This is where the link to my bio was to be found...until today

UPDATES

ALL UPDATE PROJECTIONS ARE SUBJECT TO ABRUPT REALITY ATTACKS

January 1, 2001: Sadly, this is not the reopening of the Clearinghouse. Something has gone wrong with my browser--it now freezes up while it can't find a URL, and sometimes crashes my computer. I'm working on that problem now. I don't know when I'll have it fixed and the Clearinghouse reopened, but the Clearinghouse will reopen. As a testament to that, I've gone ahead and paid to eliminate the delay page that previously showed up when you typed in the Clearinghouse's V3 URL. We're in this for the long haul, folks. I'll see you soon,

--Shack

November 15, 2000: Due to a major software failure, the reopening has been pushed back to sometime in December. Thank you for your patience, and once again, please hold your site submissions in reserve until we have officially reopened.

October 9, 2000: Those who have been following this site the past year may have noticed a decided dropoff in the number and quality of updates. There is a reason for this, and the blame lies entirely at my feet. Through poor formatting decisions and all-around laziness on my part, the Clearinghouse has reached a point where it has become unwieldy, and unreasonably time-consuming to manage. If things were to continue in their present state, I would be forced to abandon the site--and despite numerous appearances to the contrary, I have no intention of doing that.

It is long past time for an overhaul.

So, to that end, I am officially closing the Clearinghouse to new submissions, effective immediately. This update contains the 14 sites that I have received over the past six months that have not been rejected or dropped off the face of the earth, in the following sections:

I have also put up an overall Excuse page update, with the best of what I have read over the past six months. All of these stories will be going up in the Bookshelf section.

The Clearinghouse overhaul will consist primarily of three items:

1. A concrete entry format. Over the two and a half years the Clearinghouse has been in operation, I have received a few complaints about my rather free-wheeling style of site descriptions, both from webmasters offended by my word choices and readers who followed my categories only to find, for example, one Highlander story in among a hundred Final Fantasy works. So, I will be going through the listings and redoing every entry in the Clearinghouse--all 450-odd of them--in a format similar to this one:

Site name and link
Categories: This will list every category this site is listed under at the Clearinghouse, in descending order of relevance (read: story count).
Story count: The total number of stories I counted at the site. Expect a rough estimate, as opposed to a precise number. Also, expect me to reverse a previous trend and begin discounting poetry in my story counts.
Comments: Any particular observations I have about the site. These tend toward either the good or the neutral. Be warned, however--I can be downright merciless when it comes to sites that are difficult to navigate.
(Date this entry last updated in italics)

For an example of how this will look with an actual site:

Club Jade
Categories: Star Wars
Story count: 70
Comments: The homepage for the Internet extension of the infamous AOL Star Wars fan club known as the Star Ladies. Club Jade is the home to some of the more talented Star Wars authors on the Internet.
(10/9/00)

I haven't acted on any of the broken link notifications I've received over the past six months, because I will be cleaning these up as I go through with the overhaul, and I saw no point in basically doing the same work twice. I have retained these e-mails, and will be making use of the URL corrections contained therein as I progress.

2. A master list. The biggie, from my POV. This will make entry maintainence, particularly with cross-category sites, far easier for me than it has been. I should have maintained one of these from the first; however, the first one I tried, when I was originally assembling the Clearinghouse, was in Word as opposed to plain HTML (further proof that I am The World's Biggest Idiot), which gave me no end of headaches, delayed the opening for a full three months, and soured me on the whole concept until it was a bit too late. This list will be maintained regularly and will be available from the main page.

3. The resources page. I will have this up when I reopen, and I plan to make it the Clearinghouse's biggest feature after the links themselves. Along those lines, look for the Site Fights logo on the Welcome Mat to disappear in favor of a button link to the Viewable with Any Browser Campaign, and a few updates to my 'Net-related rants.

The internal structure of the Clearinghouse is also going to undergo a fairly radical change; those who are linked to pages inside the Clearinghouse as opposed to the Welcome Mat had best take this latest opportunity to change their links, because this time, I will not provide redirection pages. I will be contacting any webmasters I find not following my wishes in this regard.

The external appearance of the Clearinghouse, aside from the new entry format, will probably remain as is, with a few changes; I have no artistic talent, so the odds of my brandishing a new logo (with a new color layout to go with it) are fairly remote, and I like the way the main page looks.

I hope to reopen the Clearinghouse in early to mid-November. If you have any thoughts about my plans or this site, now is the time to let me know.

Until November, I remain...

--Shack

PREVIOUS UPDATES

SHACK'S FANFIC CLEARINGHOUSE 1