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By Samuel Stoddard

September 1999

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RinkWorks


Thursday, September 30, 1999

Today we have answers to the reader question from May 26, 1998, which was, quote, "Corks: good or bad." No, you're not missing anything. I never asked for a second round of answers. But this morning I checked my email and found a trio of innocently casual answers in my mailbox. It's all Darien's doing of course. He all but confessed when I sent him accusatory email, to which he responded, "Who, little ol' me? -innocent stare-" That's good enough for me.

The answers, which I'm posting in spite of the fact that they are somewhat late, follow:


Monday, September 27, 1999

What a weekend! On Friday afternoon, our server was broken into by hackers, taking the site offline until late Saturday and some of the CGI-driven web sites until just this morning. Things should be working all right now, though.

Among the symptoms of the crash was a loss of information posted to the site during the day Friday, which included Friday's journal entry. So here it is, repeated:

John K. sends more Song-A-Second entries:


Wednesday, September 22, 1999

Today I shifted something around that may disappoint some of you: Book-A-Minute and Movie-A-Minute no longer have strict monthly update rates in place, which means gives me more freedom to update them when I actually have something to update with. It probably means they'll be updated less often, on average, but it also means I'll be able to update when I actually have something to update with. Too often, the last few Book-A-Minute updates consisted of material I had to pump out at the last minute, because, honestly, Dave and I are pretty burnt out writing those things, and that's not the greatest way to get quality results anyway. I thought it was better to trade off quantity for quality.

That makes Computer Stupidities the last RinkWorks feature with a regular, predictable update rate. I suspect it will stay that way. That particular site is tedious to update, but it doesn't take me very long, it requires no forced creative input from me, and it's second to The Dialectizer in terms of popularity -- so it behooves me and the site in general to keep that one going as predictably as possible.

In spite of that, I'm also trying not to lose sight of what I set out to make RinkWorks in the first place: an entertainment web site that I do for me first and my readers a very close second. (Yet RinkWorks is not as self-oriented as that statement may make it seem, because what keeps me happy is keeping you folks happy -- so in that sense, you're not second at all.) The point, here, is that if I start doing too many things with the site that I don't enjoy doing, I'm going to get burnt out fast, and quality and quantity are both going to go down the tubes.

Hence, as started happening some time ago, the older RinkWorks sites that I've lost some interest in and/or become burnt out on, are receiving less and less attention, and more and more attention will be focus on entirely new RinkWorks features.

Enough with that. The results to the R.I.N.K.W.O.R.K.S. contest (see below), will be announced later today in the RinkWorks Message Forum. I received a bunch of fantastic entries, so don't forget to check it out.


Tuesday, September 14, 1999

It's a big day for RinkWorks! The new humor featurette, How To Be Romantic, was released this morning. It's a feature with two sources of inspiration: the obvious one is the previous humor featurette How To Be Funny. The other source of inspiration was a post by a regular to the RinkWorks Message Forum, who asked for ideas on how to propose. In response to that question, I began writing a comic reply -- and it sort of took a life of its own. That reply consisted, for the most part, of the first three paragraphs of How To Be Romantic's "How To Propose" section. Before posting the reply, however, I reconsidered, saved the text, and used it as the seed for this new featurette. Here's a link to the original post.

The second item of interest is the official RinkWorks contest that begins today. Look in the Message Forum for the details. This was a spur of the moment action on my part. I thought of a good acronym for "R.I.N.K." and then wondered what others might come up with.


Monday, September 13, 1999

Things went a little haywire in the RinkWorks Message Forum today (and still are). Somehow, the "all messages" page got corrupted. The "all messages" page is an important one, because the changes to the message index are made there first, and the segmented index pages are constructed based on the contents of the "all messages" page.

So the "all messages" page got corrupted, and that meant future attempts to post messages hung when it came time to list the new message in the segmented index pages. The result is that as of right now, several new messages are only listed in the "all messages" and "recent messages" pages. Unfortunately I won't be able to correct the problem until tonight, so posting to the forum has been disabled until I can do that.

Ah, the joys of being a webmaster!


Sunday, September 12, 1999

More Song-A-Second entries from "scArA":

And some form Doug S.:


Tuesday, September 7, 1999

Over the weekend, my family and I picked a truckload of apples, headed over to my grandparents' house, and put an antique apple cider press (from 1824!) to work. We ended up with 49 gallons of apple cider, and let me say, that stuff is good.


Thursday, September 2, 1999

"scArA" revitalizes the Song-A-Second thread that appeared in this journal on October 24th, 1998, and November 4, 1998. He submitted the following ultra-condensations:

Song themes:

Songs:

Further submissions are welcome.


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