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                  How I ended up with a month of non-entries

So how did I end up with a month of non-entries [1]? Therein lies a tale …

While the first entry of my blog is dated Debtember 4^TH, 1999 [2], the
software running the blog, mod_blog [3] wasn't even started yet—maybe. The
previous October and November I spent writing mod_litbook [4] (the software
behind The Electric King James Bible [5]) which was the inspiration for how
links work around here [6]. I'm not sure if I started the software that
Debtember or not, since I spent the rest of the month visiting Dad [7] out in
Palm Springs, California.

My first post about mod_blog appears to be on March 13^TH [8], 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 23^RD, 2001 [9] 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 [10] section I add to every
month). Besides, I really wanted to make that synopsis of _Atlas Shrugged_
[11] 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 [12]” is all about.

Get off the lawn, my younger self!

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/1Phlog:2000/10
[2] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:1999/12/04.1
[3] https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog
[4] https://github.com/spc476/mod_litbook
[5] http://literature.conman.org/bible/
[6] https://boston.conman.org/about/technical.html
[7] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:1999/12/15.3
[8] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2000/03/13.1
[9] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2001/10/23.1
[10] https://boston.conman.org/archive/
[11] https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0451191145/conmanlaborat-20
[12] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2000/10/29.1

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