The excerpting of my book "Running To The Mountain" on Slashdot last week was shockingly and surprisingly successful. Because of the excerpting here, I shot near the top of Amazon's Top 100-selling books in just a few hours, and stayed on the list all weekend. This experiment in digital literary empowerment flew in the face of just about every conventional publishing wisdom about how books and the Internet and Web do -- or don't -- interact. It suggested that for writers, as well as for so many other groups, the Net can, in fact, be just as empowering as gasbags like me have been saying for years. What happened to me wasn't supposed to happen. It shocked my publisher, and more than a few journalists. And typically,it provoked some especially ugly -- and for me, quite sad -- discussions and accusations on the site.

drwiii was the first to submit it and I guess I have to post it. Hemos and I have our pictures in the March issue of Wired (p45). We look like dorks, but when they took that picture it was like 5 degrees out and had something like a 25 degree wind chill. This is for the March issue they say as they order us to remove our coats and risk frostbyte so that we look timely. Eek. I guess this means I should buy this issue. Update: 02/15 10:34 by CT : I'm the ugly on. The ugly one on the right. The metal thing is a lighthouse.

Notice how all these stories are disappearing? Is it because I'm a censorship oriented Nazi? According to my inbox, thats the only rational explanation. The truth is that we've been having database problems for several days. Stories are randomly disappearing. Its making me really cranky. I haven't been eating or sleeping much. But I'm working on it. I'm really sorry about all this crap. Believe me, its pissing me off more than you.

Anonymous Coward writes "After reading about Microsoft's successful attempt to patent style sheets, I tried typing the word "Microsoft" into the IBM patent server. It is amazing how many of these bloody things they are generating in the patent office. I selected a patent at random to see how "novel" it was and just by chance I fell on this one. It was filed May 15, 1996. "

RandySC writes " Demoronizer is a Perl program which corrects numerous errors and incompatibilities in HTML generated by, or edited with, Microsoft applications. The demoroniser keeps you from looking dumber than a bag of dirt when your Web page is viewed by a user on a non-Microsoft platform. A little detective work revealed that, as is usually the case when you encounter something shoddy in the vicinity of a computer, Microsoft incompetence and gratuitous incompatibility were to blame. Western language HTML documents are written in the ISO 8859-1 Latin-1 character set, with a specified set of escapes for special characters. Blithely ignoring this prescription, as usual, Microsoft use their own "extension" to Latin-1, in which a variety of characters which do not appear in Latin-1 are inserted in the range 0x82 through 0x95--this having the merit of being incompatible with both Latin-1 and Unicode, which reserve this region for additional control characters. " So now we know what happened to Jon.

So something is blowing up over here. I haven't resolved what yet. Nothing has changed in weeks outside of little niggly changes here and there- we had 3 weeks of almost perfect uptime, yet now suddenly sql queries are randomly failing all over the place. I'm irritated and sleep deprived and over caffienated but still looking- hopefully we'll resolve this soon. In the meantime, hang in there, and you don't need to keep sending me email telling me- believe me, I know. It's all I've been doing since last night.

CopyLeft now has Slashdot hats available for those of you who for (whatever reason) feel the need to cover up your heads. The ones I saw look pretty smooth. The website still only has drawings and not photos though. We need Slashdot socks and boxers so we truly be draped head to toe in cheesy merchandise. Or maybe Spandex Slashdot body suits? Slashdot skull caps? Matching Bra & Panty set? Berets? Jewelry? Where will the insanity end? I'm gonna go post some real news now...

PsycoDoc writes "A while back Slashdot mentioned a lone man's plight trying to get DSL service for his Macintosh with Bell Atlantic. Well Bell Atlantic finally cracked and will now support Macs with system 7.52 or higher, in part because of hundreds of complaints due to the mentioning of Steve Godun's diary on Slashdot."

Grenamier writes "Stephen Adler analysed his httpd logs after he published some papers and had mentions made of them on Slashdot, freshmeat.org and linuxtoday.org. The results showed a pretty dramatic demonstration of the Slashdot Effect. " Where's the part where servers melt? Anyway, this amused me so I figured I'd share.

We've been working on getting to LinuxWorld in march. We've bartered banner ads for most of what we need to make the journey, but we've recently confirmed that we need to pay big bucks to get bandwidth on the show floor. If I can't read my email & post stories, I can't go, and that would be tragic since I haven't left the house in almost a month *grin*. We want 3 IPs and it looks like thats gonna cost like $1600 (apparently LWCE thinks we're going to be distributing porn from the show). If you can help, email Hemos. We'll gladly swap banner ads on Slashdot. If you just want to advertise on Slashdot, you should contact hemos about that too- Last week we averaged over 400,000 pages a day- We actually served 506,000 pages in one day. We've grown about 20% since the T3 was installed and since we pay bills by the mb/s, our bandwidth costs are gonna increase at the end of the month. So if you want your ad to be seen by thousands of geeks and help make sure we can post stories from LW, help flood Hemos's inbox. PBS Telethon mode off.Update: 02/01 01:37 by H :Thanks to everyone who wrote in-we've got it taken care of.

Several people submitted and emailed that Slashdot has won Cool Zine Site of the Year (the page says 1998 but that is definitely wrong- we didn't win squat last year *grin*) from Cool Site of the Day (the original one, not one of the trillion knockoffs) so thanks to everyone who voted for us. A few people emailed me to congratulate me. I guess get a statuette of some form that I can use as a commemorative doorstop or something. Neat. I'll post pictures when it shows up if I'm bored.

