I've made sure I'm logged in. I use Exploder 6.0 under XP Professional.

I'd be interested, if it's allowed, to hear about your first day stats.

Steve @9 - I'd completely forgotten the significance of today's date. Is that a coincidence or intentional on Tor's part, Patrick?

Call me impetuous (not to mention a little bored) but I’m not stupid. And while I’m far enough down the management ladder that I have to squint to see daylight, I’m an SSO 3, which means I can

(From the "Down on the Farm" sample.)

This is with Konqueror 4.0.98, so perhaps not of immediate concern, though that is an interesting decay sequence -- U+1074, U+1026, U+2122 -- for an apostrophe. Not what one usually sees.

But I can upload photos. :)

I am beyond thrilled to see ML regulars like Bruce Baugh and Beth Meacham as bloggers as well as commenters!

The URLs are very "messy". For example,

http://tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=706

rather than

http://tor.com/blog/2008/07/20/july-20-1969/

or even

http://tor.com/blog/706/

as you might see with, say, Wordpress. Perfectly functional, but looks ungainly.

That's the job description of our front end programmer at work.

I wasn't able to turn the full force of het Abiveld onto the site, since the "Come here and break this" email came the very day we got the keys to our new house, and I've been flat out moving ever since.

But well done to everyone who has worked so hard on getting it up and running.

Or else the het Abiveld is in full flower.

"Annihilation Jim. Total, complete, absolute annihilation."

I'm thinking this will get worked out over time, so it's not a real issue for me. Meanwhile, I did get to listen to them being read by selecting "play" instead of download, no problem.

Don't know if my browser is important, but I'm using Firefox 3.0.1.

If the site acts like a spoiled brat, it can go to bed without supper. So there. :)

Ok, I know those are beta bugs and will hopefully be dealt with soon. I've been through that with blogger as well when they changed their software and I jumped on the train early.

You do realise, Ginger, that you've written 'Or else the the Abi field is in full flower'?

(My Dutch is so bad I can't remember the rule for when to use 'het' and when to use 'de' for 'the'.)

*A province, if I am not mistaken, of the Netherlands.

This is so very very cool.

Congrats PNH and Tor folk; yes, I know, there are some glitches still, but this is really a pretty impressive undertaking.

I'm really excited.

FYI, the free e-books & wallpapers that Tor have been giving away recently are available, all in one location, for a limited time (until the end of the week).

And yay for a new "Laundry" story by Charlie Stross in multiple formats.

I say good job just for learning Joomla alone. It's a booger.

Dutch nouns are gendered; common gender (m+f) nouns use "de" and neuter nouns use "het". In compound nouns, the gender of the last word is used to determine the overall gender; this makes sense because many compound words are adjectives glued onto the fronts of nouns.

[De] Abi + het veld = het Abiveld

The 'connections' make it easier to stalk keep track of comments made by people you know via your profile page.

Dutch nouns are gendered; common gender (m+f) nouns use "de" and neuter nouns use "het".

Though good luck knowing which words are gendered and which are neutral. Is zout (salt) "de" or "het"? Whole wars have been fought out in my family over that little conundrum. For the most part, using de or het is one of these things you learn by instinct, not science...

Though good luck knowing which words are gendered and which are neutral.

This is one of the plagues of learning the language*, yes. But if in doubt, one can always make a word diminutive (and thus neuter), or talk about it in the plural (and thus common gender).

-----
* Word order is harder, though.

And of course, it's der Mond (masc) in German and la lune (fem) in French, and die Sonne but le soleil; same with a lot of words. I'm sure the French do that on purpose. ;)

Opera 9 on Windows 2000 (an old portable). I probably ought to upgrade to the absolute latest version, but this is the only time I've seen the problem, anywhere.

It's odd, perhaps, but Opera 9 and OpenOffice don't behave like bloatware on this machine. Though some websites feel over-decorated.

Which is not to say I don't want to hear about problems with Opera, Konqueror, etc., of course.

At which point the only thing left is IE, and that's best handled by detecting the browser and serving different pages.

One-size-fits-all web pages beyond flat text don't work when you've got ACID2 compliance and IE6 to deal with at the same time.

Those lines are a workaround for the fact that people keep not noticing our somewhat muted "READ MORE" post footers. As soon as we fix that, those lines will go away.

abi #44: Dank je wel.

Martin Wisse #48: Een zoutoorlog? (The word for 'war' is one place where Dutch goes truly weird.)

There's a transcript of the talk here.

To get more ontopic (obviously, anything related to Tor.com "I can't post coments on the site" is offtopic here :-): Gabriele #53, I had no problem with German (except for reading the usual pokes how foolish it is to have girls be "it" etc., and problems learning the genders by heart - I prefer languages where more of the gender is preserved in the ending and not just separated to the article). Actually, the problem was caused by how normal it was for me: Having been exposed only to that, and Slavic languages, and English on the other end of the spectrum, I thought that where there are genders at all, triad is a universal state (being after all so natural, right?), and I was surprised on learning, rather late, that Romance languages miss the neuter. I accepted that - okay, another example of that vulgar simplification going on since the Golden Age and Proto-Indo-European. But when I learned that Dutch merges masculine and feminine together, leaving neuter separately, I boggled a lot.

Oh, and since I haven't yet said it elsewhere, congratulations to everyone involved - it's a great site.

Swedish has four grammatical genders, but in general you can fold male, female and the other neutral into one, as far as grammar goes (though the masculine pokes out as you apply adjectives, as an adjective as applied to a m. noun takes an -e suffix instead of the more normal -a suffix).

PNH @ #56:
Now that the site is out of beta, I'll open a ticket with Opera about the pasting problems and general comment editing weirdness I've had.

Well, it works fine for me under Exploder 6.0 now: comments, starting a conversation, photo upload ... I'm feeling right at home there. :)

Ingvar #65
I lived in Sweden for two years back in 1989-91, studying, and foisting the intricacies of German grammar on some poor, unsuspecting Swedes. It was a fun time.

This is intensely amusing, therefore, and I really thank Patrick for the opportunity.

Are you logged in? The posting box doesn't appear unless you are.

A blank message arrived in my shoutbox ~3 hours ago. The shoutbox appears to one of the 'work-in-progress' functionalities.

:)

Arguably bad design to not have a warning, if one really needs to be logged in, rather than something which looks like a non-working equivalent of Making Light's comment entry interface.

So now I can type in a comment, press Preview Comment, and get shunted straight to the Current Conversations page.

IME Russians - at least on elementary level - are distinguished be leaving out copulas.

We also have a complex file of regex matches to distinctive words and phrases (the Words of Power).

Considering the swamp that is the internet, we actually spend very little time cutting off tentacles and banishing shambling creatures.