The BIYF Store is the latest casualty of the ongoing purge surrounding BIYF.com. I’m not sure why, but the CafePress BIYF store has had fatal issues loading and allowing me to edit it despite the other CafePress shops I run being unaffected.

Maybe it’s because it’s a very old CafePress shop on a very old CafePress server (launched in 2004, I believe)… Maybe it’s somehow related to the main BIYF site being compromised… Maybe it’s just coincidence or maintenance or any number of things. Regardless, I currently have very little patience for diagnosing the problem and I’m continuing my “burn it to the ground and start fresh’ approach here.

The former BIYF Classic shop (and URL) is now the new main BIYF store for all your BIYF shopping needs. There aren’t new things available there or anything, but that’s where the new stuff will show up along with classic designs. No more multiple stores.

This “new” shop seems unimpaired by the difficulties the old main shop was suffering from so I’m moving the flag there, culling the old shop (it let me delete it without issue), and calling the issue solved. The link on the landing page at BIYF.com has been updated to reflect the new store URL.

Hopefully this will also solve the problems a few of you were running into with the old store over the last couple years. I had been observing annoyingly slow load times at it for a while, but everything had continued to function when I shopped there. Eventually.

Things seem better with this solution already. For me, anyway. There are other options than CafePress these days if it’s just as slow and unwieldy as before for the rest of you. Please let me know here or via email or Facebook if/when you have problems.

Things are quiet at BIYF.com these days. Thanks to some helpful vandals that facilitated “burning down the house” here, there are only a couple things live on the site at the moment. That’s actually OK with me. Not the vandals part, the quiet opportunity for a fresh start part.

As I may have mentioned many times recently, we’re heading toward our 20th BIYF Festival in 2017. That seems like a good time to brush off the cobwebs, take a look around and decide what needs to stay and what can be relegated to backups-only status. Currently, everything is sitting out on the front lawn of the house due to the fire, so it’s mostly a matter of deciding what stuff to bring back into the new house as I build it.

Here’s my thinking on that. Back when we started doing all this, there weren’t all of the options available to the general public for sharing content online that we have today. It was a lot more complicated, time-consuming, and (as amazing as it sounds) there was a lot less content out there. Or at least it seemed like it because it was harder to find and didn’t seek you out of its own accord as is increasingly common today.

I wanted to have a place for us to celebrate us and this weird little ritual of ours that occurs once a year. As time went on this expanded to include a lot of the things that individuals or small groups of us did that I thought were delightful. Appearing on Jeopardy! The B-Squad! Hawkeye Tailgating! Rib Dependence! The Bricker’s new haircut! Michael Caine is Frodo Baggins! Things that made my world a happier place. Lordy, so much fun. You folks are amazing and it was fun to try and venerate that, at least in a small way.

But nowadays, there’s dozens of ways for anyone to do that sort of thing at anytime, anywhere, for free. Plus, the more I diversified and tried to celebrate all our things, the less sustainable it became. And, as such, it wasn’t sustained…

I’m going to try to reduce the scope of BIYF.com to being just about the BIYF Festival and things relating directly to that. Movies, beer, shared memories. That sort of thing. Maybe that way I can get it back on it’s feet and produce something that’s unique again. Something that’s worth revisiting from time to time. That’s still not a small task, but I’m looking at it as a long-term, multi-stage project.

At the moment the only things active at the site are the home page, the “password-protected” landing page, and the Zardoz Speaks to You (Mark II) blog. If you’re still reading this post at this point, you already know the BIYF Binge is coming and will dominate the blog for (at least) the next year. My plan is to eventually gather up the Binge posts related to a given year, combine them with any other available relics from that same year’s BIYF Festival and assemble an online shrine for each year (“onshrine” them?).

I also plan to use the blog to gather feedback not just about your BIYF viewing memories/recurring nightmares during the Binge, but also about your memories of the BIYF Festivals themselves. When I start building the shrines I’ll try to supply blog post prompts for each year as I go. Hopefully we can capture some more of our memories and stories in context before they completely fade into the past.

If you look along the left side of the landing page at BIYF.com, you’ll see a column of numbers beginning with “98.” This is where I’ll begin linking the shrine pages once they actually exist. There won’t be a lot else living here, but I hope we can make what is here fun to revisit from time to time.

I look forward to seeing what happens over the next twelve months. I hope you are as well, but I’ll be satisfied with mild interest. It’s all about managing expectations.

Drink beer! Relive movies vicariously through the blog without being forced to actually watch them again yourself! Comment below if the mood strikes you! Do you still love the Bricker’s haircut? I know I do.