I changed my Google Reader and news clippings from Slashdot to Alterslash. Yes, it's some time behind Slashdot, but then again Slashdot is some time behind my other sources anyway... and Alterslash gives proper HTML, so you don't have to click Slashdot only to get the link to the actual useful article...

I'm not going to go back and retroactively change all old clippings, but I did that for the clippings of the last few days. Enjoy!

A few weeks ago, during a system update, my brother (who owns the server) accidentally deleted my whole database. (Bad, bad Dan! Don't you know backups are the source of all happiness, or at least a lot of it?)

I finally had time to recover it from an old backup. I lost my dotplan data for the last 3 months, but that's not a very big loss. Fortunately, I haven't been blogging much. (I know, bad excuse.) In the process, I changed the engine to sqlite3, so this can't possibly happen again.

My news clippings are now integrated into the site; you can read it from right here (just click on the headline on the LaloNews box on the bottom right).

One of my primary reasons for doing that was the ability to add writeups of my own to some stories. So if you have never read them, go on and check all of them from the beginning :-)

(I might be adding comments to them too; tell me (by commenting on this post) if you think that would be cool.)

You're now looking at the beta version of Hysterical Raisins 2.0. This should be easier to read, address most complaints I had about the site, give me targeted ads, give me a place for new functionality (see the google reader widget on the bottom-right corner (when it shows up at all -- google reader is hardly the most stable app in googleland)), and still retain all the old functionality that still makes sense.

Play around... next thing on my todo list is fixing the comments system, so you'll be able to tell me how much it sucks :-) (which is, I hope, less than the previous version.)

There are a few known kinks to iron out; for one, the positioning is all done in css now, so depending on your window width, some odd things may happen. I know how to fix it, I just need to have the time :-) should come in the next few days.

If you visit this site occasionally and you're annoyed that I don't post, you may want to also follow my google reader share. Where many bloggers would post an entry linking to some piece of news they find interesting, I only share them; but that's probably because I don't really consider myself a blogger. So, any news I find worth knowing about, can be seen there. (When I redo this page, they will be here too. Eventually.)