Monday 25 April 2005

Pic of the day: Screenshot from the anime Mahou Sensei Negima. Included solely to drive my site hits to new frantic heights as people search google pictures for "cute chearleader" and "anime girls". Sadly pics like this make wild spikes in my hit counts. Now for my precious few real friends:

Meta

Exciting new plans for the Chaos Node!

You may not have noticed this, but some months ago I acquired the domain name chaosnode.net and rented some webspace at a professional web host. My archives are all there now, and will probably fade away gradually from all the other places where they have been scattered around over the last five years. I have still not changed their year ago links, except on new entries of course. In the past, my web hosts have become unusable so quickly that it has made no sense to change thousands of links. Yes, I literally have more than 2000 entries, with an average of three links each to earlier entries. Changing all of this by hand would be insane, especially with an aching wrist. I may however be able to write a small COBOL program to do the replacement, when I am reasonably sure it will be permanent. (In so far as you can use that word about anything on the Internet!)

I am currently using chaosnode.net only for my archives and for my fiction. But I do consider moving my daily diary there, too. The current location of the Chaos Node is tied to my ISP, which is neither the cheapest nor the fastest available anymore. With the rapid spread of Internet telephony here in Norway, my current provider makes less and less sense. Customers are leaving like rats from a sinking ship, and I can certainly understand them. For most people, it is a question of money. Be that as it may, it seems a good idea to not be completely dependent on one ISP.

In connection with my move to chaosnode.net, I have been thinking about adding a couple of new services for you, my precious readers! For instance, the feedback option so far has been limited to e-mail. And the e-mail has been limited, indeed: Sometimes a week or more goes by without any sign of life at all from you; and 95% of what mail there is comes from one person (you know who you are!). To merge insult and injury, there is spam. But I can understand you guys. You are not like me, who am most comfortable talking to people one at a time. Like most humans, you probably find this uncomfortably personal, almost intimate. Or perhaps you feel that I would probably not pay much attention to your feedback, since I am so self-assured and such a towering intellect in my own eyes. Or if not, you may feel that your own time is too valuable to spend talking to just one person.

I have not yet completely decided on the new feedback channel. Nova Notes, a better and more popular journal than my own, briefly tried to implement a message board. It was discontinued due to the low amount of traffic. Obviously I can not expect more, quite the opposite. So what we need is something like a message board, able to handle a few comments now and then, something that does not require registration and which allows a degree of anonymity to those who want it. And it should not require so much programming that I never get along to implementing it.

Another feature I am contemplating is an index sorted by color. As you have probably noticed, I have color-coded my entries for several years now: Blue for games, green for slice of life, gray for things that require some thinking to understand, yellow for things that are not quite worksafe, red for things that should be kept out of reach of children, black for sad or angsty entries, and turquoise for reviews. There are probably not many people in the world that are interested in them all. Actually, there is probably only I. Now, you could bookmark my calendar page instead; each entry is color-coded there. But because I love you all so much, perhaps one day I will make separate lists of only one color each. Perhaps some day. Perhaps.

Finally, since there are still some Norwegians reading this after six years, I am considering writing a short entry in Norwegian (my mother tongue) once a month or once a week, so the less linguistically blessed among my friends and relatives can keep up with my life. If I am exceptionally lucky, they might even start writing their own journal so I can keep up with them, as well! You know, just because you know me better than you know your parents or your brothers, this does not magically enable me to know what goes on with you.