Trust me, it's funnier if you know what's been going on the past 24 hours or so.  The short version is that those of you wanting to jump the gun and position yourself for the goofy madness that is the Quarto unveiling can go to the registration page and sign up to be a registered commenter.

("But, Mom, do we have to?")

Of course not.  But it means that I'll be a sweetie, and run the nifty little script that marks your old comments as belonging to your new account, thus tying your personal info provided in the comment to the contact information in your account.  (In other words, change your contact info in your account, and all your old comments reflect the change.  Databases kick ass.)

Once I move 'cat.net to Quarto, this means that you'll also gain editing privs on future comments, as well as the old ones that I link to your account.  Those who don't register are stuck with their typos; the rest of you can pretend that you actually got it right the first time.

So, about this "everybody back in the pool" thing.

See, I hadn't meant to throw everyone out of the pool in the first place.  Last night I ran Gareth's lovely little conversion script over my entries and comments (six hundred of one, a thousand of the other—we're pretty wordy around here) and discovered a couple of glitches in how entries were being imported.  At the time, I had two sites set up on Quarto; a site for testing the conversion of domesticat entries and a site full of randomness that was being tested on Quartography.

(That's where all my Quarto-related code will be posted, just to keep that mess separate from cat.net.)

When it came time to delete the old entries from the cat.net testbed and try things again with the modified conversion script, I did the deletion from the command line because it was quicker.

Quicker, yes, but the problem came when I mis-typed the SQL command and hosed every single entry from both sites.  I stared at my monitor (lower lip quivering, preschool-fashion) wondering why in the world The Powers That Be felt it necessary to allow that one stupid SQL statement to have no errors in it.

Most of the time, I'm saved by my own stupidity; I'm generally not competent enough to cause serious damage.  But my practice of late seems to have honed my destructive capabilities, and there I sat with no entries and no comments whatsoever.

Frell.

So I deleted everything, and started over from the install script—thereby discovering more things that needed tweaking.  (Rule 1:  always work from your most recent version of your install script.  Does wonders for the finished product.)  Broke more stuff.  Did more lip-quivering.  (Didn't help.)  Fixed the code.  (Helped.)

A bit more work today, and I got things back where I needed them to be.  A couple of variables that I thought were superfluous turned out to be really necessary; their addition, plus other bits and pieces of work, made life much better.

So, about the pool thing?  I ended up having to hose the test sites, and I kept having images of someone yelling "Shark!" and everyone bailing out of the pool.

Anyway - do your registration thing.  The kitties will beam happy thoughts in your direction if you do.  Soon enough, you'll get to put your registration bits to good use. 

In the meantime—have fun, fellow swimmers!

(P.S. - I let friends have the first crack at the low user numbers.  Sorry, guys; the single-digit user_ids were gone in about five minutes.  It's doubles and triples for the rest of you…and the day that this thing starts to matter, I'm crawling under my desk and NOT coming out.)