I'm happy to say that
Romantic Spanking Month was very well received - everyone enjoyed it, and it gave me a sense of accomplishment to bring four more romance comic spankings to light that otherwise would most likely have remained unknown to spankos for at least another generation. We only had one problem, and that was with last week's
Wagon Train spanking. There were so many requests for the video file, which was very large, that my web host felt they were degrading their other web sites and suspended CSR. Another factor may have been the link Chross posted on his blog, for which I'm grateful, but perhaps too many people hit Chross' blog right after it was updates and ended up on CSR at the same time. Temporarily, I solved the problem by embedding a YouTube player, which worked because I had planned to upload this video to YouTube anyway. My hose was convinced, and put the site back up late Saturday afternoon. So if you got a "Site Not Available" notice on Saturday, now you know why. (If you're still getting it, refresh the page or purge your internet cache).
Now I've always preferred to embed a Windows Media player in my video pages for reasons I've explained before: I don't like Flash Player, the Kaltura Player still has some problems, and I like to provide dowload links to WMV and MPG (for later burning to DVD) versions, which means
I have to host my own files. In the future, to play it safe I may have to embed a YouTube player at least for the initial rush - perhaps I can replace it after the initial hubub dies down. In some cases, where I'm posting additional clips for information purposes, I may just take the chance because I don't want to bother with non-spanking videos on YouTube.
And that brings us to Dan's request:
dan eldorado wrote:All the other "departments" listed show an "Updated" column that gives the most recent dates the column has received a post. But you don't have any such info for the popular "Forums" department. As I say, it is the most popular of all your pages. Don't you think it would be a great benefit to your readers to be able to look at the Welcome page, and TELL AT A GLANCE, how recently it was updated?
Today is March 5. When I look at the Board Index page, I can see how recently the other departments have been updated... and, at this point, there are NO postings for the month of March. The latest message is dated February 28, when Overbarrel posted something. But since then, there have been ZERO posts. I'm saying it would be a great benefit if we knew this from looking on your Index page. Instead, you are forcing us to log on to Forums every time we visit your site. Wouldn't it be better if we could tell at a glance if there were any new posts to that department?
I hear you, bro'

It's a good idea, but it may not be practical. You see, the "Updated" date for each department is something I do
manually - I have to remember to change it (which is easy) every time I update any of the departments. I'm not sure how I could do it otherwise since the main departments are all
static HTML pages. What that means is, when you request the page, my server sends it to your browser exactly as it is, and then your browser presents it to you by simply interpreting the HTML. This system works because I'm the only one who can update these pages.
But the rest of
CSR (the Comics Spanking and Humorama Spanking Data Bases) and this forum operate differently: they are written in PHP, which your browser never sees because the PHP code
is interpreted and executed on the web server, and my host then sends your browser the resulting HTML. Now in theory I could change the
CSR Home Page into a PHP file (remember it's HTML now), which would allow me to make SQL queries to whichever of the 43 or so individual tables that are the backbone of this forum would be necessary to get the "Last Update Date" (if it's available at all) and then return that value into the generated HTML. But there are two problems: (1) I don't think my web host likes PHP too much, because
all my code is executing on his dime! And the resources he has to tie up executing my PHP code are not available to do anything else (if you've noticed that sometimes it takes a long time to get a forum page, the reason is probably that my host assigned this task a low priority to allow, say, credit card transactions from other sites to go first). And every time anyone visited the Home Page, the same code would have to execute.
It might also be possible to do this with javascript, which unlike PHP executes in your browser (the only javascript we have on CSR today is in the "Spank Batgirl" and "Spank Wonder Woman" interactive games). That might satisfy my host, but he's still going to have to provide the resources for all those MYSQL calls to the Tables.
Finally, I took a quick look and couldn't find a "last post date" in any of the Tables. That doesn't mean it's not there, but if it is, I suspect there's a different one for each forum since each forum does indeed display a last post date. That means I have to get all of them, one query at a time, and then interrogate them to find out which has the latest date. Could it be done? Probably. Will it be done? Well, it won't be done soon, that's for sure. But I will continue to look into the problem.