Friday, September 28, 2007

The Dawn Of A New Age

A new age of Technological Blogging is upon us

Yes, I finally managed to come up with a kluge1 that got my Inline Footnotes-Plus-Some-Other-Taggy-Stuff Utility of Extreme Spiffiness which I call "Gerald"2, and so we can look forward to even more footnote-intensive text. The only thing keeping the number of footnotes per post down to mere double digits in the past was the absolute bastard task of keeping the anchor code4 straight. Often I would want to add a footnote to a post already marked up, necessitating a laborious session with Messers Cut and Paste, often leading to swearing and much hitting of inanimate objects as I renumbered the existing references to match up properly. Not any more, though.

By the aegis of "Gerald" I am able to put my footnotes inline. Not only that: because I am keeping the pre-Gerald meta-script as my working copy rather than the blog text itself, I can insert new footnotes as I deem them necessary6 without having to manually renumber all the ones around it 7. This really becomes useful when I make one of my signature run-on sentences that looks too long even to my eyes. I can now edit the text to shunt some of the line into a footnote without worrying about the fifteen footnotes it will displace by one number.

By Jove, it fair gets the old footnotey juices flowing. Just as Joe Weider felt that after taking his One Hour a Day "Terror Method" course8 one would find oneself walking the streets itching to try out one’s new powers of self-defense one passersby, I now find myself itching to create footnotes.

Just because I can.

  1. Kluge Tech.: A clumsy work-around put in place because the dimwit doing the job cannot understand the instructions well enough to get the thing working properly the right way
  2. owing to the singular fact that IFPSOTSUoES is virually unpronounceable by anyone not raised by vile Cthulhu cultists3
  3. Who alone possess the extra-terrene glottis modifications required to say stuff like Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn! without swallowing their own tonsils
  4. The magic that allows you, my readers5 to zip from reference to footnote and back again
  5. all three of you
  6. Such as this one
  7. This one, for example
  8. The actual name he picked for it, though the "hour a day" was actually an hour per lesson and his instructions urged the student to perform each previous lesson daily as one progressed. This meant that by the end of the first week one was practicing self-defense seven hours a day. I digress

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