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So, after a long hiatus, I’m very pleased to announce the re-creation of the Straight Tracks Webring.

Nor is the new hosting situation the only change with the webring.  While I’d still like to see high-quality otherkin sites joining it, what I’m hoping this ring will do is connect otherkin community resources the way the old straight tracks or “ley lines” connected many ancient sites.

It is my hope that these straight tracks will prove as magical as their namesakes, and help bridge the gaps that have sprung up in our community, making it easier to connect with one another again.

If you’ve got an Otherkin website and would like to join the Straight Tracks Webring, just click here.

Also, if you own an otherkin or magical webring that isn’t hosted on ringsurf.org or webring.com, please let me know about it.  I am interested in joining other webrings as well.

After a great deal of struggling, I’m pleased to announce that Dreamhart.org now has a searchable directory listing for otherkin up and running. To add your information to it, first you have to register for the website. Then, edit your profile: you’ll find all of the Directory information in its own section, so you can choose exactly what you want to display. You’ll also find a radio box that lets you decide whether or not you want to display your information in the directory. I’ve made very very certain that if you check “Do Not Display”, your information will never show up in the directory by any means; not as part of regular display, not as part of search results, and not even if you type the user-id in by hand in the url for individual profiles.

I believe I’ve tested everything fairly thoroughly in the course of implementing this new system, but as always if you run into any bugs please let me know. Also, if you think any fields should be included that aren’t, let me know. I can’t guarantee that everything people want will be included (I don’t actually know how to program in PHP, I know just enough to be able to read and edit someone else’s code), but I may be able to work something out.

Edit: One other small thing, I’ve now added another option for people who want to be slightly more private about their data.  You can now set it to display only to logged-in users of this website.  I will warn that registration is open, and anyone can register, though.  It should prevent indexing by google and other search engines/bots, however.

Please note as well, privacy settings for the directory do not affect visibility of your profile on the forums.

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Edit: We’ve had to move from Dalnet to Mibbit.net due to restrictions Dalnet places on the number of users who can connect through Mibbit clients. Anyone using the webclient should notice no real changes, anyone using their own IRC client should now direct themselves to irc.mibbit.net.

Edit: So, the widget for counting how many people were on the channel in IRC turned out to be unreliable. So far, I haven’t found a direct replacement for it, the best I can do at the moment is a count of how many people are using the mibbit widget to chat in the channel, rather than how many users are in the channel itself. I’m not sure that’s really useful, so my recommendation at the moment is if you care about how many people there are to chat with, sign onto the channel and check.

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As always, let me know if you encounter any bugs, especially in the forums after this change. The css interactions were complex, and annoying. I think I’ve worked around all the major issues that came up, but I can’t be sure I’ve found everything just yet.

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Additionally, I’ve set up forum.dreamhart.org as a domain which should redirect to our forums. It will be a few hours before this can be tested, however, as the DNS change needs to propagate.

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I’ve made these forums for a few reasons. First, most of the otherkin message boards, IRC channels, mailing lists, and other online venues that I used to frequent have gone silent. The members are still there, but they rarely say much of anything. Rarer still anything with actual content. I am looking around at other forums, hoping to find signs of life again, and I have found a few with some promise… but I’m hoping these forums might attract discussion from some of the people who already know me who aren’t active elsewhere in the community anymore.

Second, even in the days when online otherkin venues were more active, there was a lot of noise and comparatively little signal out there. Once you got past the off-topic posts, the one-liner replies, the onlist conversations that would better be handled privately offlist, the downright silly and intentionally fluffy posts, the trolls and flamewars and harassment, and all the other obvious noise you would find there just wasn’t a ton of substance left. People were trying, and there were sparks of something Real, but very seldom did those sparks ignite into a blaze. In many respects, we never really moved past Otherkin 101, even on lists that touted themselves as dealing with advanced concepts relating to otherkin and magic. I’d like to work on changing that, on getting somewhere deeper and seeing what we can bring back to work with.

Anyone else up for trying?

You can find my old webhosts, formerly the Lostboys and now going by the collective handle Mitsukami, at several different locations, and I’d like to use this opportunity to say how grateful I am to them for having hosted my site for so long. Couldn’t have gotten here without you, guys. As a further gesture of my appreciation, I am presently hosting their former Heliwood and Kitsune pages on this domain.

This is my first time running a site which makes use of WordPress as a content management system, so it may take a little while before I’m fully used to this format.  In the meantime, if you’ll be patient with me, I think you’ll still find the content and format of the new site rather enjoyable.  I know I’ve had a lot of fun with it’s visual design.

I’m hoping that this content management system will allow me to focus on expanding the content of this website more, rather than spending as much time focusing on the coding aspects.  I’m also hoping that it will allow the site itself to become more dynamic, incorporating first comments by my readers and eventually perhaps even content from other users.

I know it’s not going to happen overnight, but I really do believe that this is the first step in bringing Dreamhart.org to life.

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