blather_quirks sarpedon How your name does not get updated on the who page when you blather on an older blather page. Not very conducive to delayed conversations. 020107 ... bijou if you blathe somewhere more than once it won't show up on the "who". but it still goes to the top of the list for recent additions. i think. 020110 ... raze the way the "from" function works differently in both spheres. on blue, when you blathe a word or phrase that hasn't been blathed before, over a period of a day or two the system gradually creates links to every place the word / phrase appears throughout the database. so, eventually, when you click "from" you'll see every place the word / phrase appears. on red, links to a new blathe are only made when [a] the new blathe you've blathed is blathed to an even newer blathe (holy brain-twister), or [b] you say something on an existing blathe where said word / phrase appears, which has the effect of "refreshing" the blathe you're on and updating all the links...but only in that one place. take a look at something like "blather_difference" and see how many words are unlinked there. if someone were to add something new to that blathe twelve years after the fact, a lot more of those words would be underlined. 130515 ... raze fails at the linkage (that was meant to be "blather_switch", not "difference") 130515 ... raze here's an odd one. i just blathed something on 335_songs_part_three, and it brought it back up to the very top of both the general "who" page and my own individual list of blathes under this name, as if it was the first thing i ever said on that blathe. was it some strange fluke, or will the same thing happen again when i hit the "blather" button here? only one way to find out... 130625 ... raze yeah. something weird is definitely going on here. i've never seen this happen before, here or on blue. 130625 ... raze so that strange glitch resolved itself a while ago. but here's something kind of fun, borrowed from anne-girl on blue. it also works on red. go to the "who" page. add this to the end of the url: ;num=100 feel free to substitute whatever reasonably large number you like for 100. then hit enter and watch what happens. 131118 ... e_o_i Magic! So ordinarily, it says "who" wrote things today and yesterday, and then if you specify 100... well, it's easy to guess what might happen, but I'll let other people find out for themselves. 131118 ... raze i forgot about this one: on blue, the indexes for i, h, and d redirect to the words "index", "home", and "default", respectively. on red, this is only true for h, with the indexes for i and d easily accessible and not redirecting to individual blathes. funny, that. 140818 ... flux no no no no no. or not quite. we're all of us blather's quirks. 140819 ... raze something it took me this long to realize: the date pages don't account for leap years. in order to see a list of the day's blathes for, say, february 29, 2004, you need to input the date manually. 220124 ... raze you know the thing i mentioned back in 2013 about the way blathes didn't automatically refresh on red the way they do on blue? well, now they do. dallas just fixed the "rebuild script" that wasn't working over here. now more than twenty years worth of dormant links are in the process of being made. the script is working in alphabetical order, and as i write this it's about three quarters of the way through the t blathes. watching this happen right now is pretty surreal, and kind of magical. 220316 ... past i think the "index" and "default" bit is more because those blathes don't exist here so the usual browser process of looking for those pages doesn't happen as they don't exist. a bit of luck. 220317 ... raze you're right! it took me longer than i'd like to admit to figure that one out. norm toyed with the idea of throwing a wrench in the works on the "indexx" blathe once upon a time, but he held himself back. 220317 ... Biz oh! raze that is so cool! i actually wondered why that was different here. a few times i have written a post and linked a term together that i intended to go back and write about, to then return to the original blathe and see it is not linked. so i am very excited that is being fixed! 220318 ... raze i was coming back here to say, "i think i spoke too soon!" on wednesday, the script went through all the individual blathes in the system and rebuilt the html, and the dates on the index pages changed to reflect that. it tried to do the same thing again yesterday, but it stalled out at 11th_street and never made it to any of the blathes that begin with letters. i figured it hit a snag and typed up a draft email to send dallas after the weekend so he could take a look at it. but red is resilient. this morning i woke up to find the script was trying again. this time it got through each blathe, from a to z, with every underscore and number in_between, in a little less than three hours. maybe the piece of programming making these connections stopped at 11th_street because it needed to refuel. or maybe it just liked the scenery. 220319 ... raze so, you can see how many total blathes there are on red on any given day by going here: http://blather.newdream.net/red/numwords.html (to see how many blathes there are on blue, just remove the "red" from that url.) freakizh uncovered this little blather secret on blue twenty years ago. but did you know you can also see how many *entries* there are on all the blathes that have been written? check it out: http://blather.newdream.net/red/numentries.html there's also the image directory, which is almost identical to blue's but for a few slight alterations: http://blather.newdream.net/red/images/ 220326 ... past the blather_gods may be mortals, but sure raze is their oracle! (thanks!) 