News You Can Bruise

Way back in the nineties, after it was clear that News You Can Bruise was an ongoing concern, I had the idea that on December 20, 2017, twenty years after the first "notebook entry" that could be called a blog post, I would write an entry with a Sgt. Pepper's reference in the title. This idea thrilled me, more for the glimpse it gave me of the future than anything else. But I was never so thrilled that I, say, set a reminder to make this post, or figured out anything to put in here besides the title and "wow, twenty years, huh?"

So, I missed the deadline by a week and I still don't really have anything to put in here apart from that title joke, which I now find corny, but I'm doing this anyway as a promise kept to my earlier self. This is the 7905th post to News You Can Bruise, and it's not even the least interesting one!

Back in 2009 I started a project to transcribe and put online over 1000 postcards my dad bought in the 1980s. The toolchain that took things from postcards to web pages was always kind of rickety, and the project petered out altogether when my sisters sent me about 500 more postcards that Dad sent them. I decided I wouldn't start it up again until I'd transcribed all 1500 postcards and could put everything up at once.

Now it's done! The best way to experience it is through the daily @RoyPostcards bot. This is a labor of love for me, so I'm not as concerned that people follow along, but I tried to add interesting commentary whenever I could, and it's an interesting glimpse into everyday life in the 80s.

Ten years ago today, I wrote what can now be considered the first entry in News You Can Bruise. I was eighteen years old. None of the stuff mentioned in that entry actually happened or is still around (including Leonard's Yummy Homepage, then the weblog's containing site), and I thought I was funnier than I actually was, but I think my enduring voice, such as it is, was present.

For those who would charge me with narcissism, I say this: I like going to people's homepages and looking at their pictures and seeing the cool things they've done.

Looking back through the archives I see no previous self-congratulatory anniversary basking; I guess I was saving it all for the ten-year mark. Bask!

Crummy has been moved! I took the opportunity to clean up and reorganize the past ten years' worth of stuff. In particular, the writing directory is the new home for a lot of stuff that was previously scattered all over the place. Over the next couple of days I'll be continuing the cleanup, putting up some things that got lost before making it onto the site, and things that used to be up and I want to put back.

Adam Parrish said he hoped that my redesign would not destroy the aspect of Crummy where you can just click around and see random weird things. Well, there are still lots of links, so I'm assuming it'll be fine.

I haven't reuploaded some of the mega-bandwidth-sucking files, and some of those I might not put back at all. In particular, I think the world might have had enough of the early works of Jake Berendes and Jeremy Bruce. Tell you what, I'll trade you an album of my own musical ephemera. Coming soon!

Crummy weblog authors and others: let me know if you have any problems.

1 year since I turned on NYCB comments. Grep shows that NYCB has since accumulated almost 1000 comments, and the other weblogs on this site about 3000 more (Rachel is in second place with about 750 comments). Amazingly I have grown to like comments on my weblog; I had my doubts initially, but I must admit that this is the nicest tar pit I've ever sunk into. It's more like a refreshing tar bath.

And we're back. Kevin did an OS upgrade on this webserver so now we have all sorts of goodies like Apache 2 (which means mod_py (which means mod_py support for NewsBruiser) and a Subversion repository (which means SubWiki (which means a NewsBruiser documentation/fun Wiki)). Yes, it's all about NewsBruiser here. And parentheses. Speaking of the world's premiere news bruising software package, I just released version 2.4.0, "Creative Cormorant". Not only does it have integrated Creative Commons licensing support, it fixes several a couple bugs in the configuration interface that could cause you to lose data, so I definitely recommend upgrading.