pinchy dot org.

After spending the better part of a day immersed in Perl, I was able to resurrect about 99% of the comments and entries from the old pinchy.org! Most of them need a little massaging before I can put them back online, so you’ll see new (i.e., old) entries showing up sporadically as I get around to cleaning them up.

I guess you’ll be able to find out what I thought of George W. Bush six years ago after all.1

1. Spoiler alert: I did not particularly care for him. [↩]

Wow, pinchy dot org is back! And just when everyone had stopped caring that it ever existed. Perfect timing.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to import the posts and comments from the previous iteration of this weblog. To those of you who wanted to know what I thought about George W. Bush six years ago, I extend my humblest apologies.

Also, if by some miracle you still have this site in your feed reader of choice, you’ll need to update to the new feed. I trust you’ve all figured out how to do this by now. If not, I offer free technical support for the first two minutes, then $24.95 for each additional minute. You should also know that my accounts receivable guy is named Nicky the Greek and keeps a crowbar in his trunk.

So! A new year (almost) and a fresh start. And this time around, I promise to post at least once every five years. That’s the Jeff Williams Guarantee.™

I’ve switched to a new web hosting company for this site. Several things got broken in the move, but I think I’ve fixed all of them. If you run across something that doesn’t work, though, please let me know.

I’ve added a new feature to this site. Under the list of books I’ve read recently, you can now choose whether each book’s link points to Amazon; Powell’s, a huge independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon; or Book Sense, a service that directs you to your nearest independent bookstore. The default is still Amazon, since that usually has the most information, but I thought I’d help out those of you who would rather not shop there.

I’ve been making some other changes as well, most of which are related to posting comments. The comment preview page is a little whacked right now; let me know if anything else looks broken.

I’ve added an RSS feed for the comments that y’all post on this site, so you can read the new ones in a newsreader. (Read my earlier post about newsreaders if you have no idea what the hell I’m talking about.) Please try it and let me know whether you like it.

Having finished that, I can start on the 771 pages of reading that I have to do for class next week. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?

At long last, I’ve redesigned the site. The new design appears only on the home page right now; I’ll roll it out to the rest of the site soon. Let me know what you think. Thanks to squidfingers for the excellent background pattern in the header—retro is good, dammit.

Some other changes: The navigation bar now includes links to other sites that I visit frequently. When applicable, I’ve included a link to the RSS feed for each site. This is just on the home page for now.

Also, archived entries now use human-readable URLs. For example, the link to my banana nut muffin recipe used to be:

http://pinchy.org/archives/000191.shtml

The new link is:

http://pinchy.org/weblog/2003/04/06/banana_nut_muffins

Unfortunately, this means all of the “permanent” links to my Web site are now broken; however, I should never need to break them again.

After a long year of neglect, I’ve finally resumed work on the underpinnings of this Web site. I left many loose ends in my rush to get it working. Now is the time to start tying them up. (Feel free to suggest incriminating ways to use the last sentence out of context.)

Most of what I’m doing is behind-the-scenes cleanup, but there’s one enhancement that’s worth mentioning. This Web site now has an RSS feed, which makes it easy to find out when I’ve posted something new. If you’re using Windows, you can use FeedReader or Syndirella to read RSS feeds; on Mac OS X, I recommend NetNewsWire; on Linux, try Straw. Thousands of Web sites have RSS feeds, and most newsreaders include a list of sites to help you get started.

I’ll be rewriting all of my crappy, non-semantic markup in the days, weeks, and possibly months ahead, depending on how lazy I am. Please let me know if I break anything or if things look weirder than usual.

Sorry about my absence for the past week or so; my hosting service vanished rather abruptly. I’m back now, although I lost about a month of posts. Oh well. New posts shortly.

I’ve got something new planned for this site. The first installment may come this week, depending on how busy I get with work and how well the writing process goes.

Don’t worry–I’ll still be posting links to random, interesting stuff that I come across. For example, did you know that one of America’s best-known news anchors has admitted to using heroin and LSD, been abducted by a cabbie, and tangled with an impressive array of roughnecks and crazies? That would be Dan Rather, as you probably guessed if you saw his bizarre rambling on election night last year.

Christie has another take on the all-new pinchy.org: “[Y]ou could also say it’s like when a character is killed off because the audience is losing interest, but then the producers bring him back on the show a few seasons later with a new haircut and a gay partner or something. They’re thinking, ‘Let’s see if the audience will like him better this time around.’”

Actually, you and Brian are both wrong. It’s more like the show was cancelled for low ratings, but the producers hired a few new writers, filmed some different opening credits, and got a network exec really drunk, and the exec foolishly decided to put the show back on the air.

If you have more theories about the new pinchy.org and its possible relationship to bad sitcoms, you should definitely click the little “Comments” link and put those theories in writing. Meanwhile, I’m working on some less self-referential posts, but they’re taking a while to write. Bear with me while I pull my thoughts together.