A word about what’s been going on with the site. Wordie finally outgrew the basic hosting it launched on, so this week I moved it to a new home, a VPS on Slicehost. I’d like to think that eventually Wordie will need a dedicated server, but this should do for a while, I hope.

While I was at it I ported Errata over to Blogger, as you may have deduced from the new look. I was hesitant to do this, since I didn’t want to disturb the existing posts and comments, but I decided the benefits outweighed the minor headaches. My Wordie time is better spent working on the site itself, rather than futzing with blog software. I moved all the old posts over to Blogger, and sucked out the old comments as well, though I have yet to attach them to the new posts (I’ll do that soon).

Lastly, I spent some time this afternoon optimizing the db, which sped some pages up 10x. May or may not be noticeable to you, dear reader, but at the least it should help the site better handle traffic spikes, like when William Safire did that “On Language” column about Wordie last week*.

Hopefully this puts site infrastructure in good stead for now, which will both let me get back to building features, and allow Errata to focus less on web development, and more on words and language.

*not true

Apologies for Wordie going kind of bonkers while I sorted out DNS issues related to changing hosts. I just ironed out some config kinks on the new server, the transfer finally went through, and from reports in the field, they seems to have propagated throughout the pipes.

If this outage really has you hot and bothered, this might soothe you.

If you go to any one of your lists, or to your profile page, theres a “Comments” link where you can see all the comments that you yourself have written.

On that comments page there is now also a link to a new page, where you can see everything other people have written on your profile, your lists, and your words. Another way to keep track of what people are saying.

I was poking around in the OED tonight — that’s right, the Online Etymology Dictionary — and came across an article on the etymology of the word “shit.” Apparently there’s a mistaken belief in some quarters that it’s an acronym. Which strikes me as transparently false: If ever there was a good, solid, Anglo-Saxon sounding word, it’s shit. The article is a bit shrill in makings its point, but nevertheless it’s an interesting read.

In a similar vein, you might want to check out Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-word, which is both fun and enlightening, or, drifting a bit farther, On Bullshit, by the tremendously named Harry G. Frankfurt, which I read over the holidays and loved. Would make an excellent gift for a Wordie, or for yourself, if you’re planning on exchanging that copy of The Redneck Dictionary you got for Christmas.

For some reason all this reminds me of a paper I read long ago, by one Quang Phúc Ðông of the South Hanoi Institute of Technology (coincidentally my alma mater), titled “English sentences without overt grammatical subject.”

I’m not sure why it’s funny to take cuss words seriously, but it is.

First, passing on a tip from Andrew Mager: the new “live bookmarks” feature in Firefox 2.0 is rad, and works nicely with Wordie feeds. Live bookmarks essentially let you bookmark a feed, and then see the contents of the feed as if the bookmark was a folder. It’s nice.

Second, Wordie has been nominated for a Mashable Social Networking Award in the “nice” (or maybe it was “niche”?) category. Vote for us with the big dumb button below, if you wanna. And rembember, a vote for Wordie is a vote for prosperity:

Ok, I know I’m a pathetic whore for doing this, but a blog I enjoy, Mashable, is hosting a series of Social Networking Awards. Please click the big dumb button below if you wouldn’t mind nominating Wordie in the “Niche and Miscellaneous Networks” category (sorry, they don’t have a gaytarded category).

Wordie was featured on TechCrunch tonight. A nice post, complimentary and polite while still pointing out that Wordie is basically absurd. And apparently the site amuses Flickr’s Stewart Butterfield, which amuses me.

Some people got hot and bothered in the first few comments, upset that Techcrunch would have the effrontery to cover something not related to venture capital. But those comments were clearly penned by illiterates (“The quality of Techcrunch is getting bad day by day”, etc.), so you can hardly blame them for not grokking Wordie. I did appreciate the guy who liked our error message, and the guy (I presume it’s a guy), who took such pleasure in getting to use the acronym WTF. Language appreciators both.

Some people get a little crazed about getting covered by Techcrunch. And believe me, I’m psyched about it — I read it every day. But I’m not sure it’s a very wordie crowd. I’m curious to see if it leads to anything besides a momentary bump in traffic.