plasticbag.org

Today I am mostly writing the gay section for Time Out‘s London Guide.

Yet again, Barbelith is creaking under the strain of bandwidth that I can’t afford to maintain. This month looks likely to be running at the 600Mb a day mark. And, remaining sporadically employed as I do, I can’t afford the $100 – $125 a month that this costs. So I’ve finally snapped…

VOLUNTARY SUBSCRIPTIONS VIA PAYPAL: If you would like to help pay for the cost of maintaining barbelith (and the barbelith underground), then you can do so by donating $2.50 a month via Paypal. You can cancel your subscription at any time with no notice, via Paypal itself. It’s PURELY voluntary – it won’t affect your ability to use the site if you don’t subscribe, but barbelith really does need support if it is to continue running at this level.

If I can get fifty subscribers, we can pay the bandwidth bills and also move to Pair.com‘s “High Volume” account, which would give us room to nearly double in size if necessary. And if we can get one hundred subscribers, we can actually get a Barbelith Server Of Our Own. This would mean no more time-outs, substantially fewer massive server errors ever ten minutes, and a considerably smaller chance of the whole damn site going tits-up every six months. As soon as we get enough people to get a server, we won’t accept any more donations. This is literally JUST to cover bandwidth and maintenance costs.

You can: Donate $2.50 (around £1.75) a month
Or: Donate $5 (around £3) a month.

Recent Questions asked about Movable Type:

1) Is a search facility worthwhile?, Like in Greymatter?
2) Being able to delete multiple posts (and scroll through entries by page) would be really nice…
3) A limit to Blogger exports?

Footprints:

1) Does Derek take himself too seriously?

Quote of the Day:

Julie Burchill: “The Evening Argus is probably the only read in the world WORSE than Time Out…”

Ok. I give up. If everyone insists that I am the TheGrapevine, then I might as well admit to it.

Phew. A return to the mud-brown background of yesteryear after a month of stolen background. It was kind of supposed to be a joke, but I kept forgetting to turn it back.

Because I can’t resist a challenge, I present Pingzilla in Paris:

Anyone have a solution for my Movable Type Error?

Amazon have redesigned their book information pages – so that they now include actual excerpts from the book themselves – scanned in for you to read and flick through. Not such a relelation, you might think – except that it allows them to have twenty-three page excerpts from Watchmen (found via Haddock) and V for Vendetta. Astonishing. Beautiful. If this doesn’t persuade you to buy them I don’t know what will.

Ok, so we all remember Eminenya (warning – big mp3 file from Megnut.com) – but I’m looking for about ten really good parody / combo mp3 files out there. Don’t send me the files, but send me links to them if they are on the net. Mail me your suggestions.

Pointless fact of the day: telephone numbers assigned for use in television and film drama.