It has been a while since I have "blogged" anything here, and I figure there's no better time to do that than right now, to not only wish you the happiest of holiday seasons, but to also test-drive SLR's new template work in progress.
The holiday seasons are a strange time for me. I have to admit, I often end up ranting about Christmas more often than I end up praising it. The fact is, Christmas is not really my favorite holiday and often just causes a good deal of stress for me.
That being said, I realize that Christmas is a very emotional, religious time of year for many. Please accept my holiday greetings from SL Reports, from our family to yours, this holiest of seasons.
I've personally not been up to a heck of a whole lot lately. I have been blogging randomly about real-life issues... hoping one of my unused domains will become a great self-sustaining outlet for my thoughts.
Nothing much going on in Second Life... at all. We have made a decision for the SL Reports CEO replacement, just to update you. However, I have not moved towards making this final right now. I am thinking at this point that it will be after Christmas, before the new year.
This not only allows everyone some breathing room during a busy time of year, but it also allows me to sit back and oversee the SLR redesign and get everything set back up before a new CEO moves in.
To be honest, a lot of the delay has been purely on my end. I have been caught up and busy in random things, as has everyone else. Not much effort has been made to move into the CEO replacement quickly. A lot of it is the time of year, again. But hey, I've ran this company for almost a year now... so I figure a week or two more won't kill me.
Real-life work continues as usual. It's Monday, which means my sister – whose small urban weekly newspaper does not boast an in-house graphic artist (imagine that) – has sent me a slew of ads to build before her paper goes to press this afternoon. I also have two ads at this point to build for SL Reports, several contracted jobs due "ASAP" as always, and a number of personal projects which have unfortunately taken a backburner to more important things.
As The Bangles would say, "It's just another Manic Monday."
I'll troll the usual sources later today for some good Second Life news for SLR, but until then... stay warm, stay level-headed, and don't crash too hard when your family pulls the plug on SL and tells you to get your ass in the kitchen to help make Christmas cookies!
Due to the lack of involvement and participation at the MetaSnort web site, we will be closing the site after December 31, 2007. At that time, all (or any) traffic that tries to go to MetaSnort will be taken directly to SL Reports. We had hoped that the site would "take off" and become "the" social news reporting site for all things in the metaverse, but after the last couple months, that doesn't seem to be something that users are interested in.
We actually don't "blame" this on any particular reason, other than the fact that there just really isn't any interest for something like this, at this time. SL Reports will continue to do a fine job of pointing to and reporting on interesting stories in Second Life. Although it will not cover every single blog post and news site that reports on SL which could be linked from a site like MetaSnort, I'm sure that users of SL Reports will continue to return to the site for stories that they're interested in.
The MetaSnort site will remain active through the month of December. Ater that, all traffic will be directed to the SL Reports web site, at http://sl-virtual-world-news.com
It came to my attention a few days ago that the newly upgraded comment system wasn't working quite the was that it was supposed to. After a few tests of my own and talking to a couple other people, I realized that the problem wasn't limited to me or the browser that I use. I put a notice right before the submit button, letting commenters know that they should copy their text to the clipboard before posting, as it might take several tries to actually get comments to post.
I contacted the comment component designer to let him know about the problem. He did a few things and got the same results. The next day, a new version of the comment component was delivered and has just been upgraded. After running it through a few tests, it looks like everything is working the way it should.
I'll be watching this over the next few days, very closely (something I didn't do when I first upgraded the component) to make sure that it continues to work right. Even though this is a minor announcement and not posted on the front page, please let me know if you have any problems.
Hello everyone, this article is actually quite personal. And I'm doing this to get the opinions of others on a matter that has evolved into a war between my former partner and I. Aside from being a freelance writer for SL Reports, I am also a shape-maker. For those that aren't familiar with what a shape-maker does-- I create shapes that provides avatars with a distinct look to compliment the skin of his/her choice. I haven't found a place yet to market and promote my shapes, but I'm in the process of doing so. Hopefully in a few weeks I'll accomplish that.
Well, to make a long story short, my partner and I broke up for numerous reasons. That aspect I wish not to go into, as I respect his privacy and think that it would be unfair of me to do such a thing. However, when things suddenly turned for the worst, in a fit of rage and vindictiveness-- my ex requested that I no longer use the name (which I will not mention lol) to represent my business. As you can imagine, I was absolutely outraged. When we were together, he was fine with me using the name. I guess you can even say that our separate businesses became a union because of this. I became the Baby Phat to his Phat Farm, for lack of a better example.
I would like to take this last opportunity of the day to bring up a very important matter regarding the Second Life media community. My very dear friend Marvel Ousley made official today via an email what she had told me privately several days ago – that she was retiring from SLNN.com.
For 14 months, SLNN.com has provided the Second Life community with fabulous AP Style journalism, mostly because of the tireless - frequently stressful - effort put forth by Marvel. In her time at SLNN, the organization often "scooped" real life media in important Second Life news matters. She truly has much to be proud of in all she has accomplished.
I understand that Marvel, much like me, has real-life matters she needs to attend to... matters that trump anything involved in Second Life. All I can say is that personally I have known Marvel for a quite some time in SL terms. She will be sorely missed. Marvel and SLNN.com have been great friends of SL Reports and JT Financial for a very long time. On behalf of both organizations I would like to wish her best of luck in her future endeavors.
Updates to the SL Reports website, this morning, includes a new "captcha" verification that will make sure that people commenting are actually human, and not spam robots. Since the comments system was installed on the site, about 50% of the total comments have been spam. In the past, all of them were manually deleted by site administration and only remained visible for just a few minutes.
The captcha question is only asked if you are not logged in to the site and are an anonymous user. You'll still have the ability to post anonymous comments but you'll need to answer the captcha question before submitting.
The upgraded comments also gives the site administrators the ability to block specific IP addresses (or rage of IP addresses) from leaving comments. This is done for known spammers, but may interfere in ways we're unaware of, at this time. If you are blocked from leaving comments on the site and you feel that this is an error, please use the "contact us " page to let the site administration know. We'll do our best to explain why or fix things, if there's an error.
In an effort to reduce some of the workload for new administrators while remaining an "open forum" for your comments and opinions, this change will be benefitial for everybody.
Opinions 
