And a happy Christmas to one and all.

Except of course those woeful individuals who exercised their right to free speech by dumping on the printed version of the site (Dictionary of Playground Slang) at Amazon UK. If any of you have a few minutes to spare we'd really appreciate your nipping over to the site and giving us a more balanced review.... pretty please??

Moving on, the ODPS has had a couple of bursts of publicity in the UK and Australia lately which have produced several hundred new words or so all of which have been dutifully uploaded - but of course as always we still need more so if your friends and relatives haven't been bored to buggery by repeated requests for old or new slang words then now is the time to do it. If you don't I'll have to spend time with my family over Xmas and that'll never do!

What else is new. Well not a lot really. You'll see we added a section of Rugby Songs, chants and similar called 'Hymns and Arias'. If you have alternate words, if you have more songs, if you'd like to record MP3's of yourself (and friends?) singing a few choice verses... send them on in and we'll load them up!!

We're also in the process of working out a few other ideas for the site such as a mailing list in addition to the proposed forums. If anyone likes the idea of a mailing list please let me know and I'll set one up. We were thinking of including, for example, all the words that come in without meanings or with obscure references to meanings we can't get to grips with. This way you can have a direct input into the content of the site.

I think that'll do for now. Please go give us a decent review at Amazon UK and if we don't see you for a week or two... well have a safe and pleasant holiday over Xmas and the New Year.

1-2-3 Jump...

Hey hey -we're 'live'!! For those of you new to the site, and the regulars who've been redirected from the old 'cyberscriber' site - welcome. For the newbies, look around and have fun. I've not set up an FQA yet but will do so in response to the questions that come in - and there're bound to be a few!

For the old hands you'll see a few real changes. For a start the search function will make it much easier to find obscure words. In addition we've separated the the site into three sections 1. Ghastly Games - with the games and rules, 2. Dictionary of slang - 3000 terms of weirdness, 3. Seedy Songs and Rotten Rhymes - lyrics, poems etc.

As before we really need as many more as you can send us - and if you feel like just sending in some reminiscences of your schooldays, well they're welcome too.

As soon as she's able, kyte will be installing a forum option onsite where some of our joint interests can be discussed.

Oh the joys of editing!

Well to start with it means I get to laugh again at all the stuff that arrives. On the other hand I just uploaded 600 words to the Dictionaries and feel shattered. Serves me right for doing it in bulk I suppose.

Either way, the new site is almost ready to go 'live' but first I'm going to take a stab at adding as many of the words from the 'old' site as I can before I have a breakdown. As soon as it's ready (or as soon as I collapse) we'll redirect from cyberscriber to the new interface, but with the option of returning if that's what people wish. Having said that, from now on all new words will be added to the new site only so those who don;t look at it will miss them - which is sad.

The printed version seems to be selling well which is nice. I've had nothing but good responses from feedback which is even better!

So... I'm back to work. The faster the words are transferred, the faster I can start reading the rest of the new crop of words as they arrive.

Have fun!

So...

At last the book is on sale in the UK at least and I can relax. Some of you may have caught my embarrasingly amateur interviews on Five Live, Radio Newcastle, Radio Three Counties etc et. for which I apologise :)

I think now though that the main pressure is off at last and I can start to properly populate the new site and I can only apologise profusely to everyone who has sent in words over the last few months and wondered if they disappeared into some black hole never to be seen again. I promise you I *have* stored them all away and am now getting them online - in fact I'm adding all the new words to the site first so it'll be worth visiting and getting to know.

Have lots of fun.... and thanks again for all the support!

We're off!!

Ok, the book is published. It's on pre order at Amazon (click here) and ready to go.

The cover looks great. The content is as bad as it can be and still be legal and is an ideal Xmas present for anyone you hate.... or love.... life is odd like that.

I look forward to seeing you at the book signings. Bring your camera and I'll even grimace a bit for you :)

So.... long time no write. But at least there's something definite about the book. The copy has been submitted, as has the bio and a couple of piccies. Release date is around October in the UK and November in Aus - not sure about other release points yet - but it'll be available through Amazon and as soon as I have the details I'll post a banner onsite.

Remember folks, this book is a sure fire Xmas present for any crabby old relative you want to really annoy!! :)

I'll be back in the UK in a week or so and taking notes. If you look over your shoulder and see a fat old man hunched over doing something furtive under his mac....don't hit him.... it might be me writing down new words into my organiser!

Be warned !! :)

Interesting bit of news for you...

The ODPS has been talking to a publisher about the possibility of getting the old girl into print.

Well...... we signed our contract a week or two ago and are waiting on the return of their copies, but it look as if the book of the site of the slang of the playgrounds of long ago may become a reality.

The version to be published will be 'edited' of course..... especially as we're now restructuring to move games and songs to their own pages to make the site more accessible, but the best bits will be kept in.

We'll keep you posted but hopefully by Christmas you should be able to go get a copy and wave it about saying...... I've been to that site and I heard it first!! :)

Fingers crossed eh??

Another day dawns and the sparrows cough a happy tune to greet the dawn.

Well ok I lied. It's 10:00 at night in Sydney, Australia and still warm and humid despite being the last day of summer. Nights are drawing in rapidly but we do at least wake to the sound of dawn breaking.

The new site is still no better than it was I'm afraid. No extra words added and none of the duplicate entries removed. We've taken a day off to review both progress and mistakes.

In addition, I appears that some of yesterdays blog report didn't make it. We're not having much luck eh?? :)

Still. Things have moved ahead in other areas and we should be back on track by Monday to carry on uploading and formatting etc. Fingers crossed there'll be no more nasty issues to deal with.

