While on vacation in Oregon, I did what everyone does on vacation, start thinking about what needs improvement on my web site. And when I came home, I actually worked on those improvements rather than sticking them back in the “maybe someday” todo list.
There are a few small updates here on the site:
First, it really annoyed me that the way Squarespace handles blogs older posts essentially disappear and are hard to find. I spent some time with Claude exploring ways to find those older posts and build up an archive of them — and then I found the Squarespace “archive” block (well, duh), which did basically exactly what I wanted. And while I was tweaking the blog, I changed the look of the main blog page a little bit, just to make it look a little different. So now it’s possible to see that this blog goes back all the way to 2002 (that’s almost 25 years) — and in fact, it would go back further, except over time I occasiona y look at what I’ve posted and remove things that have become irrelevant, no longer accurate, no longer representing my current opinions, or just a plain waste of time. But it’s now there to see what I was saying 20 years ago, for the three people who care.
Second, long, long ago, I was a budding SF writer, and even sold a few short stories. And while most of those were added to the web site over the years, there were a couple that lingered in that “maybe someday” todo list. So I spent an hour, and updated my fiction page to include the missing stories — so now my entire canon of fiction (all seven pieces!) are available for you to enjoy. And having gone over and cleaned up the formatting and look of all of them, today I think I’m a better writer, but overall, they hold up fairly well.
In the even earlier days, I published a fan pub called OtherRealms. This was one of the earliest attempts at online published content (this is before browsers and web pages, kids) and earned a couple of Hugo nominations, for which I am proud to have finished above No Award. I’ve sort of had them online, but in all honesty, it was a set of text files stuck on a Linode server with a quick hack of a front end to display them, and so I was paying $7/month for a server that literally did nothing else but host these until I finally could get around to making them real HTML files here on the site — and yes, I find it amusing to note that I was taking something formatted in text and webifying it.
But, again with the help of Claude, I finally did, and got them online here on my main site, so I was able to kill off that Linode server, so one less thing to pay for and have to maintain and keep track of. And maybe this will mean that content will end up back in the search engines, So if you’re ever curious what my review of Terry Pratchett’s Coulour of Magic was back in 1986, now you can actually find it.
Honestly, all three of these updates are things that probably have an audience of one: me. But they were little annoyances I’ve always wanted to fix, and I realized while on vacation an AI tool like Claude could help me with the grunt coding needed, which is why I’d never gotten around to it before now. The OtherRealms update took the longest, and that, once I got going, was about three hours work, and now, I can relax, until the next set of things about the site start to annoy me….
And the last change I made was a decision to stop using Glass to post photos to. I did this somewhat reluctantly, because I really like the site and I was happy to support them in the early days when they were just starting out — it reminds me of the good days of Flickr in all the right ways. But when I took a close look at how I was using it, it’d been months since I uploaded new photos to it, over a year since I linked to any photos on Glass anywhere, and it just seemed clear that it was no longer really a piece of my online presence puzzle. I do prefer to self host here on this site when possible, and over time, I had gone back to linking to pictures here, not there, so it really made no sense to keep it around and complicate the challenge of where to find my stuff. The short answer to that is here on this site, and the shorter answer is the 6PFS newsletter I put out monthly, where I’ll link to whatever I’ve done in the previous month, wherever that happens to be.
