As the Piker Press heads off into its eighth year on the web, faithful readers may have noticed some weird crap going on ... like links not working, or bookmarks sending the viewer to an "Oops" page. Believe me, we're trying to get that all straightened out. For those with computer savvy, we've changed the guts of the Piker Press from Cold Fusion as its computer language to PHP. This has caused the old links that had .cfm suffixes to no longer work. Of course, for those with computer savvy, you can get up off the floor from your laughter at why on earth we were still using that dinosaur language in the first place. Shut up, just shut up.
The solution: type in "http://www.pikerpress.com" (sans quotation marks, of course) and you will find the Press and can bookmark it anew.
The Forums have undergone a change, too. For some unknown reason, the Forums developed a mind of their own and began banning IP addresses, seemingly at random. Drunken forum-gremlins would wait until someone signed out, then fiddle with the IP address. When the user would try to sign back in, a nasty message would appear, shouting "YOU ARE BANNED FROM THIS FORUM!" The gremlins would drink up, pour themselves another, and wait for the next victim. No matter how many times we would clear the "Banned IP" list, within minutes the gremlins would list another, so we upgraded our forums to the latest release, which included gremlin bait from an internet pest control site. Until the gremlins develop yet another immunity, this ought to keep the forums accessible to everyone. The New and Improved link to the Piker Press Forums is http://pikerpress.com/phpbb3/index.php . There folks can register and leave comments about the Press, or play the writing games, or just introduce themselves to the rest of the Piker community.
The solution: click on the Forums link on the left-hand side of the Front Page of the Piker Press, and you will find the new Forums and can change your bookmark.
The next new experiment we've embarked upon (dangling participles and all) is Facebook. On the left side of the Front Page is a Facebook link. From that link, a reader ought to be able to poke sticks at lots of Filthy Pikers and suggest stories to them ... or maybe even muster the courage to submit writings of his/her own.
Finally, if you are considering submission of something to the Piker Press, what we're looking for is fine summer reading: fiction (1200 - 5000 words), poetry (funny rhyming stuff you could read aloud to kids would be wonderful -- we get too little of that), non-fiction how-to's, food articles, informative articles on history, gardening lore, travel ... we're wide open.
And photographs! Don't forget the photographs!
Send queries, submissions, photos, letters to editor@pikerpress.com.
Thanks, and we hope you enjoy yet another year of the Piker Press.
The Piker Press moderates all comments.
Click here for the commenting policy.