19 runaways posted today

So at least I’m caught up with those.

Meanwhile I’ve got 38 family abduction cases waiting to post, and 28 regular cases.

BTW, I apologize for the lack of updations lately. I’ve been lazy.

90,352 visits to Charley yesterday

My average is about 2,500.

Catching up

After much strenuous effort I am just about caught up on all the backlog that accumulated over the last two months while I was being post-traumatically stressed. I now have less than thirty cases to my “to add” folder, down from over sixty. And about the same amount of cases in my “to update” folder. Yay!

Not that this is any time to relax, though. I know if I turn my back for five minutes I’ll wind up with 350983409 cases waiting to post again.

In other news, I am writing a play. It’s an adaptation of a book, meaning I don’t have to think up (most) of the stuff on my own, but it’s still a demanding project, more difficult than I had anticipated. I don’t have much hope of seeing it performed anywhere, but it’s a good exercise anyway.

HUGE update today

Three new links, three resolved cases, thirteen new cases, seventeen updated cases. Most I ever posted in one day. I’ve truly outdone myself.

But I have not made much of a dent in the huge pile of cases to write and updates to add.

My apologies

I know I haven’t been updating or blogging much lately. I feel kind of bad about it. I’ve just been feeling rather tired and down, and not up to much. I go to work, go home, read a bit, fall asleep, and wake up just in time to get ready for work. What a drag. I have the day off tomorrow and hopefully will be able to post some cases.

In other news, I’ve really hit the big leagues now: someone from ViCAP contacted me asking about using my site to identify bodies, and could ViCAP download all my information for their own use and such. Woo.

A big thorn in my side

Months and months (maybe a year, has it been that long ago?) after I did it, someone finally emailed me asking why I had added the javascript thingy to the Charley Project casefiles to make it more difficult to copy them. The script makes it impossible, in most browsers, to highlight anything on the page, therefore making it impossible to select and copy text. There are ways around this however.

The person tried to guilt me, saying that wasn’t the purpose of my site to get the information out there? I replied saying Charley gets the information out there quite nicely. I added the script because people were regularly copying my casefiles and putting them on their own sites without attribution, in violation of my extremely generous terms of service. I would be within my rights to prohibit any and all duplication of the stuff on Charley; as it is, you can take all you want as long as you include a link to me. But quite a few people wouldn’t even do that, in spite of my repeated requests and reminders. In one case, when I wrote someone to tell them they’d stolen my entire casefile and would they either remove it or add a link, they quickly altered the casefile and said, “There’s no stolen bits, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But I had taken a screenshot of the page before and could prove they had plagiarized me and then tried to cover it up.

I don’t understand why these people will not add a simple little link to me. I don’t think it’s too much to ask. I work hard writing up those files and putting them together. If someone isn’t aware of the terms of service, fine, I will enlighten them. But there are some people who are repeat offenders, who regularly apologized and promised to put up attribution in the future, and then continued on as usual, time and time again. I could name them, I suppose, but what good would it do, besides possibly starting another comment war?

The script may well go away soon as Pri upgrades my site for me. It doesn’t really work anyway — as I said, there are ways to get around it and still plagiarize my site at will. The theft still happens, but not as often as it used to I think. But I felt like I had to do something. The repeated thefts were really making me angry.

Upgrading Charley Part III

My mysterious benefactor Pri has shown me some of what he plans to do and I really like it. It would make updating so much easier for me. Best of all, he doesn’t need to access my accounts to do this upgrade. He says he can write everything on his servers and send it to me to add to my servers — meaning I don’t have to trust him with my login and password.

Also, he provided me with some samples of his work. He works for a web design company.

This opportunity sounds better every minute.

Upgrading Charley Part II

So I wrote to Pri (who, it turns out, is a guy) asking more details about what he had in mind for my upgrade. He says he can make it so I don’t have to copy and edit each casefile’s HTML by hand: I’ll just fill in the blanks on a form and the casefile will be automatically generated. Also, the MP’s name will be added to all the lists automatically too. That last one would be really great for me. I hate having to add all the names when I’m done writing the updates. It’s so boring.

So I am encouraged and I’m going to ask Pri if he has any references I can talk to.

This may yet come to nothing, but it looks promising so far. Fingers crossed!

Upgrading Charley?

A few days ago a person emailed me offering to, for no money, sort of upgrade Charley with things like PHP and MySQL to minimize the work I do. As it stands, Charley is a very low-tech operation. Every page is plain ol’ HTML, hand-written by yours truly (except for a few pages from the old MPCCN that were written by Jennifer Marra). I have wanted to upgrade, simply because then it would take less time to update the site, but I simply don’t know how to do it on my own. One of my brothers, a computer programmer, offered to help me when he got the time. That was almost three years ago and he’s had two (more) kids since then. I’m not holding my breath.

So, if this person (not sure if it’s a man or woman, with a name like Pri you really can’t tell) is the gen-yoo-ine article, he or she would be a big boon to the site. But I am wary. Presumably I would have to entrust Pri with my password. The last time I trusted a stranger things didn’t go too well, and I’d frankly rather get raped again than have anything bad happen to that website.

Backlogs

With me and Charley stuff, if it doesn’t get taken care of right away, it often doesn’t get taken care of for yonks, or even at all. Several people have emailed me with corrections, weeks ago, and I haven’t acted on them yet. Grr. I am such a bad website maintainer. *smacks self* In addition, I’ve always got a backlog of cases to add and lately it’s gotten a wee bit too big for its britches.

However, today I hope to take care of those corrections and make a dent in the backlog. I’ve decided to make a list of all the cases I need to post, and add them on a first-come, first-serve basis.