oh, holibiteme

I have cramps, and the remains of a migraine, and in about an hour I have to go to the office and do a lot of work. So really, this is just a test to see if I can stare at a computer screen without any difficulties. I’m sorry if you feel used.

Meanwhile, Holidailies is perking right along this month. If you’re looking for something to read, that is the place to go. More than 100 sites are registered and people truly are updating their sites every single day, with content that is a lot more interesting than what you are reading right now.
I admit that not every site in Holidailies is to my personal taste. I figure there are two ways I can go with Holidailies: one is to let anyone and everyone register (within a certain time frame or until it gets too huge, and then cut it off really really fast so as to piss off as many people as possible, right?), and the other is to make people apply to join and then select a few dozen. The hand-selected group would possibly be easier to keep up with, but it would not appeal to as wide a group of readers, only to people with my narrow sense of taste in writing, and who’s to say that such a small group of people would be motivated to update daily?
I keep hearing very entertaining ideas about how to run Holidailies next year, the current favorite being to do it Survivor-style, eliminating one or two sites every day because they hadn’t updated enough. One person has suggested that we could also eliminate overachievers who update too much, although that would defeat the purpose of having fresh stuff to read on a regular basis.
My favorite suggestion so far is to have a spinoff portal called HoliBiteMes, which I could run in as elitist a way as I liked, eliminating sites because I thought their design was annoying or I didn’t like their latest entry or an anagram of their site name spelled something Satanic.
But despite claims that I am elitist (which are probably true) I have to say I like having a big ramshackly portal full of different kinds of sites and different kinds of writing, with a new entry posted practically every time you hit the Reload button on your browser. I like a project that runs only one month a year; that’s just about the level of project that I can handle (unlike JournalCon, which was fun but ran me ragged). I am so pleased when I see people resurrect their old journal pages just for Holidailies, especially when they’re people whose writing I missed.
One unexpected side benefit of Holidailies this year was a feature allowing people to syndicate the site through an RSS feed. I didn’t quite understand what an RSS feed was or what you did with it—I had heard about the theory but hadn’t seen the practice. Then my boyfriend showed me the Bloglines site and how you could use it to see when various sites with RSS feeds were updated, and the light came on. Then I realized that this was the same sort of principle being used with some XML tools I was documenting at work, so I was able to understand and edit that documentation much more clearly. In other words, Holidailies actually helped me in the office. Wow.
I think this is my favorite year of running Holidailies so far. A lot of that has to do with the wonderful portal design, which practically runs itself. You can see who has been, er, naughty or nice about updating regularly, and you can sort the list of participating sites in all kinds of ways, and you can click on the number of entries written next to the site name and get a list of all the entries posted to the portal.
I’m left with very little to do other than occasionally helping someone with a lost password or a minor difficulty in posting. And, of course, having to update my own Web site every day, or almost every day. It wouldn’t do for the creator of Holidailies to be at the bottom of the list on her own portal and have to fine eliminate herself.