Write Only Memory on Blogger

I am moving Write Only Memory to Blogger, instead of hosting it with my current web provider (webhostingbuzz.com). We'll see how it goes.

No more comments

The comments feature wasn't being used and I got tired of cleaning up comment spam.

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Update: I am trying them again now that the site is hosted on Blogger,

Bloglines

Like a lot of people who read the web from several different places, I use Bloglines as my RSS newsreader. Bloglines allows you to make your subscriptions public, so others can see what you've subscribed to. My subscriptions, for example, are here.

What I did not realize is that you can see who is publicly subscribed to any particular feed by clicking on the number of subscribers. And that at least some information, such as the home page you've given, is available to the public for each subscriber.

Hi, Bernard.

First piece of comment spam

Somebody left me my first piece of comment spam today! Or at least, I noticed it today. I'm touched. Of course, I deleted all the spam, but I can't tell you what it means to me to know that some automated device out there picked my blog to deface. Thanks to all.

Sorry about the outage

I'm not sure for how long the blog was down. It turns out that one of the library files on the server was truncated somehow, so every time the blog program tried to run, it gave a syntax error. I have no idea how something like this could happen to the server's Perl installation. Very odd.

Dates and departments in flux

I don't think there have been many visitors so far -- my expectations of readership for this blog should be made clear by the name -- but if anybody's out there, you will find that some of the dates and departments have been shuffled around a bit. That will probably cause the RSS feeds to feed a lot of old stuff as if it were new. Sorry.

The good news is that I have now gone through everything and changed the dates, so there should be no more jumping around of those. The bad news is that I haven't decided what to do about departments yet, so those might change in the future.

About the dates in this blog

As should be obvious, many of the dates given for these entries are not really the dates they were posted to the blog. One thing I wanted to do when I started the blog was move certain files from my old home page to the blog, in order to take advantage of comments and to clean up the web page a bit. Of course, the blog requires that I give each entry a date and time. I suppose the right thing to do might be to give the date that these were added to the original web site, but in general I no longer have that information.
What I do have in many cases is a date and time when the entry was originated, because they originated as email or forum posts, or I simply still have the original files copied from disk to disk. For example, the first entry (What, Definitions? What's a Definition?) really was finished and saved to disk on November 10, 1986.
The alternative, it seems to me, is to give all the files the date when the blog was started (May 16, 2005). But there's nothing really special about that date, and I don't want to mush so many years of my life into one lump, from high school through my thirties.
So, although it may seem anachronistic, I think it makes the most sense to put entry dates back in the 1980s into the blog, and then put a link to this explanation above the dates on the sidebar.
This only works now, when the blog is just starting. In the future, I wouldn't want people to have to dig through the archives regularly to see if I decided to post any of my college-age materials. So if I should do that, I'll give it the date it is being posted, not the original authorship date.

Internet Explorer for Mac

The CSS bugs that made Internet Explorer for Mac display a huge amount of space between each line should now be worked around. The top banner isn't perfect, but the blog should now be readable.

At this point getting the blog pixel-perfect for old browsers is low on my priority list, but if you have serious trouble reading it, let me know. Thanks.

Comments are here...

So, comments should now be working. All the people who aren't reading this can now tell me what I should have said instead of what I actually did say.

The comment plugin also handles trackbacks, although I have no way of testing this and I'm not really sure what will happen.

I'm not so sure it's really a good idea to open up a place where people will spend all their time talking about me, but who knows, maybe people will be nice for a change. Here's hoping!

Wow, I've started a blog!

Well, Write-Only Memory, my long-in-coming but not long-awaited blog, is now up. I hope to add comments (for as long as I can stand dealing with comment spam) and maybe other features soon. Meanwhile I have seeded the blog with stuff from my web site. I will probably eventually redirect the old web site links to the blog entries.