Two new things:
First, is a meta news item, saying that news will now appear on the front page with other entries, so that everyone can read it, and also so that you can comment on it, because sometime feedback is nice to have.
Second: I got an email from Bla-Bla today basically explaining that the idea of banner ads was dead, and that pop-ups (or "interstitials," as they liked to call them) were what bla-bla affiliates would have to support in the future.
Personally, I hate pop-ups, and if I'd be annoyed to read my own site, imagine how annoyed you all would be?
On the other hand, I was getting $19 a month from Bla-Bla, and site hosting costs me about $34, so ending my contract with them would mean In Passing would cost me even more to run. I've seen alternative solutions to this, such as webmasters who make it possible for visitors to send them a dime, or a quarter via pay pal (such as AOLiza,) kind of like a tipping system. But at the same time, I don't know how I'd feel about hitting people up for money.
Anyone have thoughts or suggestions?

The agony, oh the pain. Finals have descended upon me in full force, and I am strung out on caffiene and Scheme. I know I've always been slow in responding to email -- it's not that I don't appreciate it, IP letters make my day. I just don't manage my time well. :-) Anyway, if I'm taking especially long to respond, please don't feel offended, I will be writing back to everyone over Christmas break. And that's a promise.

In the meantime, I'm going to pour myself another redbull and grapefruit juice cocktail, and get back to work.

Three items today:

The first is that, due to lack of entries, a "Contest" link has been added to the left navigation bar for now. Please send your submissions in!

Second, the ability to preview your comments before you post them has been added, so that you can preview what you say before you say it. Be sure to use it when you post to avoid putting your foot in your mouth or stepping on someone's toes!

And finally, the comment display code has been sped up tremendously, so that the comments pages will load much, much faster. The more comments there are, the more significant the speed up is going to be, and if there's less than 25 comments total for the topic there won't be a difference, but for things like the Passed By, which now has more than 800 comments, the page loads significantly faster.

If you notice anything that doesn't seem to be working right, be sure to let me know so I can check it out. Sorry about the spotty breakages this afternoon, but live pages are more fun to edit, after all.

Enjoy the enhancements, and if there's anything you think would enhance the site, don't hesitate to let me know! Thanks for the support!

You might have noticed the new icon in the corner of the page today. It's going to be there for 24 hours, because today's an important day -- its World AIDS Day, a day to education, raise awareness, and to remember those who have battled it. Click the icon for more info.

A day Without Weblogs is born out of a Day Without Art, a day of memory of those who have been taken from us by the virus. I know In Passing isn't technically a weblog, but I felt it was important to participate. Because while I feel incredibly thankful that no one I know has tested HIV+, there are others who aren't so fortunate.

It's been promised for a while and it's finally here: the one, the only "Name Your IP Admin Contest." You might have noticed that the cool folks over at Atomic Tonic all have nifty nicknames. Ditto for Hissyfit. Heck, even Halcy(j)o(h)n does. And I think Admin, while descriptive, is a little aloof.

Now there are those who might point out that all of those people chose their names themself, as a representation of themselves. Which is true. However, this way I can have the creative input of several thousand people. (Yep, that's right, the percentage of daily visitors who post is actually relatively small. Hello to all the lurkers.)

So send me your suggestions, via email please, inpassingorg@yahoo.com. Multiple submissions are welcomed, and you don't need to have a separate email for each. The winner of the contest gets fame, fortune and fabulous prizes, primarily in the form of the pride in knowing I picked your entry, and maybe some recognition on the site. Submissions shall be judged solely at my whim, though I may put the finalists up on the site for a poll. Oh, and if for some reason your suggestion is gender or age specific, I'm a female college student.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Two quick notes. Ads have returned with bla-bla's claim of having removed the popups, and Dreamhost's SQL server is down, which is causing this ugly errors on most of the pages. We apologize for the inconvenience, but I'm sure that it'll be back up soon after Thanksgiving is over.

I'd like to put in a sincere apology if any of you experienced the horror that is a pop-up ad during your visit to the site today. I was just as surprised as I'm sure any of you were to see them, since they were not part of my agreement with Bla-Bla. Furthermore the code that would implement them on the site is commented out (made null) on my end, so that means they're being sneaky.

Rest assured that I am composing a polite yet very grumpy email this very moment, and that the situation will hopefully be resolved soon. Terribly sorry.

Newsflash: 15 minutes later

It appears that some, but not all bla-bla sites are currently aflicted by the aforementioned pop-up plague. Until bla-bla can explain to me how and why the pop-ups appeared on my site, I will not be showing any of their ads. That's right, I'm breaching contract. Hell hath no fury like a webmistress whose readers are subjected to pop-ups.

It's now possible to comment or link to your favorite comments or overheard snippets, because the page ordering has been reversed. Before, all the most recent comments or snippets went on page 1, and all the old items were moved back and new pages were added to the end. Now, however, the oldest items are found on page 1, and newer items are added to the end, so that an old item will never change pages.

