In the last few weeks, I've gone through all but the last few years of this blog and done some repairs, fixing errors and cleaning up little formatting errors. I went from the first post (on December 18, 2000) through the last post in 2010 and I know I missed some things but I did a lot of buffing and sanding.
Many of the problems date back to the two times I changed the software on which this thing runs. I hand-coded it in HTML at first, then switched to Movable Type and finally migrated to WordPress, which is what about half the Internet runs on. During this maintenance, I…
- Fixed coding errors in about two dozen messages that caused them to display either in truncated formats or not at all. So these are restored.
- Deleted a few messages that were duplicates of others.
- Deleted a lot of dead video embeds. (Here's my policy: I don't fix or delete dead text links to other sites. I do delete dead video embeds if and when I happen to notice them. Don't bother writing to tell me that some YouTube video ain't there any longer. I only put up the little BROKEN LINK sign when I stumble upon them.)
- Fixed a few dead video embeds. But only a few. Again, thanks but don't bother writing to tell me about an outdated link I can update. I can't spare the time to do much of that.
- Upgraded a number of photos, especially on obits. I didn't have a good picture of the deceased when I wrote about them so I had to make do with a poor one. Now, I have a good one available so in it goes.
- And in the case of a number of words that have acceptable variant spellings, I picked one and made the word consistent throughout this site. I decided not to do this with "theater" and "theatre" because a lot of those places are pretty insistent on that part of their name being spelled only one of those ways.
In case anyone's interested, once I post this there will be 21,919 posts on this blog. Less than a hundred are duplicates.
As you may notice, we have this PayPal link for anyone who wants to send a donation and we appreciate it whenever someone does that, and also when they use our Amazon gateway to buy anything from Amazon.
A lot of sites are beginning to use a service called Patreon where you can become a "patron" of a site or creator and make either one-time donations or regular contributions to them. Quite a few folks wrote to ask me to do this and I went and signed up and started to figure it out…and then decided it was too much extra work. They want you to make a video and to write little essays about your goals and to have all sorts of little bonus goodies for those who contribute bucks. So there's no Patreon link here. It's for the same reason I decline all offers to put paid ads on this page.
I hope that doesn't sound like I'm criticizing anyone who does any of that. I am all for my favorite bloggers and creators on the web making as much as possible from their efforts, especially if they'd like to do all or most of their work on that basis. I just made a decision that for reasons I'm not sure I can put into a coherent paragraph, I don't want to "monetize" this blog beyond the few cash-generating links I already have.
So thanks but you don't have to tell me about Patreon. It's great but I've decided it's not, in its present form at least, for me. Maybe later.