Why you don't get published.
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Q & A 34 Hey! Where's the Roman Numerals?
What happened to the Roman numbers? Lost count?
When the numbers started getting higher than I ever expected them to, I realized the Romans were idiots. When we get to query 1888, it would be MDCCCLXXXVIII. And "Face-Lift L" looked weird. Plus, I didn't see why 49 had to be XLIX, when IL seems so much more efficient.
Of course it was too much trouble to change them all just for that, but then someone pointed out to me that I had the title bar turned off, so that the titles weren't the only thing appearing in the index. All this time I thought I'd chosen a template that had no title bar. I figured if I was going to go back and put the titles in their title bars, I might as well take the opportunity to change the numbers. Sorry if this bothers the minions, but at least I went into the HTML and made it so the title would remain the same color and size and boldness, so you wouldn't have to deal with too much change at once.
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11 comments:
Fair enough. After all, what have the Romans ever done for us...?
Yes, but now I've had to go and change the urls in all the places where I linked to my mangling so I could share it with people. Ahem. Because, yanno, they might still be interested.
Sorry, Buff. Of course, all people being directed to Evil Editor's blog should be advised to start from the beginning and read everything, rather than to just read the post about you.
Just to be consistent, perhaps you should also number the Q&A posts. Looking down the list of headers in my RSS reader, they all look the same now.
[ JRM ]
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your numerals. I write not to praise Evil, but to bury him.
But I'm not an honorable enough man, so I'll stop now. Plus, I don't remember the rest of the speech and I can never spell sololiquy correctly.
Maybe I should put together an index with the book titles for the critiques and the questions for the Q & A's. Or is the "search this blog" feature good enough to help you find a specific query or question?
I'm not sure if the "index" question was a response to my comment or not, but I'll answer as if it was. The index sounds cool, but neither that nor the "search" function would be useful to me (though I'm sure they would to others.)
I use an RSS aggregator for blog reading. Meaning: I don't go to your blog on the web, your posts come to me instead. Every time you (or Miss Snark or a dozen others whose feeds I subscribe to) add a new post or update an old one, my RSS reader grabs it and displays the headline and modification date, etc.
This is terrific, as it saves me a lot of time surfing. I open one application and see what everyone's up to at once. Problem is, it shows modified posts as new entries. So, for example, when you post "Face Lift 55", I see it in my healine list. But if you modify the post to add a comma, I get a second headline. If you change your mind and go take the comma back out again, I get a third headline. All of them say "Face Lift 55". Next time I go into my reader, if I see multiple headlines that say "Face Lift 55", I just click the newest one and kill the older versions.
This is OK for "Face Lift" posts, which are numbered. And until today it was also OK for "Q & A" posts, because I saw five versions of the headline "Q & A We need t-shirts! First of all..." I clicked the top one and killed the rest because they all point to the same blog entry.
Now that you've "fixed" the headlines, I see a bunch of headlines that just say "Q & A" and I have to click on each to find out if they are repeats (updated versions of previous posts) or new entries. Slows me down. Bums me out.
So ... not that you need to change the world for me (but really, could ya?) it would be helpful if there were a number or something in the headline to differentiate one Q&A post from another.
Looking at back at what I wrote here, I see that it is very long and boring, just like the queries I've been sending to agents. Perhaps you could edit this comment for me, while you're at it?
Thanks, and keep up the great work!
[ JRM ]
Indexes (or however that's spelled) are good.
jrmosher---
I use the RSS feeds too and have changed the settings so I don't get updates, just new pieces.
Since EE doesn't usually add new information to the post, and is just changing commas around, it works. This isn't a global change either but a tweak to this feed.
Don't worry, EE, I do that too!
(Indices, strictly)
Stay_C: Thanks for the note. I'll play with the settings in my RSS reader and see if I can do the same. What I'd really prefer is for the reader to keep only the newest version of each post, not the original version of each, but maybe it has a setting to do that and I'm just a nitwit. Of course, since EE was nice enough to change the headlines already, it's a moot point.
Thank you, Stay_C and especially EE!
[ JRM ]
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