V3 is now live. I’ll tidy it up over the coming days, but please post and comment there from now.

http://stillsv3.wordpress.com/

I’m planning to try and shift the site to v3 early on the week starting Monday Dec 14th. I’ll wait until Sunday has finished everywhere in the world first :-)

Please don’t post or comment from the 14th until I put up a notice that posting is open again. I’ll make the notice on both v2 and v3.

I won’t necessarily complete the shift on that Monday, so allow at least until the end of Tuesday before assuming something has gone wrong…

A test of the blog import process showed that it can work fine, but I need all of you set up as authors on the new blog first – the software needs somewhere to map all the existing posts to.

So what’s going to happen next is that I will send out invites to join to the email address that I have for you. This might not be for a day or two as I’m working around an electrician and a re-wiring job at the moment.

If you already have a wordpress.com account then you can use that. Simply tell me the email address that is associated with it and ignore the invite.

If you haven’t got a wordpress.com account then follow the joining instructions.

Feel free to look around Stills v3 and make a test comment with your wordpress.com account ID so that I can set you up as an approved commenter as well as an author. But please note that the blog isn’t live yet and all the existing test content will be taken down at some point.

Yes, the theme for Stills v3 isn’t ideal. But that’s something to work on later rather than a priority right now.

http://stillsv3.wordpress.com/

Stills v2 is still the place for new posts and comments until I indicate otherwise.

It looks like we have a solution for the future hosting of Stills. Keep posting here in the short term while I set everything up. I *ought* to be able to import everything in v2 into v3, so I will declare a 24 hour moratorium on posting and commenting at some point to make sure that stuff doesn’t fall between stools during the transfer.

There will be a couple of administrative changes, and I’ll be unable to customise the look of the site to the extent that I’ve been used to, but as it looks like wordpress.com is the way to go then the basic working of the site will be identical to what we have now. I’ll deal with administrative changes as we go along, but one that you should be aware of right now is that I will no longer be able to email all comments to all users automatically. Users who currently read comments via RSS will be able to go on doing that. User who don’t will have to change to RSS, I’m afraid. Contact me privately for assistance if necessary.

I’ll announce any moratorium as a new post here. You’ll know the new version is live when you get an email about signing up to it (sign up required to keep the commenting restricted to members).

Thanks to both Rex and Matt for helping me think this through.

Keep posting and commenting :-)

Stills is four in just a few weeks.

Even with the recent kerfuffle, it has been enormous fun. I hope contributors both old and new feel the same. I hope for more fun in the future.

In the near term, though, I’m going to create a bit of a problem by letting my hosting contract expire in the new year. Stills was never meant to be the sub-directory of auspiciousdragon.net that it now is (if you recall, Blogger locked up and I moved it in exasperation one day). It will be an unfortunate side effect of me winding up most of my net presence that Stills will become homeless.

There are options, such as moving to wordpress.com. Each option has advantages and disadvantages that I’d need to spend a little time to explore. We might end up with something a bit less flexible, for example, than the current set up.

My purpose in writing this before doing the research is to find out whether any contributor who has hosted server space might consider taking the site over. I’d happily go on administering (or jointly administering) it. Please contact me privately if you think you might be able to provide Stills with a new home.

(Yes, I continue to call it Stills. No, the lawyer hasn’t yet gone away. Yes, it is all very tedious. Nothing of real concern)

Later this week I plan to update the WordPress install and do some housekeeping around the site. I’ll be deleting any draft post with a 2008 date unless you shout soon. I’ve already deleted tags that have experimentally appeared (talking of which, you can stop the tag option appearing on your publishing screen by selecting ’screen options’ top right and unticking it).

There might be a time when the site is unavailable. If you can’t access the site assume that the upgrade is the reason unless the problem seems to go on for more than an hour or two.

WP, or the server, or the database is behaving slightly odd. Nothing major, just missing comments and unexpectedly sending comments for moderation. I’m going to do an update to the latest version of WordPress sometime in the next day. Don’t be alarmed if you can’t access the site for a short while. If anything goes wrong which might mean that the site is going to be down for more than an hour or two, I’ll email independently of the site’s communications network.

You all may have found the RSS feed that gets automatically added to the address bar by now.  However there are some RSS options:

feed://www.auspiciousdragon.net/stills/wp-rss.php

is a feed without images embedded

feed://www.auspiciousdragon.net/stills/wp-rss2.php

is a feed with images embedded.  Precisely how this behaves depends on your newsreader and its settings.

feed://auspiciousdragon.net/stills/wp-comments_rss2.php

is a feed containing only comments

[in each case you might need to replace “feed” with “http” depending on your newsreader/browser

There are also atom and rdf feeds.  If these are of interest, you can read about them here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Feeds

If, like me, you decide to take the comments feed then let me know and I’ll remove your name from the email cascade for comments notifications.