Black As My Soul

Because It Made Me Think

Because I want to be free.

Number One: Make art. There is value in the creative experience.

Number Two: Continue to learn about my crafts. I will exploit this. It will inform my art.

Number Three: Know myself. There is no one like me. I will exploit this. It will inform my art.

Number Four: Ignore the rule makers. If I am doing One, Two and Three correctly I will break the rules. All of them. God I hope I break the rules.

Number Five: Everyone is a critic. I am a critic. Don't listen to any critic. See Number One.

Number Six: Change is inevitable. See One, Two and Three.

Number Seven: My art is intimate.

MovableType Template Guidance, Please

I have updated the software behind this web site to MovableType 4, but my templates are stuck somewhere back in version 1.x with a smattering of new functionality patched in here and there.

I'm not looking to overhaul my site, necessarily. I do want to retain the essential current look, feel and color-scheme. I want to maintain what I think is a light-weight design that is primarily HTML and CSS

But I am flying the flag of defeat. My interface is inconsistent, and my categories and headings obscure the structure. Finally, maintaining all of the templates individually is counter-intuitive/counter-productive when I have a marvelous tool full of widgets, plugins and modules.

What stops me before I start is the sense that migrating from my old templates to the new template system is going to take herculean effort.

Has anyone done this? Does anyone have good pointers on resources?

I'm not looking for someone to do the work for me, but I do need help in determining where to start and looking at how to break the project into chunks that I know I can manage.

In short, I'm looking for a design mentor.

Barring that, I'm looking for tips, thoughts, and feedback.

Many thanks in advance for your ideas, my friends.

The Deciding Factor

Researching possibilities for a pen name, I came upon the following:

sinner

noun
a person who sins (without repenting)

And that was all I needed to see.

Sinner?

At your cervix service.

Updated: Good News/Bad News

Since I switched the comment system, I have had no spam, which was the goal.

However, I haven't gotten any real comments, either.

Now I'm worried.

*****

Update:

I received email this afternoon from lovely people who tried valiantly to comment, only to be thwarted by the CAPTCHA text. And this was because there was no graphic text to enter into the correct dialog, and therefore no way to authenticate.

I am nothing if not frustrated and defeated. I don't know what the change was between when the CAPTCHA text worked and when it didn't. I wouldn't have turned it on for the site if it didn't work in my tests, but today it didn't work for me, either.

So it is now off.

The plug-in I was using before the upgrade is no longer working, the tools built-in to the blogging software are not working, and I am throwing my hands up in disgust.

I don't want to have to turn on moderation again, but it looks like that's the only way I will be able to keep the bad guys from abusing you and me both.

In the mean time, I'm republishing my site with the CAPTCHA off. We will see how it goes.

Yours In Frustration,

~Soulless

Updating Site Now

Comments are working now, so far as I can tell. Anything I wrote recently should be commentable.

There are a few small glitches.

Right now, the comments function does not remember your name, your email address or your URL. If you like this feature, you will be annoyed that it isn't working yet. I'm trying to correctly link the JavaScript file in my template, but so far the two times I've attempted to fix it, I have broken the template and it won't publish new entries.

The other issue is cosmetic. Basically I need to update the site style sheet. I'm not happy with the way comments are presented. Right now my page templates are now a combination of MovableType 2.x, 3.x and 4.0. The only way I'm going to fix it completely is to redesign my site around the new templates and the new template tags.

That will come in time.

Thanks for your patience.

All For CAPTCHA

Yeah, I went and had to mess with well enough and now comments are pretty broken.

Sorry.

Feel free to send me email at this domain. My email alias is sinner.

If you do instant messaging, I do that, too. Add sou11355 on AIM or Yahoo!

Hopefully I get comments fixed in the near future.

Watch this space.

Thank the Gods!

I just upgraded to MovableType 4.

It didn't go smoothly…

But if you can see this, then the blog is still kicking.

And I am breathing deep, deep sighs of relief.

Skip the rest of this post if you're not interested in the minutia.

Sweet mother of fuck was I scared the whole damned thing was gone.

