Gareth: Heh. You will use the holiday skin and like it.

Amy: Can I quote you on that when I post the entry about all this?

For those of you who used your best StrongBad "Holy crap!" voice when you showed up here, relax. 'cat.net hasn't been taken over by aliens yet. There will be no alien takeover until December; until then we're free to make merry and taunt the cats.

(There is, however, a growing rumor that the cats are in collusion with the invading horde. Remember the April 2003 'Takeover' series? Be afraid...)

Nevertheless. I digress.

Welcome to Domesticat-On-Holiday, version IV. It's become something of a painful winter tradition around here that I rip down whatever perfectly-functioning design I had on this site and replace it with a partially-functioning, utterly-different design just to torture my friends for the duration of the holiday season. I'm pleased to say that around here, some things do stay the same.

I've been needing to do some serious housecleaning behind the scenes for about a year now, but knew that such a process would probably require disabling skins while I take an industrial-strength code cleaner to two years' worth of website cobwebs.

Um, how about now? After all, if you're distressed by the loss of your favorite skin, you can toddle over to your nearest market-of-choice and buy eggnog. Better yet, buy some rum to go with it. Pour yourself a cup of eggnog. Or a cup of rum. Garnish the eggnog with the rum, or the rum with the eggnog, depending on your state of desperation. Either way, I guarantee that you won't care about your favorite skin being gone once you've drunk the contents of the cup.

Wasn't I talking about site changes? Yeesh. I thought this kind of forgetfulness and digression was only supposed to happen after the cup of rum. I may be in for a long holiday season this year...

Right then. Changes. For entries on the front page, the text links for permalinks and emailing me are now gone; they're now obnoxiously cute pixellated images next to the title, with a shiny new graphic next to it: the "all entries from this week" graphic.

I finally got periodic archives working in a decent fashion. (See, I told you the aliens were coming.)

Word counts and pull quotes are now visible, because it amused me.

Most of what's going to happen from now on won't be terribly visible to other people. Many of the extraneous pages on cat.net need to be shifted around. You don't have to look at my dirty directory structure, but I do. I'm gonna take the good old mod_rewrite scrubbie to the org structure and remake it in my own internally-sensible yet externally-incomprehensible image.

The big issue is the lack of skins. The eighteen million "how do I skin my site?" visitors will just have to get over that. I feel some degree of responsibility to maintain skinning on this site, but, you know what? I wrote a tutorial a couple of years ago. I'm glad people have used it - glad, but essentially surprised. There comes a point where I should be allowed to say, "Glad you like it, but there are now plenty of well-skinned sites out there that you can look at while my site undergoes some sorely-needed housecleaning."

Until things are back up, we're just boneless/skinless around here. We do not taste like chicken, though.

Holler if things break. They will. Meanwhile, my karmic duty dictates I go to the post office. It's against my religious beliefs to visit any stores on the day after Thanksgiving, so I'm preparing now.

Current music: Rupert Holmes' "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)".

…but I don't call it that. It may have two titles on its own, but Jeff can attest that I call it by a third of my own making: "The Infidelity Song." I made this killer two-CD mp3 set of cheesy 70s and 80s tunes for Chris, and I managed to suck myself into my own cheesy music. Grr. *laugh*