All the clouds turn to words.
I still haven't finished meeting my obligations from last summer's charity auction (no, I have not forgotten, am still chugging), so I may not get involved in another one. But there is one going on if you're so inclined: help_japan. We've had a lot of humanitarian crises in the last year, but this one is staggering in scope. You might, however, want to consider how to make sure your donation is effective.Spammity spam: Livejournal is once again in hot water with Spamhaus for hosting known spam sites and doing nothing about it for weeks. This is why your notifications/PMs/etc were getting spamblocked. It's not clear why our new Russian overlords are doing nothing. It is clear that LJ is slowly dying as a site for fannish journals, and there really isn't a replacement out there. Tumblr's pretty unsatisfying for what fans do on LJ. Ah, well, it'll take a few more years to crumble.
Random: A plea for baked weblogs. I don't get why people need databases to serve blog content. What's dynamic about it? This is one reason why my fic archive tool design uses a database as a local cache for generating/regenerating static pages. It's possible to be blazingly fast serving static pages. It takes a lot of work to make sql-backed pages serve quickly. And if you're using ORMs & heavyweight frameworks, you probably have no idea why your sql-backed pages are rendering slowly. And how freaking often does that content actually change? Never, compared to how often it's being served. What's more you have a really clear bottleneck to use for regeneration: the moment when the user adds a new post/story/whatever. You can take seconds to regenerate then and it's fine, there's no expectation of instant response.
Witter witter: Let's see, what else? Wrote 2000 words of rather Buffy/Xander-ish kink fic yesterday, in a surprising burst of id-tastic activity. The world clamors for this, I know. In the sense of "not at all". Especially the Buffy/Oz/Xander bits. (I have mentioned this story before.) I guess I just needed a break from the serious stuff. Where by "serious" I mean that stories where concerns about craft slow me down. I need to stop taking everything seriously. WTB sense of play.
Okay, back to work now. /irony
Random: A plea for baked weblogs. I don't get why people need databases to serve blog content. What's dynamic about it? This is one reason why my fic archive tool design uses a database as a local cache for generating/regenerating static pages. It's possible to be blazingly fast serving static pages. It takes a lot of work to make sql-backed pages serve quickly. And if you're using ORMs & heavyweight frameworks, you probably have no idea why your sql-backed pages are rendering slowly. And how freaking often does that content actually change? Never, compared to how often it's being served. What's more you have a really clear bottleneck to use for regeneration: the moment when the user adds a new post/story/whatever. You can take seconds to regenerate then and it's fine, there's no expectation of instant response.
Witter witter: Let's see, what else? Wrote 2000 words of rather Buffy/Xander-ish kink fic yesterday, in a surprising burst of id-tastic activity. The world clamors for this, I know. In the sense of "not at all". Especially the Buffy/Oz/Xander bits. (I have mentioned this story before.) I guess I just needed a break from the serious stuff. Where by "serious" I mean that stories where concerns about craft slow me down. I need to stop taking everything seriously. WTB sense of play.
Okay, back to work now. /irony