Well, this is indeed good news. It appears that the Factsheet 5 football has been passed and has been caught in Arlington Virginia. They are currently looking for volunteers to help get the thing rolling, but according to their website, they are to begin publishing this year (2006).
For those that don’t know, Factsheet 5 was really the first and largest all-review zine for zines, small press and other self-published material.
Its nice to see it coming back.
What exactly do we hope for? Who is “we?” We, in this case, are all of us out there who do stuff. I suppose I need to be more specific, because quite frankly, that doesn’t mean a whole lot. I also suppose that since I am writing in a particular context, the level of specificity should be such that it goes a little like this: In this sense, the “we” is all of us who spend significant amounts of time, money, effort and energy on a project. There are thousands upon thousands of “us” and the numbers grow every day. I don’t pretend, nor would I want to, speak for all of us, so I will speak for me, a single number in all of us.
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The sheer glut of bad links was getting on my nerves. So, I did something radical. I expunged 1708 of them. Basically my criteria was this:
If the link was entered on or before January 1st 2003, and was not approved and was not indexable, it got deleted. Now, when I say “deleted” I mean, that it was removed from the live production database. An original with all links (even those mentioned above) are still available, and if a long lost link owner comes back and wants to know what happened, I can easily restore their data. But think of the children!
That is all.
I’m having a deflated day with this project. Not that I’m doing anything terribly active with it… but I did submit a story to Slashdot about the re-launch of the website and the search for more volunteers (yadd yadda) and my submission got rejected. Frankly I am not surprised, and I know they would, I only submitted it on the off chance that it would be accepted and drive a little traffic to the site. No, what it did do was make me think about all of the missed oppotunities and, well, failures of this site and project
I’ve had 10 years to make this thing a success, and I haven’t. I don’t believe in luck with these sorts of things, you either do it, or you don’t. So far, I’ve been in the latter group. Because of this I get on the “why bother” jag. What’s the point. The hit count for the site has fallen off a cliff (used to average about 100k views a month, now, its about a hundreth of that). I only have myself to blame. I should have acted quicker. But alas that wasn’t really in the cards because my personal life went into a tail spin and there was no time or energy to deal with this.
So, this really is like starting from scratch. The only thing I’ve got to prove this thing is as old as it is, is a bunch of usenet posts from when I was first starting this project, and a whole bunch of ancient data in the database. No, this isn’t an “oh poor me” post, this is me wanting to document each and every facet of this project, and that always won’t be something interesting, new or good. There will be times when I post a thing like this.
Heh, its not like anyone is reading anyway. But, this doesn’t change anything. I will keep on truckin, keep on doing this thing, no matter what. I don’t need you 
Jeepers, it certainly has been a busy week here at old diysearch and company. First the site gets re-launched, bugs get fixed, the first iteration of the data pruning is run, and now what!? A brand new t-shirt!
Yes yes, this site doesn’t pay for itself, so in an attempt to make that little thing more of a reality, I’ve designed an initial t-shirt that is quite swanky (if I do say so myself).
Good news? Finally, black t-shirts. Jeepers, what a joke CafePress is. Who the hell wears white or pastel yellow t-shirts (unless you are 4 years old, then yeah sure)? I ask you! Absurd. Oh no, us older, cynical and bitter types like our shirts like our personalities, black.
So, go check ‘em out. Tell the world you don’t need ‘em. Well, unless you are talking about your significant other, or pet, or best friend, or, or, or other people you really do need. You get the idea
Anyway, I’m currently using Zazzle for this little endevor. I’m not too sure if I will stick with them. Just wish they had an API so I wouldn’t have to rely on their front-end. I just want stuff like that under my own control. CafePress has an API, but the whole lack of being able to print on the back is a real problem. So, for now, I use Zazzle. We’ll see how it turns out. They are pretty good with order processing and have a pretty fair customer service system.
