Lithchat's gone through a lot of changes in the past eight years or so. What started out originally as just a front-end to mailing list software, a few dumb photos, and the beginnings of an online dainorėlis has turned, instead, into a lot (13,000+) of dumb photos, no links to the mailing list, and a space for a community blog-type entity (waiting to be exploited by people other than I). But I think the change I rolled out yesterday is maybe the biggest shift in the past couple years.

The site has always been separated into discrete elements, and this was clearest with the photos, which had their own software, and, hence, their own look and feel, separate from the rest of the site. When the site became community authored, there were even two userspaces: you needed one login to post on the front page/comment and a different to upload photos.

Those userpaces have been merged. IF YOU HAVE A USERNAME TO UPLOAD PHOTOS, YOU CAN SUBMIT POSTS TO THE FRONT PAGE (and vice versa). That's all been done automagically. Similarly, the photo software (Gallery), has been embedded in the CMS software (Joomla!). It's not seamless, but lithchat has always been a bit broken.

There are other, smaller changes: old URLs to photos, etc., are, for the time being, broken. Trust me, I'm most upset about this, but the inanity of people signing up just to post/comment on photos and not have access to the front page necessitated this move.

Finally, I know the site looks crummy on IE. There's nothing I can do about it; I don't have a functioning copy of IE (Msoft stopped developing for Mac), nor do I particularly care, considering that I consider Firefox to be a superior browser at all things, including sucking up all your resources. The site might look normal in IE7, but I make no guarantees.

PS: There will be one more big change I hope to roll out in the next month, a World Cup pool. It will be available only to registered users. The prize will probably be, again, a bottle of degtinė.