When I was younger and got close to a pretty woman, I would have certain reactions. I'll leave it at that. But don't hang up yet, this post is actually going somewhere...

You know you've been spending too much time in the social networks when you see a pretty girl in the supermarket and your index finger starts to twitch.  You want to click her.

Photo albums now have dates on them. The photo page is now sorted a) by number of votes, and then b) by reverse creation date. This puts new and/or popular stuff on page 1 instead of the oldest stuff first.

Since the avatar collections are shared amongst 'regular' and 'adult' websites, I've moved the adult oriented avatars to a separate collection with a tag to indicate that they are adult oriented. The site you are viewing this message on isn't configured as an adult site, which is a long way of saying that the inappropriate images have vanished from here. 

All the teeny little cartoon avatars have been removed. I'm trying to standardize on 100x100 avatars. If you had an avatar in one of these other collections, I mapped it to the closest match I could find in the 'large' collection. If my choice isn't right for you, feel free to change it - or you can always upload your own avatar.

Added the top rated photo to the front page. Also removed some of the forum/weblog stuff (Top Articles, Recent Comments, Recent articles, Categories, etc.) from the menubar when you're not looking at articles. This is a performance issue - so that we're not wasting time looking up articles (which you obviously aren't looking at) every time you vote on a photorater page.

Check to see if new comments have been added since your last login - and 'open' the 'Recent Comments' menu if that's the case. 

If a certain number of people rates an image as offensive it won't be shown, but the site admin(s) can reset the counter and also block images completely - this is to reduce mischief. The exception is the top rated photo on the front page -  since this has higher visibility, offensive ratings have a more immediate impact.

Image uploads - now preserves the last used server folder name so you can upload to the same folder repeatedly instead of being required to change the folder name each time.

Weblog URL's now have 'weblog' added to the path (i.e. sitename/weblog/mike instead of just sitename/mike). I mentioned this change was necessary several months ago but finally got around to doing it.  This was to prevent a naming conflict if somebody chose something like 'forums' or 'tags' as a username; since these are already used as system paths and could have made their weblog inaccessible. The old paths will still work - provided they don't conflict with system paths. If that's the case the system path will win.

There will likely be a few more bug fixes and useability enhancements, but this concludes the development phase of version 3.0. 

The Dixie Chicks are learning some hard lessons about marketing.  The current tour isn't selling many tickets. Their target market was the country music scene until those unfortunate political quotes a few years back. Country music isn't very political. Actually it is, but not in ways you think. Country music is very republican, and extremely patriotic. If you want to dis the president, you need to be in a different market - for instance the pop or rock-n-roll markets; which were born of rebellion. There, you can criticize most anybody or anything and get away with it.

They've actually got the right idea - they are more or less abandoning country radio - which won't play them anyhow, and trying to re-invent themselves as pop stars. But now their name is a liability. 'Dixie' isn't a very good rock-n-roll name. It still reeks of country. So the best way forward is to drop the twang, learn how to dance ala Madonna and Brittney, and just become the Chicks.

They might just stand a chance. 

The RSS feed aggregator is mostly functional now. Registered members can import their own feeds, or you can browse those news/weblog sources which others have made available. 

Located here.

Enjoy.