journal features

another new site design

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 2011.03.27

The amazon experiment went as expected; I racked up one referral sale in the months since I added their ads to my site.

So I've removed the Amazon ads for the moment and have instead added a larger banner ad across the top of the page for a single "product": my book of street photos from Tokyo.

Also, I discovered an embarrassing error in the home-grown content delivery system that I use to manage and deliver this site. It was a combination of my clever anti-spam algorithm and my clever site-caching routine. The former requires that unique form element names be used during the submission of a comment, while the latter ensures that visitors to the site aren't being served those unique codes because they're seeing instead a cached version of the page. That cached version contains form elements whose names have long since timed out, thereby defeating any legitimate attempt at submitting a request. Took me a while to sort that one out, as you can probably imagine. Dum, duh-dum-dum, dumb!

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)