Hallo, hallo! For the first time there were over 20,000 games in one month played on Dracis. November 2007 saw 20,087 games, despite some downtime and an annoying bug I saw far too late. That's cool news. Thanks to those of you who keep playing even tho it is a bit hard to find other users most of the time. :)

I haven't been very active on here in the past few weeks... even months. Mainly because work is keeping me busy. I hope there will be some more development in the second half of December again and then the new year.

A bug I fixed after the Django update may have been there a LONG TIME. It prevented editing of personal information in the profile. I noticed that all new users don't have ANY data there, so I'm guessing it was because of that error.

It WORKS again, so try it out, if you want to specify an email, location, birthday, gender, whatever.

And PLEASE tell me whenever you see such bugs, I rarely try to create a new profile... I have one! ;P

I earlier did an update of Django, the web framework we use on here, and saw with a bit of a gasp that it automatically escapes variables in templates now. Meaning the whole website was full of escaped (readable) HTML code. I tried to fix all the problems this caused. If you still see some, then don't be alarmed, but perhaps drop me a line in a private message or the bug forum, thanks.

Greetings, Dracisers. I just want to share some general news with you today.

To begin, a happy Independence Day yesterday to Lebanon, whose separation from France was initially declared on November 26, 1941, but was only recognized on November 22, 1943 after France released the government officials that it had put into prison, and finally recognized Lebanon as being independent.

Also, today, Japan celebrates Labour Thanksgiving Day, known not only for giving thanks and noting the work of labourers, but also for speaking to peace, human rights, and the environment. This celebratory day is also known as the Rice Harvest Festival, which acknowledges the hard work for the year, and makes a tribute to the spirits as the year's first grains of rice are tasted.

In semi-related news, I've discovered a new site that I'm excited about. You probably know that rice is a great source of carbohydrates, which tends to be our number one source of energy. Mmm, sugars. You and I probably eat enough carbs every day, but a lot of people around the world don't have access to the food they need in order to live. A sibling site of Poverty.com, Free Rice is a site that allows you to donate rice to these people in need whilst testing and broadening your English lexicon. For every word that you correctly define, you will effectively be donating ten grains of rice to someone who needs it. It makes it fun and educational for you, and invaluable to that person who you help survive. A record will be kept of how much you have donated, as well as your level of vocabulary for that session. It's a lovely, lovely idea and I hope you all take the time to donate at least a little bit. Personally, I happily rest at a level around 36-38, though I'm trying to consistently break 40. I have donated a few thousand grains today. This is what you can do.

Take time today to celebrate, to learn, and to make a difference!

After some complications we are back. Sorry about the downtime and annoying disconnections. Things seem to run fine now... please report any dodgy behaviour.

Have fun.

Eyup, everybody. As some of you know (or not care), dracis.com runs on Ubuntu and there's a new Ubuntu version out, so I just started an update process. There shouldn't be any problems (I hope) with the webserver or the gameservers, but if there are, then you know why. It shouldn't take too long, I'm hoping 1.5 hours tops.