220327 ... raze ::: blushes and bows ::: i gotta say, though, lately i feel like a bit of an unintentional meddler. my brain is still doing backflips over seeing three_words_on_red for the first time. i had no idea the piece of programming that keeps tabs on the number of blathes was the same script responsible for generating the three_words on the front page, or that it was sitting there all this time, dormant, with the switch waiting to be flipped. everything i do (deliberately or otherwise), i do out of love for this red_family. as long as that comes across, i'm a happy guy. 220327 ... raze maybe this is more of a browser quirk. but still. as with most places on the internet, html links on blather change their appearance depending on whether or not you've visited them. when you click on a hyperlink that connects to a blathe (or on any of the links at the bottom of a blathe), there's a subtle softening of its colour to mark it as a place you've been. on chrome, this seems to reset every ninety days. on firefox, it might take as long as a year. i'm not sure. there are blathes i haven't touched with that browser since february, and they still haven't returned to their original shade of red. i'm waiting to see what happens. 220713 ... raze so, i figured now that we had three_words_on_red they would commemorate red's birthday, the same way blue's three_words lock up for a day when that place gets older and the home page just says "happy birthday blather" for twenty-four hours. and that might happen next january. time will tell. but today the three_words in both blather spheres are frozen in recognition of blue's big day. and that's kind of neat. 220818 ... e_o_i Thanks for explaining! I didn't know that was a regular thing. 220818 ... raze i didn't know either until someone pointed it out on blue! if i remember right, i think it started happening about five years in. (and now i'm really curious to see if red recognizes its own birthday next year, or if it's only blue that gets the special treatment.) 220818 ... raze i'm not sure this is a quirk. it's more of a shortcut that's been hidden in plain sight all along. but i don't know where else to mention it. you know how you have to piggyback off of an existing blathe in order to create a new one? well, it turns out you don't really have to do that at all if you don't want to. this url will take you straight to an empty form: blather.newdream.net/cgi-bin/blather/edition=red?addform (for blue, just get rid of the "edition=red" bit.) i doubt i'll ever use it. i'm too set in my ways. still. it's kind of neat to know it's there, in case anyone ever wants a truly blank_page to work with. 220906 ... raze turns out you don't have to click the "blather" button to publish a blathe. there's another way. you just hit enter when your cursor is in the "word" field. presto blathe-o. it's taken me more than twenty years to figure that out. my mind, she is blown. 230301 ... tender_square (i'm finding that when i hit enter in "word" after i've finished writing my first blathe of the day that blather accepts my captcha instead of making me refresh it three times like usual if i hit the "blather" button.) 230305 ... raze (the h index is now accessible, rendering the complete_index_of_h obsolete. it was a fun ride while it lasted.) 230808 ... raze again, not a quirk, but a thing: you can change the size of the "says" box by using an arrow that appears when you hover your cursor over the bottom right corner. i don't know how i went all this time without ever noticing that. 230809 ... raze if you've hit "go" enough times, at some point you've probably found yourself on a blathe that's a very long title with no text. like, say, "so this is where all the hardcore blatherskites hang out." (i'm not going to type it out with underscores, because it would stretch out the page something fierce if i did.) that's because the title of a blathe can't exceed the amount of text that will fit on one line here. otherwise, it won't make it through the digital birth canal. as far as i can figure it, the absolute ceiling is fifty characters. anything past that and you're taking your blathe in your hands. 231115 ... raze the way the first half of a compound word will link to its respective blathe but whatever comes after the dash won't, even when it should. 240108 ... raze more than ten years later, it happened again: two blathes i've contributed to a fair few times over a period of years (what_made_you_sing_today and what_did_you_smell_like_today) are suddenly on the "who" list as if i just wrote on them for the first time. curious. 240223 ... raze and today the "who" page is showing *every* blathe everyone writes on, whether they've blathed there before or not. 240614 ... e_o_i It's doing that with the name field too. I clicked on "e_o_i" to look up something I'd written earlier, and half_asleep_thoughts was at the top. It's definitely not my first time writing on that one. 240618 ... raze from what little i know about this stuff, it seems like it might be an unexplained change with the mysql database and how it tracks information. the question is, do we *want* a more accurate and up-to-date who page? i kind of liked it the way it was before. not that it's an impediment to writing or anything. but it's a little jarring to suddenly see so many things sliding to the top of the_who_page (and our individual lists of blathes) when it never worked that way before. 240618 ... e_o_i I think I like this way better, but it wouldn't bother me if it went back to how it was before. 240618 ... raze i guess it probably does technically work "better" now, and i just got used to it being funky and selective over the years. ha! (wait, did i just describe myself without meaning to?) i'm also grateful our latest glitch is only something mildly baffling, and not an issue that prevents us from blathing. 240618 what's it to you? who go blather from