Sorry, new pictures for WPT will have to wait until tomorrow. Brain fried. I know you’re all crushed.

Edit 7/31/6: Huzzah. Two new sets, one from The Magic Sword, as seen in MST 411 plus the usual random fun. Get to writing, you.

What follows is my first large scale digression from capping on this blog. It is about Monty Python, which is probably near and dear to a lot of your hearts. If Python and Broadway both bore you to tears, go ahead and skip to the previous article, which gives you a chance to grumble behind my back about how I’m running this place - an activity near and dear to all cappers’ hearts.

Sometimes having a popular blog can pay off with things like free tickets to see Spamalot on Broadway, given with the hopes you’ll write something about it. Of course, I don’t seem to warrant that kind of spontaneous generosity - but my sister does, and luckily enough for me, all the people she thought of before me were either out of town or had thrown out their backs! For those of you scoring at home, my current streaks are:

Trying to make good things happen to me: 0 for my last 700 attempts.

Sitting around waiting for others’ misfortune to become my good fortune: 1 for no actual attempts but a couple of years of sitting around.

I’m not sure why they send free tickets to Spamalot to people with food blogs who dont really talk about Python or Broadway, perhaps it was the good folks at Hormel hoping she’d write up a recipe with Spam. While I’m ranting, I’ll also point out that back in 2000 while my brother and I were paying through the nose for nosebleed seats to see the Mets one victory during the subway series, our sister the non-fan got much better seats for free through her job. But I’m not complaining. No seriously, thanks for the ticket.

Now, onto the umpteenth online fanboy review of the show. (more…)

In response to a comment here, I just rewrote my copyright policy to clarify the recent changes. Namely: “Inventing Situations grants permission to the original authors for non-profit re-use of their captions.” I’m working sans lawyer here so I’m not going to try and create all sorts of exceptions for what can and can’t be done with captions or otherwise waive my ownership. As a rule, unless I’m talking technical and legal jargon, “authors” will mean the cappers here.

If anybody wants to explicitly opt out (or into) having their captions used, contact me.

For those worried, I’ll re-iterate that I’m working without a lawyer and that the change was meant to help me make the book happen. I’ll leave you to do the math on what sort of re-use by the authors and otheris is safe. (Publishing a book of captions is, of course, not). I will say that if the book happens, wherever possible I will still make my best effort to get explicit permission for publication of caps that were made after the policy change. Though unlike ones made before the change, if I can’t contact the author, I’d probably still go ahead and use it.

Just rolled out a few bug fixes to WPT:

• Made it much harder for a different version of the story to be published than the one seen on the preview before publishing page
• Fixed some weirdness in how quotes in the title of stories would be handled - leading to “garbage” characters in the title text field or long titles being truncated at the last step. (They’re still truncated, but as soon as they’re submitted. Progress!)

As always, let me know if you see any bugs introduced with these changes, or any bugs period. Unless I get some improvement requests soon, I’ll probably stop tinkering around with the WPT & IS programs real soon and turn my attnetion to other site projects.

OK, I’ve just made two slight upgrades to the site:

• WPT: RSS feeds are officialy supported and are no longer beta. You can get the links on the bottom of all WPT pages.
• IS: Captions that fit in the text field should no longer be rejected as too long (thanks to Jazzsoda for bringing that to my attention)

I’ve got two more issues I’m working on (one in the mail a caption feature, another in WPT’s story editor), but once those are done, I’m at something of a loose ends on what to do next. So, what do you guys want to see added to the sites? Due to my tendency to cut ideas off at the knees, I’ll try to keep out of the conversation unless directly addressed. Remember, like most websites, this is a benevolent dictatorship, so just because everyone wants a feature doesn’t mean I’m going to rate the potential benefit minus potential harm to likely effort to implement ratio high enough to actually add it. But, the more people ask for something, the higher the potential benefit score goes.