The premise of the series is this:

The world is a complex place, with many mysterious and hidden dangers that the Powers That Be would prefer you didn’t know about. Ignorance is bliss, but knowing is Half the Battle!

If you have any topics you’d like me to cover in an HtB article, leave a comment or send me an email.

With the change, several different areas of the site were affected. Here are some of the things that were lost, and some of the things that were gained:

Things That Were Lost

1. Old Comments: While all of the old comments are technically still in the database, they weren’t transferred over into the WordPress system. There’s a small possibility I’ll find a way to transfer them over somehow, but it isn’t much of a priority right now. If you really want to see your old comment again, repost it or something.
2. Old RSS Feed: The old RSS feed which I had built will no longer update. If you were subscribed to the old RSS feed and still want to get updates, you’ll have to subscribe to the new feed instead, which can be found here.
3. Forums: While the forums aren’t technically gone, they aren’t really going to be supported or linked anymore.
4. Some Links: Some of the old links which pointed to articles on the old system are broken now. If you find broken links (they’ll probably just point you to the Home page when you click them), leave a comment or send me an email and I’ll go back and fix them.

Things That Were Gained

1. Post Comments Without Registering: On the old system, you had to be registered on the forums to post a comment. This was a way to prevent spam comments, of which I had been receiving copious amounts. WordPress has some great anti-spam plugins (God bless you, Akismet), so now anyone can post a comment, as long as they enter an email address.
2. Tags, Categories, and Search: Posts can be tagged, categorized, and searched for much more easily on WordPress than they could on the CMS I built. This should make it easier to find back a post you read a few weeks or months ago. At some point I hope to set up a better Archive system that’ll make browsing the back-catalogue more straightforward, as well.
3. Easier Redesigns: I don’t have to rebuild the website to change the design; I can just install a new theme or tweak the existing one.
4. Pre-Scheduled Posts: I like keeping a bit of a schedule for the site (updates M/W/F), and on WordPress I can write a post on the weekend, set it to auto-update on Monday, and spend my time thinking about other things. This will hopefully make me more productive, because I won’t have to work day-to-day to get my posts up at the right time.

If you have any comments about the redesign or any suggestions of good WordPress features or plugins I could take advantage of, let me know!

Some of the fiction I’ve hidden away may resurface at some point. Whether that’s on TPB or somewhere else remains to be seen.

If you really, REALLY want to read some Wesley Chesterson in the meantime, leave a comment or send me an email.

A coalition of linguists from North America and the United Kingdom today announced that they will no longer support the use of the word “dozen” in the English language. The group’s given reason for this boycott is the “vocabularistic devolution” of the term. Over the course of past decades, the Clear Language Alliance claims, “dozen” has come to be too closely associated with the similar-sounding word “doesn’t,” a word that has clear negative connotations.

“We live in a world that is characterized by far too much negative thinking,” says CLA spokesperson Alan Thifamilé. “Everywhere you turn you hear messages of doom and gloom: the economy is failing, American soldiers are dying overseas, and so on. It’s important that we don’t let the circumstances of our world so deeply infiltrate and define our language.”

The CLA is campaigning to have words with unnecessary negative implications removed from English dictionaries in order to counteract the language’s trend towards pessimism. Other words the CLA hopes to have removed include “Wine,” “Insulate,” and the prefix “Un.” So far, the group has not made any recommendations about what these words would be replaced with.

Asked if the CLA felt there might be a loss of diversity and meaning if their recommendations were followed, Thifamilé responded, “President Obama triumphed on a platform of Yes We Can. Would you have voted for him if he had said No We Can’t? It’s very similar with the word ‘dozen.’ If you have only a few dollars in your pocket and you’re worrying about how you’re going to afford the mortgage you took out before you lost your job at Burger King, then are you more likely to buy twelve roses, or a dozen? Which of those words sounds more encouraging and attainable? We’re all about promoting hope-based vocabulary rather than language based on the depressing realities of everyday life.”

Grant Poynte is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sussex. He writes a weekly column about the evolution of the English language for NATEL.

That said, I don’t really use the word “dozen” very often, myself, and I’m not a big fan of wine, so I don’t really care if they remove those words or not.

What do you think?