Well this is more of a pre-announcement but I am getting rid of the date drop down in favor of the date selection cloud. Months with more journals are bigger.

Here is an example from the development server showing my journal with the new style of date selection. Each month is a link. Looks like I was a much busy blogger around this time in 05.


I have lots of other updates coming soon as time warner can get my internet straight for more than 10 hours and I have some free-time from the big project at work.

Same as always, we lost again. Maybe next year (e:lilho) will vote. The food was tasty again. I particularly liked the ribs.

I still can't upload anything on my time warner connection or even access my gmail.

Be sure not to miss the Best of Buffalo party, Monday April 30 at the Town Ballroom (681 Main St) from 6-9pm, with complimentary food from Buffalo's best restaurants, and live music with the Skiffle Minstrals and the Steam Donkeys. quoted from artvoice

Ya, so we are nominated for best web site in Buffalo. Let's see if we win this year, of if it will have to wait till next year. Food is great though.

--paul

In order to make the site more intriguing and welcoming to new members in our push to expand to at least 500 writers we are going to put the top 20ish categories right on the front page so people can click on a category that interests them and see all the journals relating to that category.

Up until now you could create any category you wanted for your journal and you still can but we combined some categories for the rating purpose. You may notice some of the categories on your journals were changed to match this new system. For example, we combined the categories of phtos and photo and put them all under photo. You can still create any category you want but if you want it to be linked on the front page, try to keep it in one of the categories that already exists. The greatest part is the top 20ish list will always be changing to reflect what people are talking about. For instance, if there is some sort of freak disaster in Buffalo and everyone starts writing about that, that category would move up the list.

Here are the first categories we combined

PHOTOS took over for photo, photos2005, photos2006, photography, photography2005, photography2006, pic, pic post, pics, pic time, pictures

WORK was combined with jobs

POLITICS was combined with political

PEEPTALK was combined with peeps and epeeps

POETRY was combined with poems and epoetry

there may be more in the future we will keep you updated.

IMPORTANT: for miscellaneous we are choosing to go with (e:jason) 's category of POTPOURRI.

Remember, it is important to put a category on your journals so people can find categories they like later on. It also makes it easier for you to go back and find a certain journal you are looking for.

Any categories that have more than 30 journals assigned to them get displayed in the top categories cloud on the front page.

We will also be releasing a new system for quickly updating categories. Currently there are still 12,700+ journals that do not have categories and hundreds that have a category which is more like a subtitle.

--(e:mike)

So I wrote them this letter. I hope they are willing to sell it as I am so tired of explaining that we are not estrip.com. I might ask for some donations again depending how much it costs.

Hello,
My name is Paul Visco and I have operated a non-profit blogging called estrip.org since 2003. I noticed that estrip.com is no longer around and was wondering if you would relinquish the domain name registration so that I could use it for our site. Because we are non-profit I don't have very much money to work with but I would gladly offer you $200 to allow us to have the domain name.
Thank you for your time,
Paul