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.