I know its been forever and a day since I’ve posted. I feel bad about that. But life, work, more life has gotten in the way of this project, yet again. Heh, if some kind soul who loved diysearch, and had a massive amount of money and resources would be kind enough to pay the bill, I’d happily do this as my day job. But alas, that is as likely to happen as I am to become a world renowned theoretical physicist.
I know I was supposed to have finished work on a lot of projects, but those efforts took a seriously back seat to my ridiculously busy job (I run the development/engineering team for a highly visible public website that shall remain namelss).
So, that’s the score. I, like every apologist post, want to get back into making things work around here. Thanks if you are still around.
Well, our fearless and tireless editor has finished The Great Purge. Here are some numbers for you. Prior to re-launching on May 22nd 2006, there were exaclty 18,811 links in the system.
As of Saturday, August 12 2006, there are 483 active links in the system.
That is almost a 99.9% turn over of the entire system.
We need links! I wouldn’t mind having 5,000 by the end of the year. Is it possible? Who knows. But we are going to do all we can to see this database re-populated, but we cannot do it ourselves (hehehe, turns out that we do, lol, need you after all!).
Well, I look at it this way. Of the links that are left, they are good quality links to sites and projects that are alive and well and that need your attention. The rest, well, sorry to see them go, but that’s the way it goes. If you had a link with us, and now you notice it gone. Please, add your latest URL, and keep on top of it. The only way we can help you is if you stay active. Tell your friends about us, we can only do so much on our own. Yeah this is DIY, which hey, grassroots is a huge part of this little project. Okay, I’ll stop begging now… but I’m not too proud to though, just so you know.
Oh yeah, and also drop our editor a note if you want. She put in an incredible effort.
I have a day job. A day job is vital in that it pays the bills and enables me to do this diysearch stuff. Well, because I have this day job, which takes me through Harvard Square (in Cambridge, MA) everyday, I have been walking by something I simply haven’t been noticing. Paper Cut Zine Library. I actually didn’t know it was there until after I was looking around google for other zine resources and came accross the wikipedia page for zines, which had a link to the boston zine fair, which, as it turns out, is organized by Paper Cut.
So, I just find it quite interesting that there is a zine library right here. I haven’t been to a zine library since visiting Epicenter Zone back in the early 1990’s (in San Francisco). I have yet to stop in (well, in all fairness, I didn’t know it existed there till about 10 minutes ago) but when time permits I just may have to do that.
Anyway, if you do find yourself wandering around Harvard Square, you may want to stop by, check things out.
Its been very quiet around here. Probably a good thing. The new site (diysearch.com) is running very smoothly, not a single problem since the launch (on May 20). Its been seeing about 1,500+ visitors a week, which is significantly down from the peak back in 2002/3 where we were seeing that in a day.
I only have myself to blame for that.
Anyway, I’m working on another side-project, one that isn’t quite as involved as Diysearch, in fact I’m not doing hardly any development for it (thanks for that goes to Joomla, a nice fork of the Mambo server product). The idea is to build a “veterans” straight edge community, which I am calling Still True.
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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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