Signs of Life.

Somebody recently mentioned this site on a blog, wistfully wishing that it would come back. Well, of course, it's been here all along, athough the irritating problem of having a domain registrar screw up so spectacularly as to allow somebody to steal my domain, certainly didn't help with not looking completely dead.

But life goes on, and Hypatia's still alive here at AlexLit.org. However, don't be too quick to spread the word. You see, the system was written nearly fifteen years ago, and in order to have it working in front of you right now, I have to use the "demo" edition of a more up-to-date version of the database-to-web software. The demo version only allows five unique users at a time, so if too many of you drop by at once, somebody'll just get mysterious error messages.

But! At last, at looooong last, I finally have some time to do something about it. In fact, I have already moved the data from the old DB server to PostgreSQL. In the short term, the only difference you might notice is that there's probably a new bug or two that I haven't spotted yet. But that's the first step in rewriting the site to use open source software that won't require me to come up with $5,000 per server to get the non-demo unlimited-user version of the middleware server software. Stay tuned!

Now, if you're new here, you might be wondering "Oh, yea? Really? So what exactly do you do here that's just so all-fired amazing?" Simple. We'll help you discover exactly what you'll most enjoy reading for fun. Hypatia, our collaborative filter agent, will learn what you like to read, and point you toward things you might have already thought you'd enjoy, toward things you had no idea you'd enjoy, and even things you were already quite certain you wouldn't enjoy but will discover you actually love.

Hypatia's been dispensing advice since 1997, and with all that practice, she's gotten pretty darn good at it, if I do say so myself. So sign in to your old account, or register for a new one, as necessary, and find out what you want to read next.

— Dave Howell, founder