Struggled to get this written--first at hive.blog, then @Ecency's draft queue, and then (when the first attempt to save turned out rather impossible) back at Hive; the Ecency app was lagging away while I leapt back in. Perhaps an auto-update will remedy this?
About one month since we last met, and I'm only rushing in this next writeup as I must for reasons I'll disclose later on.
Good news first: ByetHost wikis can--and do--work. (For which you can thank a fellow vandal fighter at the old Referata--and his own short-lived ByetHost experiment--not to mention quick and easy installation of the latest MediaWiki version, 1.35, via Softaculous.)
Bad news: If you're on a free hosting plan of theirs, better do something fast before those pesky CPU timeouts get to you and your site; so far, I've had to put up with three while setting up my new creative-venture wiki. (More on that in a subsequent post.) That much slowly dawned on me from the time we launched on October 13, and given our new home was in the alpha stage, it became less pretty going into November. (The heavy job queue resulting from constant updates of various templates for the newly renamed Tovasala Dictionary--a revival of the Relformaide counterpart on Referata--clearly has not helped. Especially when they're some of the site's most heavily used so far!)
Speaking of the Tovasala Dictionary, this version's entries were not in demo this time--they immediately went live in alpha. And after three and a half years of Referata tests! At press time, an estimated 250 of them were accompanied by six Snippet listings (among them a successful recode of what I call "The Merchant's Test", after the title of a Canterbury Tale by Chaucer) and 76 morpheme tables. Much more remains on the horizon, chief among them the return--and a rewrite/re-upload--of that much-vaunted grammar.
Swinging back on topic: I only came back because, this afternoon, I started worrying about those CPU limits as I was finishing up maintenance on the template documentation pages. (If you've been on Wikipedia a lot, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.) During week one, I set up a custom Documentation namespace under the number "050", believing it was the same as "50"--only for trouble to set in once it resolved as "40" instead. Moved the docs back to the Project namespace where they started, removed the first "0", and moved them back under the correct number as time and nerve permitted. (Three-digit NS numbers starting with 0 are octal--now you know.) Until today, that also left a handful of future docs in queue limbo. As for the remainder, it'll have to wait a bit, because...
After this goes to press, I'll finally open up my anthro commission line--just to get enough cash for 1-3 months of paid hosting and get the CPU warnings off my back, and a little extra for a long-delayed Last.fm subscription. (If @bleuxwolf's reading this now...) Because the sooner I pay them, the better. Furthermore, I already have PayPal for this. If only you saw me at Unspooled mascot Sam back in 2015. Which reminds me...
- Those first 1,000 words will finally come to pass after the doc-page backlog is cleared. About time my upstate aunt got them! Late last month, during timeout #1, it seemed that at least 100 steps of a newly regenerated Veritas--or the long-promised 200 if we were lucky--would get us out of that hole. Alas, after step #69, it was not to be; blame the ongoing storage shortage of our spare laptop.
- And for the next 1-3 days, that spare laptop may be in for a checkup. Starting with an experiment with a little something called "DISM" via Command Prompt--just so I can reclaim at least 50-100 MB of space eaten up over the months by "System and reserved". Need we mention that's now at 19.2 GB out of 29.1? The commissions, as I've hinted before, should dearly cover the expenses for a replacement.
- As we head back to the Dixwells: Volume 5 of Reflections never happened on October 14. In the real world, setting up the new wiki took precedence over the next six "movements" (as the Briarwood team now call them); in their own, the Nature Islanders were busy transferring animators from recently hurricane-striken Louisiana (memories of Katrina) to a patchwork of nearby facilities all across Panama City. A slate of Halloween tunes was called off till next spring, out of respect for a beheading that occurred in suburban Paris--because to quote the Tropers, "Nothing Is Scarier". And starting on November 8, Kino Lorber gave Briarwood an entire week off--thanks to Biden's victory in the polls, the recent Independence celebrations back home in Dominica, and concerns over of Tropical Storm Eta's possible impact in Florida. Come tomorrow, it's back to work en route to the Thanksgiving edition of their visual-album series--and the final country on my explr.fm map, Monaco. (Even that might be on hold till further notice...)
- Moral of the story: Never depict Muhammad.
- And speaking of Dixwells and music: Late this morning, during the last hours of this timeout lull, I figured I could finally compose something resembling a score for my series--with a little help from our old friends at RANDOM.org. (And all because, on a whim, I felt like studying and decoding the basic melody of Peter Cetera's "Glory of Love", an early mainstay of Adanson's in Marigot.) Details on the methodology next time around--and stay tuned for the results at my soon-to-be Musescore hub. (Wish I could do that with MW's Score extension, but recent security concerns have insisted otherwise.)
- Beyond that, you're in for a long wait as concerns the next Notebook--but the seeds have already been sown at that new site's fledgling reincarnation of the Dixwell Dossier.
- Those first 1,000 words will finally come to pass after the doc-page backlog is cleared. About time my upstate aunt got them! Late last month, during timeout #1, it seemed that at least 100 steps of a newly regenerated Veritas--or the long-promised 200 if we were lucky--would get us out of that hole. Alas, after step #69, it was not to be; blame the ongoing storage shortage of our spare laptop.
Last but not least: The subdomain name still stands, but the ByetHost number is different from what I anticipated. Once the upgrade goes through, I'll announce what I got; until them, PM me at reddit.com/u/Routhwick (where I'll make a pitch at r/furry).
And thus begins my most demanding week in quite some time--perhaps since I came to the States. If I don't come back here before November's over, it'll be too soon. Until then, please take care, stay connected, wipe everything down...and God bless.
All of us, and Mr. Floyd's family.
P.S. We broke our own record--again. Details next we meet.
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