Timothy's Thoughts

A fter several months of putting up with a website template that I wasn't particularly pleased with, but was "good enough," I updated my website . The content's all the same as before, but I got rid of the design that I had hoped would look like a piece of paper with a burned edge--like what we used to do when we were children--and I updated it to something that I think looks better. The CSS is a little more simple than before, giving us less opportunity for it to break. I’ve got the print capability working. So, if you happen to be on my website and find an article you want to print, all you have to do is hit the print button on the browser and you should get a nice black on white page without the graphics. Well, without the graphics other than the images on the right-hand side of the page. Anyway, if you’re bored, go check it out. Like I said, the content hasn’t changed, so you won’t find much there that you couldn’t have found before.

W e all hate spam and we keep looking for ways to reduce how much reaches our inbox. I filter a lot of it out at the server, but some makes it through anyway, such as those e-mail message that appear to have been sent from my own e-mail address. For those, I have a rule set up that just deletes them, as everyone should. If everyone would delete them without looking at them, spammers would stop wasting their time sending them. One method of controlling spam that has gotten popular among people in the writing community is to list their e-mail address as something like somename [at] adomain [dot] com . The idea is that the web crawlers won’t realize that it is an e-mail address and thus protect the owner from receiving unwanted e-mails. Some people go ahead and create the mailto link, as I have done above, while others leave it out. In either case, all this method only discourages the people you want to e-mail you from doing so. Mangling the e-mail address like this will not keep the addr...

Much is said about people’s short attention spans. Someone recently asked why we are able to read novels, but we aren’t able to read websites. It made me think a little. What are the major differences between these two types of reading? Here’s what I came up with. We can read a novel anywhere, but a website requires a computer. When reading a novel, we have a well-defined goal of getting to the end of the book. With a website, we have no starting point and no ending point, so we can stop whenever we choose. With a novel or even a non-fiction book, we are reading to learn what the author has said. With a website, we are looking for one piece of information like a needle in a haystack. Once we find it, we declare ourselves done and move on. What other differences can you think of between the two forms of reading?