-esque stories was an APA, or "amateur press association," called MegaMorphics. An APA is basically like a fanzine with a limited members-only production run: members run off copies themselves for other members and send them all to a "central mailer," who collates the copies together and mails them out. (It's this odd production method that makes it members-only, not a desire to be incredibly exclusive and cliquish.) Most of the stories that appeared on this web site appeared in MM a couple months first.

But, like many such things, MM didn't last forever; while it isn't officially dead, it's been on hiatus for over a year now. And, why yes, it's been a bit over a year since I've posted here. Coincidence? I think not. The last couple of stories I've posted here ("Higher Learning" and "Trompe L'oeil") appeared here before the APA, in part because I'd written a couple multipart stories for MegaMorphics that I didn't want to post here until they were finished---but of course that slowed down posting here and I didn't want to leave the place abandoned. Obviously, that didn't work out.

To add insult to injury, those unfinished stories are, well, still unfinished. (For the record, their working titles are "Bed & Breakfast" and "Gates.") I did actually write a couple things in 2006, but the major one wasn't macrophile at all (gasp) and a couple others are, at least at this point, private.

But, I don't want leave this place languishing another year. I'm going to do my best to get an unfinished story or two finished, maybe get a private story made public, maybe get some notes I've made over the past two years turned into actual stories. And, I think I'm going to do another redesign of the web site, bringing it up to a modern version of WordPress along the way (assuming the new version has the spiffy "white list" spam protection the old one does).

See you all here in... well, hopefully much sooner than last time.

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