I've started getting e-mails from lots of people asking about The Gender Genie. Although BookBlog exists mainly as an online book club, the genie drives most of our traffic and sucks up a shocking amount of bandwidth each month. As a result, I think a post about its status and explanation of what happened is in order.
The Gender Genie evolved from a series of events. Andy, a lifetime member and proprietor of Reality Blurred, posted a link to a NY Times article about an algorithm designed to determine gender in writing. Rich, a former member, automated the algorithm in ASP for us to play with. We had a lot of fun, so I asked him if I could borrow his idea for BookBlog. Since ASP doesn't work here, I rewrote the program in PHP and turned it into a GUI by adding a bunch of pretty colors. (No surprise since I am a girl, after all.) Another blogger discovered it, linked to us, and it suddenly turned into a meme. The rest is history.
About two weeks ago, our hosting company migrated the site to a new server and all hell broke loose. The genie's PHP engine suddenly stopped working. A kind user alerted me to the problem, so I took the program down and began debugging. I'm sure the culprit is a single piece of badly written code but I haven't had enough free time to go through several thousand lines of it. Besides fixing the PHP problem, the page design and HTML also need an overhaul since I've done practically no maintenance for more than a year now.
So, when will The Gender Genie be back? I can't make a firm commitment, but I think it will be near the beginning of March. I have a week of vacation coming up and plan to spend it in front of the computer.
