Ahoy, maties! For a variety of reasons I've updated the Real Live Pirate web site. For those who may not know what that is, it is a site set up for fun due to a group of frequent chat participants refering to ourselves as "The Pirates of Pennance," obviously playing off of both The Pirates of Penzance and Real Live Preacher where we met and meet to chat.

As a static site it really hasn't been very interesting except to point new pirate wannabes to it in order to share some links to other pirates and pirate-related sites. It seems to me that our group of friends has enough and varied interests that there would be a variety of web sites we might run across which would be fun to share with other pirates, and perhaps even non-pirates. So, I've now installed blog software and reconfigured the site to use it. (Note that this is part of a move to a different web-hosting service, so while I have found that I can get directly to the new site, it may be that pirates whose internet connectivity uses different domain name servers (DNS) might not yet have access to the new site. Fear not, it should not take more than 48 hours (less than 40 by now) for the new site's address to propogate around the entire internet at which point it should be accessible to everyone. If you don't see the new page you might try refreshing the display and/or clearing your browser's cache of saved pages just to verify that your computer is pulling the page from the internet instead of from a saved copy of the page.)

So what does all of this mean? It is my hope that other pirates might be willing to post links that they find of interest into this common site. Most of us have our own blogs and I don't really see a need for anyone to post complete articles on rlp2 (rlp being the aforementioned Real Live Preacher, thus Real Live Pirate is rlp2). However, I know that I often run across funny, thought provoking, or otherwise interesting sites (at least, I think they qualify as such) which I'd like to share with friends, but I don't want my blog to be simply a linklog (a collection of links with little other content) even if that would be more interesting than my usual drivel. (I thought this was called a link farm but apparently that is a search engine spamming scheme for raising page rank in search results. Live and learn. I found some other sites referring to a collection of links such as I envision as a linklog, so that's the term I settled on. Anywaaaaaay...) Examples of other collective link sharing sites include SlashDot, MetaFilter, and Fark. However, those either are too specialized (SlashDot is specifically for topics of technical interest), too crude (Fark, of course), or simply too busy to keep up with (MetaFilter and the others as well). Knowing the folks who are sharing the links would make the links more interesting to me ("what does their interest in this site teach me about my friend?") and would help spark conversations when we do chat.

So, if you are interested in contributing I encourage you to visit the new site and get yourself registered (just click login and follow the instructions) and let me know that you have done so and what your handle there is (in case you decide on a different one than I usually see you using). I will then update your access so that you can post new entries. Even if you are not interested in contributing links I hope you'll visit the site and see what folks are linking to.

One consequence of this change is that the forum which had been on the old rlp2 site is now gone. I asked a few pirates if they thought that would be a problem and they agreed with me that there hadn't been enough content there to be concerned about losing. Sorry if anyone disagrees with that decision, but I don't think that can be undone at this point. For the new site the blog posts will allow for comments so discussions can continue there as needed. If anyone would dearly love to see a forum separate from blog comments on the rlp2 site then let me know. If there is enough interest I can build a new forum.

I hope to hear from some of you soon. I think this could be fun. Maybe we should even start an rlp2 webring.