This Blog Is Not For Reading

For the last several years I’ve been hanging out with the Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge WriMos at various write-ins, trying to absorb some writing talent.

NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, in which people (the WriMos) try to write a 50,000 word novel during the 30 days of November. That’s not as ludicrous as it sounds — 50,000 words over 30 days is only 1667 words a day (with 10 days off for good behaviour, at least, 10 days with only 1666 words). 50,000 words is about the size of Brave New World, which someone once told me was the benchmark for NaNoWriMo (but TIL that Brave New World has 64531 words).

The first year I participated I got a terrific start on my first novel. All 675 words. Last year I got as far as the novel description. 11 words. But this year I have better idea. I’ve got some unfinished blog posts queued up, so I’ll take their word count, flesh them out, count the word difference, and submit that as my daily writing quota. Of course, it’s possible that I’ll edit more out of an incomplete blog post than I’ll be adding, so there’s a very real possibility of a negative word count. If that keeps up I might end up with a deficit at the end of the month. Let’s see how the NaNoWriMo word counter deals with a Buffer Underflow.

Come join me in the Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge region pages. Here are some handy links for local WriMos:

The NaNoWriMo crest has all rights reserved, and so couldn’t be used here. From their FAQ page: Logo: Please do not use our logo (or parts of our logo) on anything without our permission.

This blog may not have many readers who leave comments, but it sure does have a lot of commenters who leave spam! Still, I make sure to go through the list of pending comments in case there’s a real one in there. Today, I came across one comment that was obviously spam, but charming with its fractured English and a punch line I hadn’t heard before:

AftequeAlew:
A houseman was walking on the beach harmonious day and he bring about a bottle half buried in the sand. He irrefutable to provide it. Stomach was a genie. The genie said,” I resolve agree to you three wishes and three wishes only.” The gentleman prospect there his beginning demand and decided, “I think I be deficient in 1 million dollars transferred to a Swiss bank account. POOF! Next he wished after a Ferrari red in color. POOF! There was the transport sitting in van of him. He asked in search his settled hanker, ” I wish I was irresistible to women.” POOF! He turned into a box of chocolates.

Genie in the bottle by zenoka is used under a CC BY-NC 2.0 license.

Primarily Perfect People are Permitted to Perfunctorily Pass this Post .

The rest of us, Prone to Pecadillos, may occasionally write blogposts and then change our minds about the content. When that happens it’s best not to make changes or delete posts without letting your readers know.

Instead of making a wholesale change to a post it’s better to create a new post. Imagine if someone wrote about a similar issue, quoted from your post and provided links to it. Now your post has changed, and the links no longer make sense because the content has changed. Or someone makes a comment on a post, the content of the post is changed, and now the comment has nothing to do with the post.

Instead, create a new post with a new link. It’s a good idea to keep the original post; you could delete it, but then other people’s links would return an error (that’s called “link rot”).

About the only good reason for modifying an existing post is to correct an error. Even then you shouldn’t delete the incorrect material, but indicate it should be deleted by using the <del> tag, and marking the new material with an <ins> tag. For example:

The Javan Rhinoceros <del>has only one survivor </del> <ins> is now extinct</ins> in Vietnam.

This would show with crossed-out text for <del> and highlighted text for <ins>, like this:

The Javan Rhinoceros has only one survivor is now extinct in Vietnam.

(which is a sad development, and may be worthy of a post of its own).

If you really want to delete a post then replace it with text like “This post has been removed by the author”. If you do that then you should delete or hide the comments too.

These are open and transparent ways to indicate deletions. It’s merely an online publishing convention, since there really isn’t a style guide for HTML like Strunk and White’s in the online world. Or, more accurately, there are far too many Strunk and White’s in the online world!

–Bob.

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Delete by delete08 is used under a CC-BY-NC license