Angels 2.0

Over the last few months I've been neglecting the Angels side of things. After the webhost debacle with Fasthosts late last year I began moving all my sites to a new host.

Moving the regular sites was easy. Moving the few forums I have was a little scarier. I run a small forum for work and I managed to move that across in December without any problems. But when I tried to do the same for the Angels it all went horribly wrong. So I left it... and then kept putting it off.

Last week I decided that I really should move it. It's the last of my sites to move. So with a deep breath and a little scouring of the forums I had another go and it all worked fine. Phew.

Once moved, I could now upgrade the forum to the new version of phpBB, version 3. This happened yesterday and it seems to be OK so far. I had a nasty moment when, after two hours of getting it all working, I installed a style that managed to lock up the entire forum and made it necessary for a complete reinstall.. which was a sod.

Anyway, the new and improved Angels Forum can be seen at the usual address of http://www.angelsforum.co.uk/phpforum/

On a related note I also wanted to tart up the Angels website itself. Partly because I wanted a fresh look and partly because it was becoming a little haphazard with pages all over the place and a disjointed look. I also wanted a fresh start with me now officially running the online side of the Angels without Kim as opposed to unofficially doing it :)

I'd been playing with Wordpress since it comes preinstalled with the new host (and free MySql databases too!) and had moved the "angels blog" over from Blogger to Wordpress (which was rather painless... keep an eye out I may do the same here one day too!)

What I wanted to do was base the whole site around the Wordpress theme. It took a little tinkering with some of the code, but I think it works OK for now.

You can see the new look Angels website at http://www.theangels.co.uk

If you have any old links to parts of the Angels site on your blogs, I would suggest you check the links and update any that are broken. Annoyingly with the new host I could now host the forum on the main Angels domain, but the angelsforum domain is so engrained now that it seems silly to move it back.

My next step is to try and get an RSS feed from the "latest posts" bit of the forum - and integrate it on the blog. Watch this space, but don't hold your breath.

Where do the trannies go?

I've written before about the phenomena of the Trannienova. Those trannies that burst onto the scene, produce a prolific number of posts on the various forums and lists, attend every tranny event possible then vanish in a puff of taffeta never to be seen again.

Usually they go into a period of purging, often because after all this excitement they tell their wife and it goes badly, or they just implode in a puff of self doubt (or worse, self loathing)

Sometimes it's a case of too much too soon. The tranny is released from the bottle and just explodes.

I remember it was over a year between my debut and my second night out. And another 9 months before I made it out again. Things went very slowly.

But what I was more interested in is what happens to those more stalwart trannies, that just vanish.

In the early days of the Angels there were quite a few girls who were out quite a bit at Stormes with the rest of us. And then they just disappeared. People like Claire Wilson, who was one of the founding members of the Angels right in there at the early days, or BobbyJo Smith.

I hope these girls are OK. They just vanish from the scene and disappear. Emails sent either bounce or don't get answered.

I know girls leave the scene for many reasons. Either they begin to doubt themselves or just decide it's not for them. Sometimes a partner may object and they bury their female side to get an easy life at home. Or sometimes they go full on TS and go stealth and leave the scene behind.

I hope these girls are OK. I hope they do log into sites like the Angels from time to time, even if they don't post anything. It would be nice to know they're doing fine.

I'm not really sure of the point of this post, it's just something I've been musing for a while. The tranny scene can be quite a transient scene, with girls flitting onto the stage and then exiting just as fast. And in a scene where we all go by aliases, with many girls changing their names on a periodic basis, its hard to keep up with it all.