Fanfiction Reviews, Interesting Links, and General Geekery
In case you were wondering, the lack of posts wasn’t because I’d abandoned this blog. It’s because my host’s PHP install is broken and the admin panel wouldn’t load.
I’ve finally managed to figure out how to work around that, so expect to see a large dump of new postings within the next week or two. 
Well, I’ve finally got my blog back up. It seems that there’s some kind of bug (impossible to trigger in the default configuration, I’d assume) in the newest version of PHP 5 which causes ./ and ../ includes to fail, and which doesn’t play nice with apache’s DirectoryIndex-based redirection. (the feature that lets www.foo.com load www.foo.com/index.html) WordPress makes use of such things in several important places.
I’ve managed to work around that by using symlinks for the ../ includes and by removing the ./ or ../ wherever I found it, but I don’t know what the security implications of such a change are and the post preview window doesn’t work correctly now.
To anyone who reads this, happy holidays. Hopefully, I’ll have time during the break to whip up a few programs to share.
As it is, I do have a few improvements to announce. First, I’ve set up a nice new cocktail of anti-spam tools that’s working out wonderfully. (A mix of Akismet, Spam Karma 2, and Bad Behaviour)
Second, I’ve installed Rudd-O’s XHTML validator and my site is now completely XHTML valid, and will stay that way.
Third, I installed a plugin named Sociable, so if you view any of my posts individually, you get that nice little row of icon-links to social bookmarking sites.
The Vanished Fanfiction Archive
Ever read a wonderful fic, and then go to tell a friend a few years later and find that the site is dead? In most cases, authors have the foresight to also send their fics to somewhere like Fanfiction.net or the RAAC archive, but not always. “Quantum Destinies” and “Trial by Tenderness” are two notable examples.
That’s where my new site comes in. Whenever I become aware of a decent fanfic that has dropped off the web because the author seems to have vanished, I’ll do my best to dig up a copy, and then share it. In some cases, it’s as simple as digging into the 300MB+ personal archive of fiction that has built up thanks to my “save it as you read it” policy.
Having reviewed my schedule, I now know I may not be able to find very much time to post for a while. As such, I’ve cleaned up my Fanfiction.net favorites lists and at least 90% of the stories listed are stories I haven’t had time to review.
I will continue to add stories as I find time to do so and I’ll add a link to it from the main site during it’s next update.
Bad Behavior has blocked 55 access attempts in the last 7 days.