How was I supposed to know how badly it could go? I had performed major and minor upgrades in exactly the same fashion in the past. When I found the new version of MT was available I quickly downloaded it, then uploaded new version over the old. All that remained was to log in to commence the database upgrade.

But there was no logging in. Only an error message.

And I had begun the upgrade without first doing the most important thing I could have done: a backup.

Yeah. I know.

I nearly gave up. It took me days to see possible avenues of reconstruction. I pulled down a copy of my database just in case… I don't know. Maybe I could start over and upload the data some way?

Then I started deleting crap so that I could try again by uploading the new blog software cleanly--no residue from the old, you know? But I ended up over-writing my index.html so that the front page was gone. Just a generic MT homepage placeholder remained.

After some digging, I managed to find a copy of it. I had to look in the caches of many web browsers. After uploading it, at least the site *looked* intact. Even if it was still broken.

It really sucked to be unable to log in. I wanted to say at least that I was down and would be back soon. If it had gone much longer, I would have resorted to editing the front page manually.

I finished the clean upload. I had first deleted the contents of the static files folder, then basically everything but the index file and the configuration file from the root directory.

That worked. Yesterday, after days, I was finally able to log in to my blog.

Then I wrote the first draft of this entry and...

There were errors my the templates. Old template tags that are no longer supported. The software would save new entries but it wouldn't publish them.

Tonight I was able to eradicate those old tags. And I finally published this entry.

There are still some fixes and kinks to work out. But I am alive.

I'm alive I tell you.

Updated: New Links

I have linked to some new (to me) male bloggers. I had a few in the past, but new to the roster are Pain Healer and Sadistic Excess.

I grouped the men into a new category called "Conspiring." So I am "Lusting" for the girls and "Conspiring" with the boys. The "Loving" category is for female bloggers who don't write about sex as a focus, but who are thoughtful, witty, and therefore sexy.

I added other categories, too. I broke out sexuality and BDSM advocacy groups into a category called "Strengthening," and added a "Deepening" category for sites that are more informational and instructional, again with regard to sexuality and the BDSM lifestyle.

I Think I'm Done With That Project

Four years and two moves later, I finished categorizing every post.

I just spent the last four hours categorizing stuff from July of 2003.

Wow, man. Holy fuck was I nuts.

I still think I'm crazy, just not so on-the-edge or over-the-top as then.

I found myself wondering if it was the meds. But, no. I remember. It was a whole confluence of things.

I never want to go back there. There is stuff I want to revisit and resolve, but that whole situation was something I hope I never experience again. I was in constant emotional pain.

It's so not like that anymore.

Thank you all.

Thank you, Flower.

I Have Decided to Edit My Old Stories

It's been a long time. I don't know if they have aged well, or not… But I want to go back and look at what I started.

There are also any number of stories and situations that I never completed, for a variety of personal and creative reasons. I don't promise to finish stories that are three or four years old, but It could happen.

What I want to do for the most part is to re-edit them into a more traditional and linear format. My old blog entries (and therefore stories) came from a period of time when I felt reasonably safe with a browser window open to my site all day long. Any and every pervy thought made it past my (admittedly weak) internal censor and on line. I'm not saying that was good or bad. However, in the current iteration of this site, I think it makes the stories harder to read.

Before, all of my posts only had a time stamp. There was also no title or category. So text in a post could be stand-alone or refer to the one before. Sometimes I intended my posts to do both—It was intentionally free-form and stream-of-consciousness.

When I brought them here to this site and this blog tool, categorizing and titling the posts broke them. There I things I wrote that I have no idea any longer what I meant or who it might have been directed to.

Suffice it to say, instead of bending this tool back to fit those posts, I'm going to re-edit to make the stories flow better and to possibly make them more portable.

I don't intend to make many changes to the original posts. They will retain all of the original spelling and grammar errors and reside at the same URLs.

But I am going to take the old stories and dress them in new clothes.

I won't promise this will happen tomorrow or anything. It always took me many hours to write those little vignettes and time feels so fleeting, anymore. But it is something I feel inspired to do of late.

Thanks, RG. I still love your work.

Still Reliving The Past

I'm finding a lot of spelling and grammar errors in my old posts. But still you kept reading.

You're really a trooper.

Thanks for sticking with me.