Many years ago, fleetfootmike and I set up FilkNet and its IRC channel as a service to the filk community. It became a place where filkers from all over the world could gather, a virtual space to call our own. Over the years, it was vibrant and warm and a great place to be home on the Internet when we couldn’t be in a filkcircle at a convention. Of late, it’s a bit of a ghost town. Maybe life got busy and you just fell out of the habit of checking in, or maybe you just don’t have time. Maybe something happened (either in or out of the #filkhaven space) that made you decide to stay away. Maybe you were completely unaware of the existence of it, or don’t even know what IRC is. When I started to write this, it was as an administrator of a service, wanting to find out where the users had gone, but honestly, it’s more personal than that. I miss my friends and I want to see them in our big crazy chatroom again. Or for the first time. Comments to this entry are screened. If you’d like to say something private about your feelings about the #filkhaven channel, you can leave them here. Or, as always, you can email me at autographedcat@gmail.com. But if you’ve no particular reason to be away, come on in. I’d love to see you. A long time ago I decided that I really wanted to do something about all the photos I had been taking since I acquired a digital camera. More precisely, I wanted to put them where other people could see them, and that meant on my very own webpage. At first, I used a set of perl scripts I wrote to generate the HTML for each set of photos, but after the collection grew to a certain size, I decided this was cumbersome, and started to investigate other options, and I found Gallery, a PHP project that did everything I wanted for organizing and displaying my various pictures. I did a bit of customization to it to make it fit in with the look and feel of the rest of my site, and was reasonably happy with it. Not long after that, a lot of people started using the website Flickr. I was bit skeptical of it. “Yeah, that’s ok if you don’t have your own site”, I said, “but I like having more control over my things than that.” (In retrospect, I think I was more than a bit snobbish about this, but we all have our moments of lapse.) And, in truth, I *did* like having the control, but as time has gone by, the software has gotten old and cranky, and the task of upgrading to the new (and very different internally) version of Gallery seemed daunting. And in that time, Flickr grew, developed a large and vibrant community, was acquired by Yahoo, and generally is more or less the default place for people to share their photos. Maybe it was time for a second look. The more I evaluated it, the more I thought that, were I to Continue Reading
TSP On This Day
Published On: April 27, 2012
Published On: April 27, 2009