A little over five years ago, in a post titled “Disconnected Archives,” I wrote this (just quoting the text here—not the links embedded in that text): Earlier this past week […] I noticed that Michael Chabon‘s “about” page was gone, and his home page said something, if I remember right, about how he’s had difficulty [...]
I read Maud’s blog post from last fall about her site being compromised again; I understood her sound advice: “[I]f you maintain a website and are running an old version of WordPress, update now, even if the switchover borks your stylesheet”; I linked to Lorelle VanFossen’s post about blogs running on old versions of WordPress [...]
I’m at the warehouse party now. I’ve been here for almost a year. I followed Elizabeth’s advice (as I wrote about last April); I went ahead and started touching the photos on the walls, making them come alive. In some ways I like it, but in other ways I don’t like it at all. People [...]
Ten years ago today, I registered the domain name tomhop.com for the first time. This Web site remains as infrequently visited now as it has been since before Al Gore was chosen as President by a majority of the American electorate. I’ve been renewing the domain once a year ever since; I’ve never renewed for [...]
At first, eight or nine years ago maybe, it felt like there was this great new thing: a new, digital public square where anyone could set up a soapbox, climb up on it, and start talking. A virtual Speakers’ Corner. At the start, the very earliest speakers seemed sometimes to limit their monologues almost exclusively [...]
Oh, man. This is awesome. Do a print preview of this page. (If you’re looking at this either on the home page or on the page for the post itself, that is—search and archive pages won’t do it.) Check it out! I’ve been wanting to have this site set up so that links print out [...]
I migrated this site from my old hosting company to Media Temple; I installed WordPress, and imported all my old Movable Type posts into it; most everything appears to have survived the transition, except that dozens of links are now broken, but I’ll fix them later; I’ve picked the plain-vanilla default template, and tweaked it [...]
This is tempting (in that knocking-down-a-house-of-cards-you-built way): I made some decisions for my own Internet usage when I got back online. The first thing I did was replace my blog with an advertisement for my books. Why did I think I needed a blog? —Stephen Elliott, “Surviving a Month Without Internet,” Poets & Writers, May/June [...]
Last Friday, January 12, Ron Hogan wrote a really nice post on GalleyCat about Emily’s and my reading that night. Ron’s mention drove more traffic to this Web site than any other link ever has in a single day, which put me in a somewhat frantic (Unexpected guests are coming over! Quick! Better clean the [...]
I want to post pictures to this page of Wyoming. The cows and horses, the scraggly trees burping up out of the river beds, the endless rolling foothills, the storms blowing in off the snowy peaks of the Big Horns, the annoying little field mouse nibbling at my power cord right now. Unfortunately, I’m having [...]
So I was recently looking at the usage statistics for my Web site, and I couldn’t help but notice that someone connecting to the Web via a dhs.gov server visited tomhop.com thirteen times in the month of February of this year, checking out a total of 101 pages. Wow! Thanks for stopping by! I am, [...]
About a year ago I wanted to get a digital camera, but a very particular digital camera, one I wasn’t sure even existed: I thought camera phones were awesome, but I just wanted the camera part, not the phone part. (I’m generally in favor of products that are designed to only do one thing, and [...]
Further tomhop.com improvements: I’ve created a new category for drawings, and I’ve re-uploaded six old batches of them from the five years of this site’s existence before I switched from Dreamweaver and hand-coding to Movable Type. (As before, I’m still taking care to reproduce the original dates accurately; the only real difference in MT is [...]
Years ago, when I first started this site, I was horrified to discover, looking at my site stats, all the appalling search terms visitors had used to end up here at tomhop.com. (I imagine most new URL owners must experience the same horror.) The search term rankings were an astounding list of orifices and organs, [...]
Still slowly re-uploading yet more older, pre-Movable Type-switchover things. Today’s batch is older sequences of photographs: here, here, and here. All three of these shot with my Nikon FM3a, not with my dinky little Oregon Scientific. Still trying to be as meticulous as possible about reproducing the exact original date and time stamp, because that [...]
Slowly adding older, unpublished articles from journalism classes (see categories in sidebar, right). (Dates and times of postings are retroactive to when the pieces were written.)
Okay. Think that’s done it. Finally figured out a nav bar (above) and a sidebar (right), thanks to this person; pretty sure these elements are consistent across all pages; brought back a server-side include or two, plus naked old guy loitering in the background (left); am very, very glad I’m using MovableType now; figured out [...]
The ability to post retroactively while using an automated weblog system freaks me out a little bit. What’s to stop a person from blogging back to the nineteenth century? Or years into the future? (But then, come to think of it, I’m sure someone, somewhere, has already done that, or is already doing that.)