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Friday, January second, 2009
I've modified my RSS feed-builder to include (almost) the full text of posts, with HTML formatting (mostly) intact. I have been slow getting up to speed with RSS but this should make the site much more conveniently readable for those of you who access it that way. Readers should now show, for each post: all text, including all formatting tags; a link to comment on the post, and if there are any comments, a counter; links for any category tags associated with the post. Readers will not show any graphics or multimedia, and will not have the CSS formatting that's in the blog.
posted evening of January second, 2009: 3 responses
➳ More posts about Programming Projects
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Sunday, October 26th, 2008
Thanks to commenter RedRum for finding a bug in my comments code and telling me to fix it -- I put in a quick and easy, but hacky, fix; maybe will think about figuring out a more fully-featured solution.
posted evening of October 26th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Projects
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Friday, August 15th, 2008
 Sorry about the lack of updates recently... someday soon I will start thinking about posting blog entries! I am loving Ricardo Reis, I think I will finish it this weekend, not sure what I will read next.
I am nearly done fixing READIN to be compatible with HostMonster, still just a couple of things to do -- like I can't post "What's of Interest" items on the sidebar, or update the blogroll, at least not consistently.* Timeline for finishing this is Tuesday, when I will have some free time and Internet access.
We are going away for a long weekend, to a place without Internet or even much of a cellular network -- and yet it is nearby! in northern Bucks County, PA -- and spend a few days relaxing. See you Tuesday!
 * If I could do these things, I would have: Added A History of New York to the blogroll, under "Literati"; updated Matthew Yglesias' link to point to his new site; posted an "of Interest" item that today is the anniversary of the Beatles' Shea Stadium concert. Without arena rock, we would not have Kansas, Styx, REO Speedwagon! Also, I would add a link under "Comix" to Bad Gods, which I see is publishing again.
↻...done
posted morning of August 15th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
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Wednesday, August 13th, 2008
OK, the new machinery is now active. READIN is now hosted by HostMonster. Comments don't seem to work yet nor does the RSS feed; these too will come.
 OK, comments are working...
posted evening of August 13th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, August 12th, 2008
 Outage this weekend can be laid at the door of my ISP. Now I'm thinking strongly about moving the site out of my house, onto Dreamhost or some such. Recommendations welcomed -- the things I need are MySql, PHP, and ssh access.
(Service is still kind of slow and/or occasionally nonexistent. A new ISP is in the offing, a new hosting service also: changing ISP's means no more fixed IP address for my house. But it ultimately makes way more sense to use a remote hosting service anyway.)
posted morning of August 12th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, June 9th, 2008
So I left work early today, to watch Sylvia auditioning for next year's Overture Strings, and to file away the folders of music I've had in the back of my car since YOEC's spring concert a few weeks ago. Arrived at South Orange Middle School, only to find the school and the rest of town dark -- a fire at a transformer station in West Orange shut down several towns around here. Well Ellen, Sylvia and I escaped the heat by driving over to Springfield, which still had power and by lucky coincidence, has the only public library around here that's open well into the evening. We chilled out, I read the first chapter of Nixonland and confirmed that I want to read the rest of it. Got back home just as the power came on. So the site was down for a while this afternoon but it looks like no data was lost. And here we are.
posted evening of June 9th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Nixonland
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Friday, May second, 2008
I said yesterday that I wanted to reminisce some about starting the blog. Well: I think I've written most of this before, but here goes. In 1999 or thereabouts, I decided I wanted to have a website, and that it should consist of a notes about what books I am currently reading. I cajoled my then-employers to give me some space on their server, I bought a domain name from Network Solutions, I wrote a couple of pages. The site went live the same evening Ellen's writing group held a reading of their work at Cornelia Street Café; we announced the site's launch, fun. Over the next couple of years I wrote sporadically for the site; occasionally came up with some really interesting pages. (My notes on reading Faulkner's The Hamlet are one of the most popular pages in all of READIN -- nearly every day brings a couple of Google searches for "The Hamlet by Faulkner", which I guess must not have a lot written about it on the web. It is probably my favorite Faulkner book, largely because the process of writing notes on it went so well.) The technology supporting READIN at this point was Notepad to compose posts and a Visual Basic™ program to compile them into nicely formatted HTML. In 2002 I started noticing blogs (I think the first one I read was Tom Tomorrow's This Modern World, which I found while searching for an online publisher of his comic), and getting interested. I didn't realize for a while that blogging was what I wanted to do -- I was hardly maintaining READIN at all anymore, and I didn't make the connection between my web site and this new technology. (I'm slow that way.) But after about a year of reading blogs I decided to give it a try, and in the space of about a week hacked together an ASP script to render pages. And this journal was born. And, well, this is one of the main things I do for fun nowadays. It gets more and more interesting as I learn new ways I can use the technology. Hope to keep it going for a long time.
posted evening of May second, 2008: 3 responses
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 I like it.
posted evening of May second, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Pretty Pictures
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This week I have been making an effort to add illustrations to my posts and to my sidebar links. I'm pretty happy with how it's looking and intend to keep doing that -- it seems to make the page a lot more visually engaging. Also thinking of trying to find a graphic that would fit nicely in the upper right-hand corner of the page, where there is a lot of empty space.* Somewhat related, I've been doing a lot of work on the interface for adding new posts and editing posts, so that I'm able to see how the post will render as I'm adding it. Would like to do something similar for adding/editing the daily "Of interest:" links, but that is going to be a bit more involved.
*Update: Found one! How do you like it?
posted evening of May second, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, May first, 2008
 I totally forgot to note the passing of another year blogging, which happened last Friday. I have been keeping this journal for 5 years, now! (At roughly 240235 posts/year.*) That is a long time.
I feel like writing some reminiscences of starting this journal, but not right now. Maybe on the weekend I will. (In the meantime, here is an early post about my motivations in starting a blog.)
 *Forgot: the id number of the latest post is not quite the same as the number of posts, since there have been a couple of deletions here and there. (It's very front-loaded though: in the first four years the average number of posts is 176, in the fifth year there are 473 posts. I wonder what the sixth year will bring?)
posted morning of May first, 2008: Respond
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Continuing her seasonal theme, Pet 