Day two of the redesign, mostly involving tweaking and a missing alt tag or two....

One thing the redesign will do is force me to write slightly longer entries. (I have this thing about the sidebar being longer than the entry on a standard day's journaling, and now there's more whitespace for me to fill on any given day.)

With the journal redone, I can now focus on beginning to add the sections of "annotations" I haven't had time to work on until now. You see, I've known for a while that I was going to redo Annotations more or less from scratch, and I wanted to wait until I did the redesign before I actually built the review and fiction sections.

The fiction sections are going to be the pain in the neck. They'll have things like the HTML'd Superguy Stuff I wrote, and other online fiction that's managed to just sort of appear, and maybe a crosslink or two to some In Nomine fanfic I'm kind of keen on writing. That means there'll be a lot of fiction to convert from raw text to "Something Else." We're talking novel length works here, all with superfluous hard returns at the end of each line.

Ah well. Once it's done, I can do anything with that text. HTML has become the worldwide standard enriched document format. I can work with HTML files in any word processor I care to and have them convert in a few seconds. I can import HTML into Page Layout programs and be ready to produce books of them if I choose. And, naturally, it will be done and I won't have to do it again right away. Any new fiction I can write in a word or text processor, convert to raw ASCII if I need to post it somewhere, and then dump the original into HTML and forget about it.

This line of text, by the way, is the point on my home composing software where I've "filled" the journal entry window, so that the sidebar isn't as long as the entry. Three hundred and eighty-seven words. Not the hardest thing in the world, but since a "traditional" page of text is two hundred and fifty words, that means I have to write more than a page more or less daily to meet these obligations.

I like this.

The other big addition to the Annotations site, the Online Review, is actually what I'd registered the Annotations.com domain for in the first place. I was originally going to publish an online scholarly review. However, as you can see, this went nowhere. But it's still something that appeals to me -- rate and review the various books that enter my life, throw up amazon links for folks what are interested... a little value back to the Internet that's been so gosh darn nice to me. I'm going to review on a 1 to 6 scale, 6 being the highest, and have some simple graphics I can throw up to show the ratings to folks. Here's a 6 for example. So, if I were talking about a book here, I'd be giving it the top possible rating. If that were a 1, it would be the lowest possible rating (which would make it a Piers Anthony book, I suspect).

By doing an Amazon thing, I might get eight cents a quarter for doing this. Or, I might not. But at least that extra functionality will be there. I rather like that.

Russ reviewed the site last night and was thrilled -- mostly because my current font choices don't force him to read things smaller than he likes. Well, if it makes people happy.... By the by, it seems the white background does. I've had several positive comments on the lack of dark or light grey. Again, we're just happy to be of service.

One recurring question people have asked me is whether I'm going to reformat old entries to match the new site. The answer's no -- to me, the evolution of the journal is a part of the journal, the same as if I'd been buying blank books and filling those pages with ink. If I muck with the old entries, I'm really changing those old entries, and I don't want to do that.

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Mystery Science Theater 3000 ended this week. One of the great Geekdom Icons has been laid to rest.

I wish I could care more. But, sadly, I can't. I lost a lot of interest at the end of the Joel era -- his dry wit and sensibility transcended the geekyness (in part because Joel was a successful stand-up comic and comedic writer before MST3K). These were the days MST3K was a standout hit, where the cool kids and college students would get up Saturday Mornings and watch it. When Joel, Trace Beauleau and Frank Coniff left... well, what remained was funny, but had lost a certain broader edge to it. Mike Nelson was never the detached view that Joel was, and always came across as just one of the 'bots, only dumber. And the show became a geek's paradise, but lost its broadbase appeal.

The few times I saw (thanks to the good graces of my friend Gary) the SciFi MST3K, the real standouts were Mary Jo Pehl and Bill Corbett, but they weren't stand-out enough. It seems it was well time for the end, and they did it well enough. Some mention of those who came before would have been nice, but oh well. There was at least one fall down laughing line, and the final scene was... appropriate.

In the meantime... wiiiiiiiiiiiiild rebels! Crunchy chewy rebels!