I’m looking to shut down the Inventning Situations Cafe Press store. I just need to make a few more sales before that becomes the sensible thing to do - to help speed up this process, I’ve dropped prices by $0.50 to $2.00 on everything except the Ringer T-Shirt and Long Sleeve Shirt (see, I’ve got no marketing skills). I plan to shut the shop down at the end of September, but that depends on how sales go and how cafepress registers them.
I know one or two of you have said “make a black t-shirt and I’ll buy it”. Unfortunately after many months cafepress still considers the black shirts to be in beta testing and I’m not a professional designer, so my attempts to make one have all looked awful. Sorry.
I’m not sure what will replace the shop, but the banners won’t be any more obtrusive, and may even be less obtrusive. I’m thinking I might add a tip jar with the option to request that I run an item from the ‘non-ephemeral’ (feature film) collection.
P.S. Don’t forget, you still have til around noon to vote for the movies for Thursday’s Hitch Session.

There have been some errors cropping up around here thanks to some recent upgrades. I think I have them all worked out except the XML feeds for Wasting Precious Time still aren’t updating correctly. I hope to have that corrected this weekend.

Let me know if you still have any difficulties. Thanks for the patience.

[Update 8/5: Everything should be functioning normally now. If anything is still going wrong, let me know, after weeping softly into my keyboard, I'll get right on it.]

[Update 8/9: The WPT syndication feeds seem to have broken again. There are some unconfirmed reports of problems with the RSS for comments on this blog. Why do I keep on getting out of bed?]

First off, the “send a caption” feature is no longer beta and is now considered a stable feature. Or as stable as they come around here. Look for this envelope and click away.

I’ve also created a list of people who’ve added captions in the last 5 minutes. It’s on top of the gallery for now (provided anybody’s made a caption in the last 5 minutes). I know the request was to have it on the gallery and the entrance page, but right now I’m just keeping it on the gallery.

This probably marks the end of major development on IS & WPT for the immediate future. I’ll continue adding new grabs as quickly as I can stomach, but apart from bugfixes there’s not much functionality to add. I know there was a request to be able to “remove a feature” - if I’m reading that correctly I’d rather know what problems are being caused by which features rather than knocking myself out to allow people to make functionality inaccesible to themselves without actually addressing the issue.

There are a couple of ideas (new layout, a tip jar that allows you to request a movie) in the back of my head that I may get around to eventually, but well, whay you see is what you get for now.

To celebrate Alfred Hitchcock’s 107th birthday, I’m going to run a few of his films, and what’s more, I’ll let you guys pick them. First showing will be on Thursday, August 10th starting at 7 PM Eastern [Edit: fixed date], and the second one will actually be on his birthday, Sunday August 13th starting in the wee hours at 1 AM (Addendum: that’s right after Saturday turns into Sunday.)

Vote for your choices now! (Don’t worry, even the ones that don’t get picked will show up in the non-ephemeral film rotation sooner or later.)

In addition to the top two vote getters in the current poll, we’ll also have an episode of Alfred Hitchock Presents - The Cheney Vase, starring Darren ‘Kolchak’ McGavin and Carolyn ‘Morticia’ Jones.