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Sunday, September 13th, 2020
The READIN blog may have come to an end. The host will be upgrading PHP from 5.6 to 7.3 (or rather, has done so at some point in the past and will soon be disabling 5.6.) I'm pretty sure the current script will not run in 7.3; I could probably figure out how to upgrade the script but not sure I will take the initiative any time soon.
 Ok, it is working now (by and large) as of October 1 -- will seek out and fix broken features in the coming days and weeks.
posted morning of September 13th, 2020: Respond
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Friday, August second, 2019
Hm. Non-ASCII characters in the blog don't seem to be rendering correctly anymore. Sorry... at some point I will figure out why and fix it, but not today. eéäoö what's weird is if I enter non-ASCII characters in a new post, they render correctly...
posted afternoon of August second, 2019: Respond
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Saturday, August 25th, 2018
READIN rss feed is a going concern once more! Onward...
posted evening of August 25th, 2018: Respond
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Tuesday, August 21st, 2018
Hm, php scripts in READIN have started breaking with the error "Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function mysql_connect()". So far it is not affecting the blog itself, but ancilliary scripts that are called by cron jobs, like the RSS feed generator and the header quotes builder. Looks like mysql_connect is deprecated and I need to update to mysqli_connect(), and maybe update the rest of my mysql calls as well.
posted evening of August 21st, 2018: 1 response
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Saturday, March 17th, 2018
Once upon a time, not so very long ago and yet not so recently, everything imitated everything else, and thus, if not for aging and death, man would've never been the wiser about the passage of time.
It seems to me like this blog came into its own when I started reading Snow in 2007. While I was reading My Name is Red (directly afterwards), I did a Google search for the lovely quote above concerning aging and death, and happened on Rafael Carpintero's overview of his translation workshop, "Un autor en busca de tres traductores". Alas the article was in Spanish, a language I did not know, at the time, sufficiently to follow the full article.Well in the intervening ten years I've learned Spanish and have had occasional success as a translator... I'm currently starting to read The New Life in Carpintero's Spanish translation, and was led back to "Un autor en busca de tres traductores" -- long story short, I've gotten in touch with Carpintero and have obtained his permission to translate the article!
posted morning of March 17th, 2018: 1 response
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Sunday, December third, 2017
READIN syndication is once again live (after an interval of some years) at http://readin.com/blog/bfeed.xml. In case you're using Google Reader to manage your blog subscriptions... or you know, Feedly or something.
posted evening of December third, 2017: Respond
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Sunday, February 12th, 2012
 Matthew's posting of an article about fonts at Google+ reminds me that I have not posted yet about the recent typeface change at READIN -- partly or mostly out of the conviction that it is not the sort of thing that would make any difference to anybody who is not me... But what are blogs for if not stuff that would make no difference to anybody but the author?
Lately I have been writing everything (everything I write on the computer that is not code) in Palatino Linotype, and finding that it is much easier on the eyes than any other typeface I have tried. (I do not love the numerals; but most of what I write in non-programming contexts is alpha characters.) So I modified the site's stylesheet to specify that typeface name as the primary choice; if you have the face installed (and it seems to be pretty standard-issue), that's how the site should render. Giovambattista Palatino was an Italian calligrapher of the 16th C., who in 1556 wrote a manual of lettering styles. Hermann Zapf is a German typeface designer of the 20th C., who in 1948 named a set of faces after Sig. Palatino.
posted morning of February 12th, 2012: Respond
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Tuesday, October 4th, 2011
 5 years ago I illustrated a post about The Russian Debutante's Handbook with a funny-looking picture of Gary Shteyngart. Ever since then, I've had a steady trickle of Google hit referrals (why yes, I do check my referrals log rather obsessively; what makes you ask?), one or two nearly every day, looking for the text "funny looking Gary Shteyngart" or some close variation thereon. Always wondered why... He is funny looking to be sure; but --
My curiousity got the better of me today and after a little research I found that Shteyngart wrote a short note about his love-hate relationship with America for Granta 84, under the title "Funny-looking." So, one mystery solved and an entertaining read as well. Take a look -- the full text of the article is readable in Amazon's "Look Inside" feature. I scanned around the web to see if it was reprinted anywhere; the only place I found it was on a white supremacist site where (I guess -- did not really spend very long over there) it was reproduced to demonstrate the degeneracy and sickness of The Jew. Speaking of Gary Shteyngart: he is giving a reading at Seton Hall next month! That should be fun.
posted evening of October 4th, 2011: Respond
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Saturday, June 19th, 2010
I do believe I've got it! favicon.ico is the image that gets displayed in the title bar of the browser (for browsers which support this capability, which is most of them) when a reader is looking at your web page. (Also it is used by things like rss readers as a visual way of identifying your site.) For a long time I have wanted to have a butterfly icon to go with the butterflies that are my background image and the butterfly at the top of the page*. Sort of an homage to Nabokov and to GarcÃa Márquez; plus I just like the little things. For a long time I was using a shrunken-down version of the big butterfly; but at 16×16 pixels it did not (as Sylvia did not tire of pointing out) look particularly like a butterfly ( ); then I tried shrinking the butterfly image which is in the sidebar of Zembla; but again, it is too detailed to make a good icon ( ). I looked at some favicon library sites the other day and found a couple of nice butterflies but nothing that was exactly right for readin. But finally I found this butterfly, at the site of the (lamentably out of business) Brooklyn housewares store Nova Zembla:  
 * If you are not seeing a butterfly at the top of the page, it is because I made that only show up on Firefox, Chrome and Safari -- I couldn't get msie to display it the way I wanted it to, those were the only browsers I tested on. ** (If you are not seeing the new butterfly icon, that may be because your browser has cached one of the old ones. Browsers seem to store favicon's in their cache longer than a lot of other files...)
posted morning of June 19th, 2010: Respond
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Wednesday, June 9th, 2010
An idea I just had which I think it would be fun to implement: a database table with favorite (striking or profound) brief lines from each book I read -- When you read the archive page for the book in question, those lines, or some randomized subset of them, would be displayed as part of the information in the left hand sidebar. Add to this a setting in the database for "current reading", the book or books that I'm currently reading/thinking about, and a set of lines from those books could be on the front page's sidebar. A little bit like the epigraphs I run at the top of the page, but a bit more fleeting, less a permanent part of the site. For instance I really liked the line, "He does not know -- nobody could know -- my immeasurable contrition, my weariness," from "The Garden of Forking Paths." But it really only seems meaningful in the context of that reading. (This would really free me up in terms of posting short quotations, too -- generally I try only to post a quotation when I have something in particular to say about it. And only to create a new epigraph when I find a really meaningful one. -- So this is a third way.)
Two notes about the translation of that line, * Thanks John for helping with the adjective, "immeasurable" sounds much better than "innumerable" or than "endless", and * Thanks Dr. Hurley for the repetition of "my" at the end, I was leaning towards just using "contrition and weariness" as being the closest thing in format to "contrición y cansancio" -- but somehow that doesn't sound quite right in English.
 Implementation: have a button or link on the editing view of the blog that is called "Add Quotation" or something similar -- clicking on it will bring up a dialog box or form where you can enter your quote and the book it is from -- then the the "current reading" books will be books for which I have either posted a quotation or a journal entry over the past say week or two.
posted evening of June 9th, 2010: 2 responses
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