SquidgeWorld Archive

So while we've been up for almost five months, things aren't quite as busy as they were over on Peja's Wonderful World of Makebelieve - at least back in the day. Way back in 2011, Peja and I put together a contest that ran monthly, and I'm thinking about starting it up again. What do you think?

The original contest information is here: https://www.squidge.org/peja/cgi-bin/contest.php

And if you're interested, here's how it would work:
1) On the first of the month, a script would run. It would pull:
a. One random story that was posted the previous month
b. One random comment (not a kudos, but an actual comment)
2) Entrants are vetted for validity. Validity just means it's an actual story and not some spam story/comment.
3) Vetted winners would be notified via the email address on their profile, as well as posted to a news story here.
4) Winners have up until the first of the following month to claim their prize.
5) Prizes are a $10 gift certificate to Amazon, Apple, or (possibly) Google Play if interest is there.

Winners would be:
One person whose story was posted the previous month
One person who made a comment the previous month
The author of the story where the comment was made

When you're adding items to the SquidgeWorld Archive, you'll now notice the optional language of Spanish. This is there to indicate your story is in Spanish - OR - that you've translated a Spanish story into English. That option is available under the "This work is a remix, a translation, a podfic, or was inspired by another work" section under the "Language" drop down.

Questions? Ping me!

We were down due to horrific storms here in the Pacific Northwest. No power, Internet, etc for 7 days. Questions? Ping me here or read my article at this link: https://squidgestatus.dreamwidth.org/81454.html

Every website needs downtime from time to time for maintenance. Well, normally for SquidgeWorld, this means downtime on Sundays from 7am to 7:30am Pacific Time (15:00 to 15:30 UTC). So if you are on the site on Sundays during this time period and it suddenly goes down, you'll know it's because of downtime.

We are back from an extended downtime!

Long story short: A power outage took us down

Long story: See, the more we hurt our environment, the more our environment is going to fight back against us. Here in the Pacific Northwest, we had a massive storm early Wednesday. Like torrential rains and 50MPH gusts. I wouldn't know, because I slept through it all (the power of melatonin, y'all!). Anyway, we lost power about 3am on Wednesday, and it's been out until about half an hour ago. It probably would have been longer, except the power line that was down was hanging over the middle of the street - COMPLETELY dangerous.

Here's the thing. Some people may yell at me when we go down, and I get it. But I can't afford to do all that I do in a datacenter. I have an amazing ISP, and for $100/month, we have a 1Gb/1Gb static fiber connection. So I put together a few machines, and host them in my garage. For the bandwidth that we use (between 750Gb and 1Tb per month) and the number of services we offer, it would cost me thousands of dollars per month. Why do you think The OTW does fundraising and comes away with hundreds of thousands of dollars per year? Sure, they're huge, and I'm just me. But if I tried to do this in a datacenter, I'd go broke. And Squidge.org has been around for 27 years come this Fall; I don't want to see it go away.

Keep track of us on Twitter for the latest!: SquidgeORG

So you might notice that my previous post about database corruption, posted yesterday, is gone. Why?

Because the f*cking database corrupted again soon after I checked and double-checked yesterday that things were fine.

This morning I took the site down and did some major rework, and things appear to be working normally. Database backups are working just fine again, and there doesn't appear to be any corruption. I ran through some additional things that will hopefully prevent corruption from rearing it's ugly head yet again. And I hope I didn't just jinks it.

Sometime today I'll get the fics that were lost (4, all mine) reloaded. And there was one person whose account was lost as they signed up a couple of hours ago. But other than that, there should be no data loss.

Questions? If so, come find me sobbing in the corner.

So when AO3 was down last night, I was reading off of here instead - because there are a metric shitton (that's a technical term, y'all!) of fics on SqWA that just aren't on AO3. And as my iPad glared brightly, I realized that no - SquidgeWorld has no dark mode.

Well, now it does!

If you, like me, crave a dark mode for reading at night, this is for you. Simply scroll to the bottom of the page and you'll see a menu heading called "Customize" with the link, "Choose Skin ↓" menu item. Click on that, and you'll see the two skins here on SquidgeWorld, SqWA Skin and Dark Mode Skin. There's also "Default", but that's just SqWA Skin. Simply click on the "Dark Mode Skin" option, and that skin will appear on a new page. Scroll to the bottom again, and click the "Use" button which is on the lower right (there are three buttons: Use, Preview, and Set for Session) and you will have the Dark Mode Skin set for yourself.

To change back, go back to the "Choose Skin ↓" menu item and click "Default", and you'll be back in the regular skin.

Questions? Ping me!

Based on some discussions with another person about tagging, I thought I'd bring a question to those folks who are interested. This will be posted as both a blogpost on SquidgeWorld, as well as a blogpost over at SquidgeStatus's Dreamwidth account.

Alternate Universe. There's a tag that brings up all kinds of responses. I mean, who doesn't like an amazing coffee shop AU, or maybe Steve McGarrett is a Sentinel and Danny Williams is a guide? It brings up all sorts of possibilities.

But it gives me a bit of a headache as well. And that's why I would like some input.

In Peja's Wonderful World of Makebelieve (WWOMB), which of course is now SquidgeWorld Archive (SqWA), we had many different AU type tags. There's the easy ones that are true equivalents - so "Alternate universe" and "AU" mean exactly the same, so I kept "Alternate Universe" and made "AU" an equivalent. But there are others that I had a hard time with. Are they generic enough to make equivalent of Alternate Universe, or should they be standalone? And that's where you come in.

Below is a list of every current AU tag in SqWA, and either "standalone" or "equivalent of X". I made these choices on my own, but I can already see changing some. But I need another brain, because goodness knows I'm not using mine 100% these days. So if you would be so kind as to look over these and if any make you feel one way or another (especially if it contradicts what I've already chosen), please yell at me so I can change it.

Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence: equivalent to Alternate Universe
Alternate Universe - Dark: equivalent to Alternate Universe
Alternate Universe - Time Travel: equivalent to "Time Travel" tag.
Alternate Universe: standalone and parent to other tags
AU - Arthurian Fantasy: equivalent to Alternate Universe
AU - ATF: equivalent to Alternate Universe. NOTE: ATF = Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms, so profession AU
AU - Canon Divergent: equivalent to Alternate Universe
AU - Centaurs: standalone
AU - Children: standalone
AU - Fantasy: standalone
AU - First Meeting: equivalent to "First Meeting" tag
AU - Fusion: equivalent to "fusion" tag
AU - Gender Bender: equivalent to "Gender-Bender" tag
AU - High School: equivalent to Alternate Universe
AU - Human: standalone
AU - Humanoid Animals: standalone
AU - Immortality: equivalent to "immortality" tag
AU - Magic: standalone
AU - Mpreg: equivalent to "mpreg" tag
AU - Not Dead: standalone
AU - Occupation: equivalent to Alternate Universe
AU - Out Of Time: equivalent to Alternate Universe
AU - Rentboy: standalone
AU - Sentinel/Guide: standalone
AU - Shape Shifters: equivalent to "Supernatural - shape shifting"
AU - Slave!Fic: equivalent to "SlaveFic"
AU - Teen Age: equivalent to Alternate Universe
AU - Time Travel: equivalent to "Time Travel" tag
AU - Vampires: equivalent to "Supernatural - Vampires"
AU - Wake Up Gay: standalone
AU - Were Animals: standalone
AU - Zombies: equivalent to "zombies"
AU: equivalent to Alternate Universe