Straight Tracks Webring

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I don’t know about the rest of you, but I find both ringsurf.org and webring.com unusable in their current forms.  They each seem more concerned with creating ad revenue for themselves than with maintaining basic user-friendly webrings.  I’m tired of being subject to the whims of third-party webring providers, so I’ve decided to take the logical next step and host my own using the Orcas Ringmaker 3.0 PHP Script.

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.

IT LIVES! New Otherkin Directory!

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Edit: Yes, for real this time. 😉

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.

#Dreamhart (IRC)

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Continuing the surge of new features for the site, I’m pleased to introduce our dedicated IRC channel, #dreamhart on Mibbit.net. There’s a web-based IRC client available on the site here, and of course you can connect to it using any IRC client. I’ve also added a widget to the site, on the top of the right hand sidebar, which lets you know how many people are currently in the IRC channel. The count is not live, but updates once every five minutes so should provide a reasonable estimate of how active the channel is. I’m going to try to be in it as much as possible. If people want, I may even work towards setting a dedicated time (perhaps once a week?) that can be set aside for chatting.

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.