Chances are you can’t read this, but maybe you’re lucky. The host running this blog, MYSTcommunity, MYSTlore, the D’ni Linguistic Fellowship as well as various other sites is experiencing DNS issues; even though the sites are running, you won’t normally be able to reach them.

You can temporarily fix this by editing your hosts file. On a Unix-like system (including Linux, Mac OS X, etc.), this file resides in /etc/hosts; on Windows NT-based systems (including 2000, XP and Vista), %WINDIR%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. Open the file in a text editor and add a few lines like so:

216.127.69.124 mystfans.com
216.127.69.124 www.mystfans.com
216.127.69.124 chucker.mystfans.com
216.127.69.124 mystcommunity.com
216.127.69.124 www.mystcommunity.com
216.127.69.124 www.mystlore.com
216.127.69.124 en.mystlore.com
216.127.69.124 linguists.bahro.com

On Mac OS X, you also need to flush the hosts cache using dscacheutil -flushcache on 10.5 Leopard, or lookupd -flushcache on 10.4 Tiger and older (otherwise, the change won’t take place immediately).

Afterwards, launch your browser and the URLs should work as usual.

Tired of Kubrick, I decided to jump to my own design a little bit early. The new theme isn’t quite done, and you’ll notice this in two ways:

• A lot of features are missing. Most prominently, this includes search¹ and comments (both reading and submitting). Update: Search is fully back.
• Most pages are missing. Right now, only the legal page is there. There’s no “about”, which used to be a somewhat comprehensive (though incomplete) section, nor “contact”.
• Some of the layout is inconsistent. This particularly affects older articles. If you spot an article whose layout doesn’t appear to make sense (presumably, it used CSS rules that I didn’t transfer over to the new theme), let me know. For current articles, consider upgrading your browser.

Improvements – visual refresh aside – include the addition of tags (I will deprecate most categories, leaving only a handful), better handling of images (they scale to higher quality) and what I hope will be generally regarded as a less-in-your-face layout.

The site makes extensive use of CSS 3 properties, which means it won’t display quite as nicely on older browsers, but I have tried wherever possible to make things degrade nicely. Several browsers won’t support the multi-column layout, but they should degrade nicely to a single column of text. Most won’t do drop shadows underneath some of the text and images, but the site will look fine without them.

I also try to take advantage of some HTML 5 additions, such as the <header> and <footer> elements. (I’ll probably also try and let MYSTlore take advantage of HTML 5’s <video> element.) The site isn’t entirely valid at this point, but I’m getting there.

Finally, there will be a series of tabs on the top, as I showed a while ago.

Now, I realize that using CSS 3 and HTML 5 features this early makes navigating my little place on the Web ever-so-slightly less enjoyable on a regular browser, but when it comes to technology, I’ve always been the kind of guy to jump on bandwagons. (I can’t help it. )

I hope you enjoy some of the changes.

1. You actually can perform a search; there just isn’t any interface for queries yet. ↩