Wednesday, February 26, 2020
How I ended up with a month of non-entries
So how did I end up with a month of non-entries? Therein lies a tale …
While the first entry of my blog is dated Debtember 4TH, 1999,
the software running the blog,
mod_blog wasn't even started yet—maybe.
The previous October and November I spent writing mod_litbook
(the software behind The Electric King James Bible)
which was the inspiration for how links work around here.
I'm not sure if I started the software that Debtember or not,
since I spent the rest of the month visiting Dad out in Palm Springs, California.
My first post about mod_blog appears to be on March 13TH,
so sometime between Debtember of 1999 and March of 2000 is when I started coding mod_blog.
But until mod_blog was ready,
I was basically maintaining a bunch of static pages by hand.
I then spent over a year and a half writing the software.
Most of the time I spent trying to figure out how to generate the appropriate hyperlinks—I
was trying to generate anchor links
(<A HREF="#2000/10/15.1">) if the entry was on screen,
otherwise a hyperlink
(<A HREF="/2000/10/15.1">)
if the entry wasn't on the screen,
while at the same time trying to generate an on-page directory of entries currently being displayed—it was a real mess.
By early October of 2000, I had finalized the storage format for each entry. But that was also the month I started working at Negiyo and the first few weeks were pretty tough. I think I just forgot to go back and flesh out those entries. Besides, at that point, the blog wasn't on a public server and only a small select set of friends had the actual link to it.
It wasn't until October 23RD, 2001 that I finally had enough with the development and decided to go public with what I had.
I didn't have the anchor links like I wanted
(but that turned out to be a bad idea in the long term anyway),
nor the directory of entries
(and I still don't have an automatic list of past entries—the archive section I add to every month).
Besides,
I really wanted to make that synopsis of Atlas Shrugged public
(yes, that's what finally prompted me to get mod_blog shipped),
so I copied everything on the private server
(including the month of non-entries)
to the public server and the rest has been online ever since.
And that's how I ended up with a month of non-entries, and curiousity as to what “a wired Jamison” is all about.
Get off the lawn, my younger self!
