I have been debating and debating what to do with the site. I think I have decided not to go with the home connection for my $4000 superserver because I don't want the responsibility of keeping it up, seeing as I cannot find a qualified server admin to volunteer or help out.

Dr. Halavais suggested I talk with a woman named Kera who is a graduate of the UB informatics dept, web designer at Medaille and knows of a good local hosting company. After getting ahold of her I was able to contact buffalo web hosting They also seem really nice and local which is good but pretty freakin' expensive. I will end up paying $46/month which is really a lot to me considering I pay it all out of pocket.

We also will be losing shell access and with Buffalo web hosting. Because I don't get ssh and I can't compile my own stuff - blah. A dedicated box with them is really expensive. Around $250/month which is pretty crazy freakin's expensive for a site that is totally free.

I wonder what options the future will hold for (e:strip). Maybe if someone out there is a grant writer, they could help us write for grants. I have no idea where to start on that (e:terry) said he could get us declared a federal non-profit but that still wouldn't help the server situation but may open up more grant opportunities.

So either a grant writer or people will have to donate. However, the best solution is that someone can offer me a really nice job for $40-50k a year where I will work really hard and just pay for it out of pocket. Here is my portfolio I seriously have no problem paying for it all to support this local community, I just wish I had a bigger personal budget to pull from or didn't have $70,000 in student loans that I will have to start paying next month.

Kera suggest making estrip merchandise that people can buy. I like the idea but who is going to buy a tee-shirt or a coffee mug? Maybe if we put (e:matthew) ' s photos on them! Maybe I will just stick with where we are for now. an not care about the whole local thing.

I took a break from writing to get some data. Here a made a little fun toy to play with

It turns each entry written by the user into a little red dot. If you roll over them it says the title and if you click it is a link to the print version of the entry.

You can also see them broken down by quantity by date. It is a great way to search the history of the site and for the authors, to see how much work they put in. I am grading my friendships in red dots now, lol.



It's more fun with firefox.

I fixed both login box bugs during sign up and sign in. Now whenever you sign in from the front page, or confirm your email addr when signing up it takes you directly to your journal publish box. Hopefully, this will make it easier for people to publish.

They at least work in Firefox and IE 6. The rest of you with win 98 aol browser, I have no idea.

Here they are:

You can hit ctrl +m from any journal to be taken to your publish box.

Once at your publish box you can now style text similar to the way you do in word. Simply highlight the text and then hold down ctrl + the first lette rof the style name. The text then become wrapped in the style tag.,

e.g type a sentence, highlight a word you want to bol and hit ctrl +b on the keyboard. The text will then be designated as bold text.

This works with
bold = ctrl +b
underline = ctrl +u
italic = ctrl + i
strike = ctrl +s
quote = ctrl +q
highlight = ctrl +h

You can now upload, store and manage multiple userpics. To select the one you want as your default userpic, just click on it. When it turns red around the border you are set to go. You can use this same gallery to delete userpics and to add new ones. To delete a userpic, simply click on the radio button next to the userpic you want to delete and hit the delete button.

Uploading works the same as before. I am probably going to tie in the little image manipulation program from p:labs in the near future.



You can find this userpic gallery by clicking on your userpic on your profile. You can reach your profile, by clickling on your userpic on your journal.