The Community At Large in its current iteration is now over. Thanks for visiting, but you won’t find any new posts here. Also, all comments forms are closed, except on this post.

TCAL ran from 1998 - 1999, and then disappeared until September 2004 when it returned in the form you see it in today. It now stops, with one last iteration to come in the next few years.

Thanks a million to all our thousands of daily readers, those who left comments on posts, anyone who took the time to email in links and stories for the site, and also to those who wrote feature articles.

Thanks to all the frequent posters: Adam, Dave, Davey, G, Norm, Piaras, Steph, adnans, dodger, gordy, jp, kgaughan, littleman, maca, squid, stephen xiel, Si, Feshti, PeterR, lorcan, rOb, sbradish, twenty and Tim.

My favourite link is still Quest for the Crown.

TCAL returns one more time. Until then.

TCAL is intermittently going tits up at the moment. Sorry.

Click on the image to download large version. (1152×864 only…if you really want it at another resolution let me know…)

A quick proof of concept turned into almost passable TCAL desktop background. At least it’s not like the last one.

Oh, and no prizes for pointing out what it’s directly based on.

Regular readers will know we love wikipedia, and now its been confirmed.

As for mentioning the term Wikipedia, certain bloggers demonstrate undeniable affinity with the site. Bloggers most likely to mention Wikipedia include popular and influential authors, as well as ad-supported blogs maintained by established niche-publishing networks.

And TCAL is fourth on the list. Nielson buzzmetrics press release. (via.)

Hello, we’re currently thinking about version 4.0 of TCAL, and we’re currently looking for ideas in the following areas:

1. Encouraging more people to sign up and post
2. Increasing readership
3. Presenting the information better
4. New features
5. Subject matter - more Irish stuff? Less random internet shit?

Drop a comment or contact us if you’ve any ideas/anything you hate at the moment etc…

This is the 7003rd post on TCAL; the 7000th post was made by dodger here. Onwards and upwards…

The series of tubes that runs our web site is broken. Hence the quietness around these parts. Stay tuned.

Yes it’s that time of year again. TCAL just turned two years of age. For the record, here’s what the site looked like back when it started and here’s the very first post.

Since then, we’ve finally got some proper features going.

We’ve had some controversy in the shape of Xiel.

We won the Best Group Blog award at the first annual Irish Blog Awards, which was an incredible surprise.

There’s some cool new stuff coming down the line to mark the occasion of turning 2; the first thing is a site redesign - Not the fully fledged redesign that we’re still working on, but a stop gap spit and shine to make the site look nicer; this current version is really starting to creak around the edges. The second thing coming online is pretty exciting too, but I’m going to hold fire on the specifics of that until it’s up and running properly.

Update: We turned on the new design a bit early just to mark the occasion. It’s very much just a clean-up, but if you notice anything wrong please tell us.

It’s a perfect world, It’s a TCAL world.

Hello, if you are one of the 208 people who’s signed up recently, but has not gotten an automated email, this message is for you. In the next two weeks we will be resetting our user registration process, so hopefully ALL of you should get an email along with your accounts being activated.

All I can do is apologise for this, we suck at user registration. It’s like our kryptonite. If you are reading this and don’t get an email within the next two weeks, please contact us. Look out for more exciting stuff as we approach TCAL: Year Two. (Well really year nine, but who’s counting?)

TCAL.NET was down for a short time at lunchtime today due to server problems at our hosting provider; hosting365. Bit of discussion about it at Tom Raftery’s blog here and at this boards.ie thread.

The internet told me to go and put TCAL.NET’s URL into this page here, which says:

You can use adCenter technology to predict a customer’s age, gender, and other demographic information according to his or her online behavior—that is, from search queries and webpage views.

That all sounds suitably impressive. So I throw the URL in and boom:

And there it is. Find out more about Microsoft adCenter Labs here.

Suitably sun burnt it’s time to fix the site. - Any members, now is probably not the best time to write posts.

Upgrade complete: Can anyone who notices any problems please post about them below.

Update: The comments bug appears to be fixed but not retroactively. If you look carefully, you’ll notice that it reports 0 comments for some posts, but if a comment is made, it will then start to display the correct number of comments. Pushing a comment into moderation and then back out also causes it to start behaving correctly. Interesting issue, it’s as if a table wasn’t being updated. Don’t have time right now to go dig in the database [it’s too sunny outside] but it appears to be fixed for new posts and comments at least.

While we continue to experience technical difficulties, I just thought I’d point you towards some Irish stuff to keep you going. The Stunned weblog as ever, delivers kick ass content with every post. The Dublin Community Blog and the Limerick Blogger do their respective areas proud. Damien Mulley has a few good links up at the moment. Given the weather thats in it, Geared Up Blog may be just the place to get primed for the weekend. For more Irish blogging action, some of which is good, but a lot of which is very bad, head on over to the aggregators irishblogs.ie and planet journals.

Have a good one!

Further to our ealier post today, there really is something wrong with TCAL.NET. That’s about as far as we’ve got in our troubleshooting but rest assured we’ll take our time, have a few pints, enjoy the sun over the weekend and then get right on possibly thinking about maybe making an effort to fix it.

There is a problem with something on the site. For example, on this post:
http://tcal.net/archives/2006/05/26/the-broken-laptop-i-sold-on-ebay/

It says there are 3 comments, when in fact there are 7. It’s reporting the number of comments all over the site incorrectly. I’m pretty cut up by this.

If you registered for TCAL over the last few weeks and have not been able to login/post can you please contact us here with the email addressed you used, it looks like once again we’ve tripped up on the registration process.

After 604 days in operation and 5,385 posts we’ve decided it’s time for another redesign, as this one is getting slightly crusty and can’t quite contain how kick ass the site is becoming. To tell the truth the monkey butlers have been pouring over wireframes, uml diagrams and photoshop mockups for several months now, dilligently coming up with a new iteration of TCAL that should support it’s continued growth. Have you got some killer ideas for us or some way to help out? Want to give your thoughts on the way you see TCAL going over the next while? Let us know.

For those of you keeping score, here’s what TCAL looked like when it launched. And here’s the second iteration before it went all 3 column.

It’s a perfect world. It’s a TCAL world.

If you are wondering why all the videos below are blank, it’s because YouTube is down at the moment.

Our amazing new feature, being able to email posts to your friends, is now up and running. You can email any of the stories on the site to up to 5 email addresses at once. Enjoy!