One slight hiccup is that no matter what, the front page of the site will have the 10 most recent snippets. If there are, for example, exactly 251 snippets, the 9 entries below the top entry will be duplicated on the second to last page, also. I apologize if this is confusing, but it was done this way so that you'll always have the ten most recent entries at your fingertips. On comment pages, however, the most recent page doesn't the most recent 25 entries, but rather only the entries for the page.

Questions? Comments? Suggestions?

This morning a drive in the machine that this site is hosted on went a little bonkers, but the happy Dreamhost crew remedied that problem, and so we're back online. However, when that part of the hosting machine was rebuilt, it ended up with an older version of PHP installed, which is the tool which powers the content on this site. This only caused one problem: Anytime anyone commented, one php feature broke and the content of the comment was lost forever. I've worked around this problem for now, but at the moment, no HTML can be used in the comments. I hope to have this resolved soon.

If you posted anything between when the site returned and around 4:15 pm PST, you might want to double check and make sure that what you had to share showed up. Thanks for hanging in there!

Added a new section, "Wisdom," in an attempt to pull more items out of the "Funny" category. (For although they were funny, it was humor of a different sort.)

Also, since all of you were being so clever and sending me wisecracks about the "passings," I felt there should be a place on the page for those to be shared. Enter the new "comments" system, where you can make smartass remarks about entries on the page, and share your sharp observations with other people.

...But that's probably not what you're noticing right now.

No doubt what's currently drawing your eye is a bit of animation, say, 468 by 60 pixels, asking you to "click here to maximize your internet connection," or "enjoy streaming radio," or (my personal favorite) "punch the monkey."

You probably think I've sold out.

I can feel the flaming emails coming my way already.

I mean, how could I, a student at Berkeley of all places, be working with 'the man,' right? Whatever happened to making a website for the sake of art, and not to try and make a profit?

Well, let's not jump to any conclusions, now. Slow down, hear me out, don't swear off the site just yet. Please.

You ask, "Give me the facts, just the facts, ma'am."

The cold, hard, truth: I have entered into an agreement with Bla-bla.com for the next 6 months wherein I become part of the Bla network. True, part of this does involve having ads on my site. But, there are some very good reasons that I joined.

First of all, Bla-bla provides publicity for the sites in their network, meaning that more readers would be able to find In Passing, (and therefore, there would be more 'passed by' comments for you to read. See? This is directly benefiting you, the reader, already.)

Second, yes, there are financial advantages to our partnership. (Hey-- stop making that face.) It costs money to run a website -- to pay for hosting mainly, but that costs me about $30 a month, and I'm a college student. Thirty dollars... that's 300 packages of ramen. That's 1/3 of my computer science textbook. That's 1/7 of that red leather skirt I wanted at Banana Republic. Admittedly, I'm getting off track here, and true, not all of those items are vital to my existence (I don't like ramen that much, actually) but you understand where I'm coming from.

Third, and most importantly, the people behind Bla-bla are actually pretty cool. I talked with them on the phone after they initially contacted me, and they said that their goal was to make a cool network of interesting, (alternative even,) websites that had smart content. (Yes, they kissed up to my ego.) It didn't hurt that one of my favorite sites (www.plif.com) was already a member, and that another site I admire (www.atomictonic.com) became a member around the same time I did. (Because, I mean, if the boys at plif are in, Bla-bla has to be cool, and not fucked up or something, right? Right? Oh. Anyway...) They also said that while they didn't promise that anyone would make a fortune from the ads, their eventual goal was to help webmasters (who so desired) to quit their day jobs and work on their website full time.

My head was filled with delusions of grandeur. Imagining being able to do what I do for fun, as a job. Of having to take trips 'for work purposes' of overhearing and observing... doing 'research' at swanky clubs in San Francisco, or better yet, cafes in Paris, train stations in London...

Yes, I was a little swept up, and of course I realize that chances of that actually happening are roughly slim to none.

But all the same, it seemed like a good start, and a good partnership. They don't own my soul, they don't even own the intellectual property rights to my content. At the end of 6 months I can sign on to stay with them longer, or we can shake hands and walk away.

I'm certain that at least someone out there, (if indeed anyone has bothered to read this far) is saying, "Hrm, sounds like she's really just trying to justify it to herself, not to her readers." Well, yes. I'm trying to explain to everyone, myself included. So that if after some long day I visit my page and become infuriated by the blight of the blinking lights of an ad, I don't snap, and blow away a bit of code to return the page to its plain purple splendour, just because I momentarily forgot about all the benefits.

And I'd be interested to hear what you think too. Love the ads? Hate the ads? Think the other sites in the network are brilliant or inane? Let me know. Thanks for listening. As I promised above, you're free to walk out on us (me, and In Passing) now if you want. But I hope you won't.

Let's give this a try, ok?