Peggy C, The Other Half

It’s been brought to my attention that I haven’t updated this thing in a while. “A while” being the euphemistic term for…oh, 8 months? ::looks around sheepishly::

In my defense, I can only plead that I really am more of a geek than a mouthpiece. While Tony is perfectly (some might say too, but that wouldn’t be me, no way!) comfortable out there blasting away, I’d really rather be squinting at my screen, pulling apart code and figuring out how to get the new store up and running and things like that.

Speaking of the new store, I’m pretty psyched about it. But, um, not the color scheme. Let’s call that “transitional,” shall we? See, I’m actually working on redesigning the whole enchilada here at casa Comstock, the main Web site and our blogs too, but until it’s all ready to go, we figured we should keep using the old color scheme at the new store as a temporary unifying element so that people wouldn’t be disoriented and wonder where the hell they’d clicked off to.

But anyway, aside from the temporary color scheme, the new store is so much nicer and easier to use than the old one, and best of all, we’ve finally got everything in-house with our own super-spiffy secure server and digital certificate and everything. We can, like, sit at the grown-ups table now!

Yes, it’s sad. I really do get excited about this stuff. But on the plus side, I look much nicer in a dress than Tony does, and I can spell!

Battling referrer log spam. Oh joy. Because I really don’t have anything better to do with my afternoon than figuring out why our site’s access logs are clogged with hits from bogus sites about horny Russian teenagers with webcams. (Although, to be fair, the party poker and online casino sites are just as bad with this practice.)

As I was muttering curses under my breath researching this phenomenon, it also made me think about the place of porn in our society — how sad it is that sexually explicit material treads almost exclusively in the gutters and bad neighborhoods of our awareness, presenting itself like a marginally criminal enterprise even when it’s perfectly legal. Vice. I realize that for some people, the illicitness is part of the thrill, but when it’s always like that? All the fucking time??? It gets old.

I’d like to be able to tell people what I do, what Tony and I do without it being met with suspicion. I’d like to not be assumed off the bat to be a merchant of sleaze — see Tony’s recent experience on the Ovusoft bulletin boards (Hard times at Ovusoft) for an example that left me seething.

If there’s going to be a revolution, can it start already? Huh?

p.s. for anyone curious about the referrer log spam thing, I found the following article helpful — Proposal on referrer spam with some recommendations for bloggers to help make this practice less appealing to spammers.

Long time, no blog. I’m still not used to having this thing. I’ll try to be better going forward!

One of the things that’s been occupying my thoughts now that Damon & Hunter is done, is a long (long) needed redesign of the Comstock Films Web site.

Are there any features of the current site you feel strongly about one way or another? Things you wish we did that we don’t? Things you really wish we’d stop doing? Drop me a line, either here in the comments, or via email (peggy@ the domain here) and let me know! I’d love to get input from people who actually use the site.

Don’t mind me, I’m just having a minor geek-gasm over here having just installed the Brian’s Threaded Comments plugin. I suppose it’s from having a lot of personal friends who do their “blogging” over on LiveJournal where whole mini-conversations frequently crop up within the comments of someone’s initial post. When I came over to Blog-land, I have to admit I thought it was kinda lameass that threaded comments were not the norm!

Anyhoo, I’ll try to post something with actual, you know, content next time. Right now, I’m just doing my little Snoopy-dance of “it worked!” glee.