Oh bugger........

Well...... no real idea what happened... but virtually all of the new site got wiped today. This is as they say "a bit of a bugger" and means the whole thing has to be knocked up from scratch again and all the data previously entered and uploaded also has to be re-entered - happy days.

Annoying yes - but we have to remember these things happen from time to time. Luckily of course this is just a test site and the old site still functions as well as it ever did.

You may well ask why we don't have a backup that we can just upload - and the answer is we do and we don't. Being a php based web interface, Glossword stores the database online so if the access permissions are corrupted somehow it means you can't actually access any of the information directly... as far as we know.

Currently we're uploading the backups we do have in the hope it will reset the access permissions to a previous version. This is most unlikey to occur but it's all we have. The alternative is a rewrite :)

It's been an "interesting learning experience" - and as always one we could have well done without!!

We'll keep you informed.

Oops.... sorry.

In the eagerness to get the trial site up and on show, we forgot to change some of the links to reflect the online situation - in other words they link to the 'test area' rather than where the files were actually loaded.

We'll attend to it as soon as we can - probably tomorrow.

In the meantime thanks for pointing it out.. work is in progress!! If any other little quirks pop up please be sure to let us know.

It's a long, long road.... etc

Slowly but surely the old words are moving into the new site. It's taking a long time and we're noticing some idiosyncracies with Glossword that we hadn't really been aware off before.

One obvious one is that the html formatting isn't apparant in the short version of an entry. So for example, if the original has a rhyme in it, in the short version you see one long paragraph. Whereas in the long version you see it properly formatted.

To get to the long version you have to click on the word itself - which is neither obvious nor intuitive. I'm not sure how we can get around that but we'll work on it and get back to you if changes can be made. Other than that it all seems ok.

Thanks for all the comments by the way - it's good to know the interface hasn't met with any serious objection - except for Ron who would prefer we darken the scroll bars on the 'Planarchy blog section.

And so it goes....

The new interface seems to have been well received so far. We've begun populating it with words, games and songs/rhymes but it'll be a longish process so I hope you'll bear with us.

The site designer, Kyte, has implemented Planarchy as the blogprog of choice... but for whatever reason it currently won't auto-upload so we're doing a manual jobby.

Some even more exciting news about the ODPS is on the horizon but I'm not yet at liberty to let you in on the secret. But as soon as I'm able I promise you'll be the first to know - ok??

As they say in the papers... watch this space!! :)

Oh dear what can the matter be...

How peculiar! Dropped info. into the blog but it didn't appear onsite. Teething troubles maybe.

If this doesn't arrive I might move to planarchy just for the hell of it!

On the other hand maybe I'm just too damn impatient......

New Dictionary Format/Interface

Ok. For anyone interested the interface has been loaded up to the host. So far it's not populated (i.e. no words to look at) but it's there if you'd like to make comments on useability etc.

I quite like the functionality, but I really miss the look and feel of the old site.

You can find the new version here. (http://www.odps/index.htm if the link fails for some reason).

What do you think??

Still working on Blogger... it's fun actually. There are all sorts of formatting errors to make and bits of the template to ruin. Maybe an upgrade to Blogger Pro might be worthwhile. On the other hand there's Planarchy which also looks as if it might repay investigating!

It occurs to me that anyone reading this will wonder who the hell 'Sky' or Skyrider' is. Well obviously that's me.

When meandering around the newsgroups as is my wont I use the name 'Sky Rider' (or variations). I've been using it for 3 - 4 years now and it's become second nature to me. I could use 'Chris Lewis' of course, but that's such a boring name.

You'll find me hanging out in well worn places like alt.fan.harry-potter, aus.tv and the like. I also hang out as a founder member of alt.ozdebate. This started life as a 'flame group' but now we just hang around and bitch at each other and any other poor soul who passes by for no obvious reason.

Of course I also hang around the newsgroup dedicated to the dictionary.... 'free.odps'.... which for some reason never gets the number or quality of posts it deserves. If you have nothing better to do, please drop in. It gets quite lonely in there sometimes!!

OK... I think I'm finally getting the hang of this now.

I'm writing this 'blog' for a couple of reasons. Firstly because I want to pass on information about the development of the ODPS as it grows and changes. Secondly because I talk a lot naturally and being alone at the computer means I have a lot of time to spend with nobody to whinge at! And pretty much because I can ( I loves computers me... well OK I hate them as well but that's another story).

Moving rapidly on. The ODPS has been around for 3 years or so and in that time has morphed from more or less 'home page' to what is virtual cult in its own right. We've had around a million visitors which is a respectable total. So, we think it's time to update the site and its image. Yes we love the old fashioned look of the original site, but sooner or later it has to change. We've been asked over and over to make it more user friendly and to add this feature or that. So... work is in progress.

In a few weeks we hope to have a 'sampler' page up showing off the new site, albeit maybe with few words on it to begin with. All the new words will be entered into the new site and over a period we'll transfer the old words in as well. When it's complete... we'll relegate the old site to an archive where the nostalgic can go and wonder what the fuss was about.

The new site will have a much 'easier on the eye' interface, will have a decent search facility, will show all the new words added and will have an enhanced submission page.

What else it will have isn't definite yet, but I'd like to start a 'community' so will start looking at producing a regular newsletter... but first we need to get the site up and running. Please bear with us while the work is carried out. there may be a few 'hiccoughs' along the way :)

Of course I have no doubt that within days I'll be writing about politics, religion and anything else that passes through my mind, but if I do and start to ramble a bit, please let me know.