I’ve been following trackbacks from the various articles mentioned here. I found the one for Jack Mottram’s submit response blog. Is the story you get from the email supposed to be about what happened to him at the station?

Then, later, this:

I created a twitter account to follow Jack Mottram…I hope this wouldn’t be considered stalking….this is what his last post said:

Anyone else reading/playing We Tell Stories? http://tinyurl.com/2vckou - http://icanhaz.com/cluez

Wonderful! For a little while, I became a character in a game I’m playing myself!

I resisted the temptation to play along, placing myself inside the ARG as an unofficial hybrid player-character. But only because I’m so easily identified as a real person, and most players would instantly assume that Six To Start, thorough as they are, probably wouldn’t write seven years’ worth of weblog posts or somehow insert a decade of journalism into the press in order to create my backstory.

Though I wonder if this sort of trick been tried before? I’ve never followed any other ARGs, only reading about them after the fact, but it strikes me that recruiting demonstrably real people to play characters would be an interesting move, adding to the level of difficulty and longevity of the game.

I haven’t had a system like this in place for years, and was quite surprised this morning by the stats. Many more people visit the site than I thought, and certain posts — the one about casuals, the one about collapsed lungs, and anything about how to do stuff on a computer — actually get a decent number of hits each day, from real live humans, as best as I can tell.

So, I thought I’d try a little experiment and… add some advertisements to the site. You know, so I can profit from football hooligans arranging fights and unwell Americans without health insurance. Might as well go the whole hog, eh?

Of course, this is wrong and bad and I should kill myself at the first available opportunity, so, to salve the terrible guilt, if I make more money than it takes to pay my hosting and domain registration fees (around £60 a year, I think), I’ll give it to charity.

I don’t want folk who actively read the site to be troubled by these ever-so-discreet textual intrusions of Mammon, so, just in case you’re not already blocking them, adverts will only appear below entries a week after they’ve been posted, and will never appear in RSS feeds or on the home page.

Here’s what they look like:

What do you reckon, then? Sensible plan, or revolting act?

If past experience is anything to go by, the entire site will break horribly, at least once.

Update: it seems that my old template was so riddled with elderly WordPress code that the new version point blank refuses to use it. This theme will have to do until I summon the energy to redesign the site.

Update II: Huh, I seem to have fixed everything. Which is almost a shame, as I quite fancied flexing my puny HTML and CSS muscles on a new design.

Update III: Instead, I’ll be flexing my puny metadata entry muscles: Submit Response now has tags. Well, eight posts do. Only 1,242 to go! Don’t worry, I won’t be entering them all manually, thanks to the rather clever Simple Tags plugin.

Update IV: You can now use OpenID to leave comments on the site.

More importantly, the problem extended to my email, so if you sent me anything important between the 14th of September and today, please do send it again.

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Good, eh?

So, instead, here are a few little notes:

• The site is now powered by WordPress instead of Movable Type. This means I’ll be spending less time smashing my head off the desk in rage when posting new entries. It also means you can leave comments without waiting for them to be moderated.
• The site design is based on Hemingway, with a lot of modifications, because I couldn’t face learning enough about WordPress to write a theme from scratch. The result is rather messy templates, and even messier CSS. Hey ho. I’ll fix it all up at some point.
• See the wee ‘about’ bit at the top of the page? It’s an hCard. hCard is one of several microformats, which are clever ways of presenting information on the web so that machines can do stuff with it, without getting in the way of the humans reading it. There’s other microformat stuff going on too, using MicroID and xFolk. Some future posts will be microformatted using hReview, geo and the like. Microformats are really rather exciting—if you want to see them in action, try installing the Operator extension for Firefox.
• If you have a look at the bottom of the page, there’s a little bar chart, or ‘sparkline’. It shows activity on the weblog over the last six months or so—the darker and taller the bar, the more stuff was going on. Dinky, eh? I should probably put it somewhere more visible. It’s powered by the SparkStats plugin.

That’s about it, I think. Non-meta posting will resume as soon as I remember how to weblog.

As you can see, Submit Response has risen from the dead with a brand new look, like some crazy hypertext phoenix. Assuming I didn’t cock up the DNS thingy when I changed hosts, that is. Some things may well be horribly broken, or look hideous in your browser—if you spot anything amiss, do leave a comment on this post and I’ll try to fix it. Screenshots from Internet Explorer users would also be appreciated.

Tumble is back too, though I still have a bit of tinkering to do before various other sections of the site are ship-shape and Bristol fashion.

Apologies to my tiny band of readers for going quiet for so long. To be honest, I could’ve had the site up and running back in September, but… I couldn’t be arsed and decided I fancied an extended hiatus from wittering online.

Since last we spoke, I got a new job, as art critic for The Herald (the world’s oldest continuously-published English-language newspaper, fact fans), which is proving to be great fun—looking at art and writing about it are two of my favourite things, and I’m getting to do a lot more of both. I’m hoping to be able to post some of that writing on Submit Response, but since The Herald keeps its content behind a paywall, I’ll have to consult the powers that be. Whether or not I can re-publish reviews from The Herald, I expect Submit Response will be a bit more focussed on visual art than it was before.

A not-particularly-interesting post about the redesign of the site follows shortly.

As far as Google is concerned, the only Jacks more famous than me are Mr. Daniel and his sickly ‘whiskey’, popular singing sensation Mr. Johnson, and the perma-grinning leather-faced star of such films as One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

How very peculiar. I can only assume it’s some sort of temporary glitch in the system (I’m nowhere to be found in the first 50 results for ‘jack’ on Yahoo! or MSN search).

Note: I wasn’t on a deranged egosurf when I spotted this, honest—I just checked the logs for this site, and noticed an awful lot of folk finding their way here after searching for ‘jack’.

My apologies for the disappearance of large swathes of Submit Response—most of the pages hosted under this domain will be back online by the end of the day.

The problem, for those interested in such things, was this: any attempt to edit a file on my server, or to upload a new file, resulted in that file instantly turning into an empty file. And, so, whenever anyone left a comment on the weblog, the page they were commenting on, and all the index pages would - poof! - dissappear.

This very peculiar behaviour had me stumped, but my hosts worked it out: I was over my hosting quota. You’d’ve thought that would trigger an email alert, rather than prompting the server to wig out completely in a way that my host’s own tech support man described over the ‘phone as ‘really strange’ and ‘not anything I’ve seen before’, wouldn’t you?

Hey ho.

(If you can be bothered, do leave a comment on this entry so I can see everything is working well. If it’s working badly, expect a deluge of comments on all entries advertising dubious things.)