So how did I end up with a month of non-entries [1]? Therein lies a tale …
While the first entry of my blog is dated Debtember 4^TH, 1999 [2], the software running the blog, mod_blog [3] wasn't even started yet—maybe. The previous October and November I spent writing mod_litbook [4] (the software behind The Electric King James Bible [5]) which was the inspiration for how links work around here [6]. I'm not sure if I started the software that Debtember or not, since I spent the rest of the month visiting Dad [7] out in Palm Springs, California.
My first post about mod_blog appears to be on March 13^TH [8], so sometime between Debtember of 1999 and March of 2000 is when I started coding mod_blog. But until mod_blog was ready, I was basically maintaining a bunch of static pages by hand. I then spent over a year and a half writing the software. Most of the time I spent trying to figure out how to generate the appropriate hyperlinks—I was trying to generate anchor links (<A HREF="#2000/10/15.1">) if the entry was on screen, otherwise a hyperlink (<A HREF="/2000/10/15.1">) if the entry wasn't on the screen, while at the same time trying to generate an on-page directory of entries currently being displayed—it was a real mess.
By early October of 2000, I had finalized the storage format for each entry. But that was also the month I started working at Negiyo and the first few weeks were pretty tough. I think I just forgot to go back and flesh out those entries. Besides, at that point, the blog wasn't on a public server and only a small select set of friends had the actual link to it.
It wasn't until October 23^RD, 2001 [9] that I finally had enough with the development and decided to go public with what I had. I didn't have the anchor links like I wanted (but that turned out to be a bad idea in the long term anyway), nor the directory of entries (and I still don't have an automatic list of past entries—the archive [10] section I add to every month). Besides, I really wanted to make that synopsis of Atlas Shrugged [11] public (yes, that's what finally prompted me to get mod_blog shipped), so I copied everything on the private server (including the month of non-entries) to the public server and the rest has been online ever since.
And that's how I ended up with a month of non-entries, and curiousity as to what “a wired Jamison [12]” is all about.
Get off the lawn, my younger self!
[3] https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog
[4] https://github.com/spc476/mod_litbook
[5] http://literature.conman.org/bible/
[6] https://boston.conman.org/about/technical.html
[10] https://boston.conman.org/archive/
[11] https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0451191145/conmanlaborat-20