Google has given V-I a clean bill of health.  I’ll slowly re-add the old content, but I have to do it carefully since I don’t know exactly where the nastiness was.  In the interest of getting things up and running, I basically blew up the old site, although I still have the database, which has all the old posts and comments.  Importing it a few posts at a time could be a challenge, but I’m sure someone out there has done it, so I just have to learn how.

For now, feel free to re-add new posts for the old topics if you’d like, and I’ll integrate the old content as I get to it.  If there’s something you’re dying to review from the old stuff, let me know in the comments here, and I’ll see what I can do!

I’ll take care of all the cool sidebar stuff we had today or tomorrow.  How do I know what I’m listening to if I don’t have Mitchell’s Recent Spins in the right column?

There’s no set purpose for the site; I’d like to use it in whatever way we find useful, whether that’s discussing the latest books we’ve read, planning someone’s birthday dinner, continuing online a discussion we began in person, or sharing stuff we found on the Web.

There are a couple of functional issues I still need to work out. First, if you don’t see a link at the bottom of this page saying “login,” you’ll have to point your web-browser to the login page if you want to log-in and post something here. This is where the login i.d. and password I gave you for Christmas come in.

Second, I’m giving you all village-idiot.org email addresses, but I’m having trouble making that function work. When it’s working, well, we can talk about that when we get there.

Here are some quick pointers for using this site effectively:

1. Remember that passwords are case-sensitive. Type your password carefully, including any numbers, symbols, or punctuation marks.
2. One of the first things you should do when you log-in the first time is change your password.
3. Don’t be afraid to play around. You probably don’t have the access privileges necessary to do any real damage by hitting the wrong button. The worst that could happen is you spend a long time typing a brilliant message and you click the wrong thing and lose all your text (I’ve done it!). So maybe for these first few messages, you could stick to short messages.
4. Don’t enter your personal email address when you post a message. I plan to make this site accessible to the public, so if you don’t want Spam, don’t post your email address.
5. For longer messages (such as this one), type the first paragraph or so in the “entry body” text box (you’ll know what I mean when you log-in and try to post something) and then type the rest in the “extended entry” text box. This will make the front page look a lot nicer.
6. If you post something about movies, please put “SPOILER” in the first paragraph so people who haven’t seen a film can choose to avoid your message.
7. HTML tags work here (I’m using the OL tag in order to generate this numbered list, for example), so feel free to use it. If HTML is foreign to you, you can at least use the B, I, U and URL buttons to highlight parts of your text. Just highlight the word you want to make bold, then click on the B button and you’re golden.

The best way to figure out how to use this site is to play around with it, so feel free to post “test messages” and stuff. Please let me know if you have any problems or comments!

Ho, Ho, Ho!