Seems like just a few days ago that we announced number 10 million, but here we are again- not only did we break our "Pages in a Single Day" record (was 387,000, but on Tuesday we got 410,000) but this morning at 1:08am EST, a Windows User (who was at least running Gecko *grin*) from bigpond.com was the recipient of the 50 millionth Slashdot page. Yee haw.

Several folks have written in to comment that the Feb issue of Wired (7.02) has the "Slashdot Effect" listed in the jargon watch section. An anonymous reader noted that news.com has an article about domain disputes that mentions Slashdot and the whole ajax.org mess from ages back. And finally, Time Digital has an article that refers to " Slashdot Longhairs" (along with rapid apple partisan and java futurist) to describe how biased MSs recent DOJ witness sounds. I don't have long hair. Do you? Thanks to Matthew Rose for that one.

Neil from CopyLeft wrote in to say that they finally caught up on the flood of Slashdot T-Shirt orders. They're really sorry about the lag- apparently ya'll ordered a lot more then they expected. Anyway they are now geared up to handle sales efficiently so go order a Slashdot shirt if you want to drape yourself in #006666 and blatant advertising, or just want to help support Slashdot. They have shirts with my Don't Fear the Penguins logo too. I'm also hearing rumblings about Hats for the zillions of you who request them. No word yet on Slashdot Undergarments and Ties, but who really wants to wear underwear and ties anyway?

I tell ya, the end of the year is when all the cheesy awards things come out of the woodwork. First off, you can still vote for Slashdot as Cool Site of the Year. First prize is a new guitar (mmmm). Next Newswire has named Slashdot as winner of the "Community" section of it's Big 14 roundup. tapwater wrote in to say that The Guardian ranked us as one of the Top 10 Sites of 98. Modbuster wrote in to tell us that PlanetClick.com gave us 'Coolest Site'. Finally Norman Jordan says that @Home Network gave Slashdot a five star rating and ranked it as the best site overall for 1998.

morph- writes "Happy New Year! At 12:00 AM, 1999 GMT (that's 7:00 PM EST for those of us who can't subtract) we'll be hosting an IRC party on SlashNET (irc.slashdot.org or eu.irc.slashdot.org for you foreigners). We invite you to join us in #slashdot for a night of virtual drinking and dancing (to your favorite MP3s, of course). Hope to see everyone there!" I'm scheduled to be at an actual physical party, but hopefully I'll stumble at some point in the evening, although frankly, I know the #Slashdot crew pretty well, and I fear them dancing. Virtual or otherwise.

You might have noticed Slashdot being a tad laggy during the days (that's putting it mildly). Well that's because we're saturating our T1 solid. A T3 is coming (actually, the T3 is months late, but anyway) but in the meantime, we've got a squid proxy on another connection running that you can use for speedier access. It's up at Cachedot.slashdot.org (once again we name things as painfully as possible) and it should be about 15 minutes behind the main site, but it should be much less saturated. Note that you'll need to relogin out there to get you cookie back, but other than that it should work pretty much transparently.

Once again I have some award things that I feal obligated to mention. If you're not interested, skip down, click the link below to read some mussings on Slashdot CDs and a Slashdot Magazine. I really want feedback on this stuff. The main one is Cool Site of the Year which has a Guitar that I want as First Prize, so go vote. You're allowed to vote every day. Nathan Machula wrote in to tell us that we're once again in ZDNet's Top 100 websites. You'll enjoy the new review of the site. Ngeran wrote in to tell us that Slashdot was on NetCenter's What's New page. We're almost a year and a half old, but they gave us a '9' for content. DPI is doing some award thing for the end of the year. Apparently you can vote for Slashdot, I don't think I win a guitar from this one *grin*. Please click the link below and read the rest of this story. It is quite important to the future of Slashdot sorta stuff

Well folks, I have officially finished my last exam. Assuming I'm not missing anything anywhere, I've earned a B.S. in Computer Science and a Studio Art Minor at Hope College. Now that I've got that whole mess out of the way, my plan is to take it easy for a few weeks, and then I will start my "Job". Basically, I work for my company (Block Stackers Inc: basically Hemos, Me, Nate and Kurt) and my job will be to run Slashdot in the best way I can. It'll kinda be nice to be working only one full time job instead of running Slashdot and full time school. It means new features, better stability, and hopefully the ability to pay my student loans and rent. This site serves close to 8 million pages a month, now I just have to figure out how to make a living at it. Lastly, some folks have actually sent real graduation presents- you know who you are- you rock.Hey, click below if you want our address to send presents.

Slashdot gets a lot of mentions out there, and I'm sick of devoting whole stories to them, so I'm lumping them together. First, I mentioned Cool Site of the Year before, but I just found out that one of the prizes is a New Guitar- so Go vote for us. You can vote once a day, and this is one poll I have no problem Slashdotting *grin*. Cheekyboy wrote in to tell us that we're the #5 site at at 100 Hot's Developer Site List. hatredonalog wrote in to say that the new issue of Linux Journal has Slashdot listed as the #1 Linux Web Page, beating out linux.org. Anonymous Harrison noted that a recent Jerk City cartoon mentions Slashdot. And lastly, the RC5 Team has been doing pretty well these days. In fact, we and the Evangelista's have been swapping the #1 daily keys spot. So go run clients on anything that boots and lets dust 'em.