As of now, I have removed the “activation by administrator” control from the ditzie Beta Site‘s gallery. It will now use ordinary email confirmation activation. Now that I have a better mechanism for accepting feedback in place (yonder WordPress blog), I feel a little bit more comfortable opening up the floodgates. Of course, this means being more “on guard” looking for abuse (which is why I’ve historically hated running open community sites like forums), but I trust that ditzie will eventually develop a sense of community and some self-policing will occur.

There’s no particular reason why, but I kinda felt that ditzie was being left out in the big-bad world of Internet tools while it lacked a logo. So, I did what any good administrator of a shoe-string budget project does: I fired up The Gimp and typed out the name in a nifty looking font. Voila, a logo. You can see it hanging out in the upper left hand corner of the page.

For fun, and since it’s what we do here, I also added a ditzie logo image set to the Beta site.

Welcome to WordPress. This is my first post.

ditizie was originally envisioned as an entirely visual system. The site had no text when it was first created, just a bunch of colorful images (and, in fact, the application itself remains as visually simplistic as ever). My hope was to keep ditzie accessible to anyone and everyone who happened to stumble across it. As it happened, no one got it. Either the concept of a purely visual, completely interactive web application was so foreign that the average visitor just doesn’t comprehend it at first, or more likely, no one expected that it did anything. Regardless, I came to realize that ditzie needs to both provide comprehensive instructions and a notion of what it actually does if it’s going to appeal to anyone other than myself. Thus the blog.

Since ditzie is basically an experimental toy, I really don’t have a clear vision of what I expect this blog to become. Still, I imagine a lot of blogs start out that way, so, hey, it’s cool with me.