*8)
The log is a place where I post stuff, so I can hear my voice,
play with ideas, record paths travelled through conceptual space,
maybe get comments from others in the great Out There,
maybe become rich and famous when a hermetic philanthropist whose
middle name is Hank reads something that I've written and is
so struck by the perfect beauty and wisdom of it that he endows
a revolving fund for the support of me and my heirs and assignees
in perpetuity, so I can be free to write my nose off.
Something like that!
The log won't often be a chronicle of daily events. Daily events aren't always that interesting, and they often involve people who may not want the world reading about them. It is likely to be a bit of a Weblog, as I spend quite a bit of personal and professional time on the Web, and posting some of what I see and find noteworthy there seems proper.
Think of it, for instance, as a mirror. A mirror that I'm looking into at myself, because I'm incurably vain, and that you're free to look into over my shoulder. Of course, you're looking from a slightly different angle, and what you see is likely to be a bit of both of us, sort of crammed together. If there's anything you'd like to say about the composite experience, I'd love to hear it; drop me a note at log@davidchess.com.
How do I write links to the log?
Good question! "http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.html" is the right link for the log in general, but what if you want to link from a page of yours to a specific log entry of mine?
Starting near the end of March, 2000, there's a little square image at the right end of the date-header on every entry; it points to the permanent linkable URL for that entry. In Navigator, just right-click on it and do "copy link location" to get the permanent URL onto the clipboard. Something similar probably works in IE also. For older entries, read on!
The entry for any given day will always be on a page called "log.yyyymmdd.html", where yyyymmdd is the year, month, and date of the Friday that starts the week that the day is in (yeah, log weeks start on Friday: historical reasons). So for instance the entry for 26 December 1999 is in log.19991224.html, since that's the relevant Friday. Even the days that are currently in plain old log.html are also on the site as log.yyyymmdd.html, where yyyymmdd is the most recent Friday.
Starting in 2000 (and for some random dates in 1999), there's also a named anchor for every individual day, in the form yyyymmdd. So, for instance, the permanent URL for the entry for 3 January 2000 would be
http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.19991231.html#20000103Lovely, eh? *8)
What's the name of the log?
Well, that's a good question. Most other logs and journals and stuff have fancier names, like "My Heart on Fire", or "Fred's Technology Watch". I started calling my page "Log" before I thought anyone else might ever want to refer to it. You can call it "log", or "David Chess's Log", or "davidchess", or "a weblog", or just decide it's too much trouble to decide and not refer to it at all. I'll forgive you!
I'd sort of like to call it "The Curvature of the Earth is Overwhelmed by Local Noise", but that's kind of long. You can allude to that name, though, and show that you're one of the select few who have read this paragraph.
Can I subscribe to your log?
I don't have a notification list myself, but I do produce various geeky XML "feeds", and there are various tools and sites that can read those and let you know when I've posted a new entry or whatever, in various ways. There are links to the feeds on the main Log page, but for quick reference they are: RSS feed with just the title of each entry, RSS feed with the complete text of each entry, Atom feed with the complete text of each entry.
These feeds are all produced by hacks of various degrees of groddiness; lemme know if you find any of them broken someday.
Please summarize your philosophy of weblogs and journals.
To quote myself, way back when all I had was a NEWS page:
That about sums it up, but see also a longer rant from the other month, about some things that don't suck.I think everyone in the world should be forced to write a paragraph a day of thoughts, events, rants, or whatever, and to put it up on the Web for everyone to read. Of course that would imply universal literacy and computer access, but that's OK! Anyone who refused to post their daily paragraph could like have their livers eaten by eagles or something.
