WIST

I’ve made a change in how Bible verses are quoted in WIST.  Whereas before I had Bible quotes falling underneath “Other Authors and Sources,” I’ve now designated “Bible” as an “author” in the database, allowing easier grouping and finding of quotations from there. (One could arguably assert various “authors” within the Bible, especially in the New Testament, but I’m not going to take it to that detail; the authorship is associated with the book cited and is subject to whatever scholarship the reader cares to accept.)

I’m also trying to be more diligent about citing the translation in use, since that can have a lot of influence on how the ideas are presented (or even whether folks consider them “valid”).  I’m generally not citing source links, as the reader may have their preference.  The three I use, for different reasons:

• Bible Gateway (the most robust site out there)
• NetBible (includes some translations not in Bible Gateway, like NRSV, as well as some linguistic resources)
• Olive Tree (includes one of my favorite translations, Today’s English Version)

There are other Holy Books / Scripture out there which I still have lumped under “Other,” mostly because the number of quote I have from them is relatively small.  As I see a need, I’ll break them out into their own “author” categories.

WIST is now echoed out to Twitter at @WISTquotes.  Each quotation I add will be excerpted to that site as they’re done each day.  Of course, with only 140 characters, all folks there will get will be the name, the first 60 characters of the quote, a link back to the WIST entry.  E.g.,

Lincoln, Abraham: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith…” http://bit.ly/dBh9EQ #quotes

My hope is that this will provide folks over in the Twitterverse with something useful, as well as driving a bit more traffic over to this site.

Let me know what you think, or if you have any other ideas for how to improve WIST.

I’ve added a search plug-in for WIST to the Mycroft Project, which hosts search engine plug-ins for Firefox and for IE.

The plug-in does a quotation text search. That means it won’t search for author info — a side effect of the way I’ve implemented the authors as categories in WordPress.

You can find the plug-in here.  Enjoy!

This week has been a bit spotty with WIST, as I’ve been in a flurry of holiday/vacation travel and activities.  I’m going to be taking a week off from WIST until after the New Year, since the coming week will be even more harried (and likely less connected).

Thank you all for your support and reading of this little hobby of mine.  I’ll be doing a more official tally in the New Year,  but I’ve added probably a good thousand quotes to the list, and had a great time doing so.

Here’s hoping you and yours have a wonderful holiday season, and that the new year brings you both joy and illuminating words to ponder.

Apologies for the silence this week — the H1N1 flu grabbed me and threw me down on the couch the past few days. I’m feeling much better, and so will be resuming with the regular WIST posts, starting … about … now.

I’ve fixed the feed problems I introduced with the Wordpress upgrade. All feeds — including the quotes-by-email from FeedBurner — should be working properly now. It not, please let me know.

For more info on the feeds here, you can choose the “Subscribe” link at the top of the page.

Apologies to WIST followers via RSS or Atom feeds (or “Quotes of the Day” email people). During a recent upgrade to Wordpress (10 July), I failed to reinstall / recreate the feed code that juggles includes the person who actually gave the quote, so that info has been missing.

I’m going to work on getting that back running today, so you may see some additional quotes passing through as I test it.

I made a couple of changes to the site setup today worth noting:

First, Author collections (category archives) will now be sorted by the citation, not by the date the quote was entered in here. That should be helpful both in looking things up and in spotting potential duplicates (or inconsistent citations).

Second, I’ve added (see the top of any WIST page) an “Authors” page, which lists all the authors currently cited in WIST (along with how many quotations they have recorded here). Clicking any of the names will bring you to their quotation page. And if you hover over the names, you’ll get the more detailed biographical info about them that shows up in each quote’s citation.

This Authors page needs some further work — I wanted to have the full description as the text here, not the shorter name (which can also be seen in the Authors list in every sidebar). But it’s a step forward.

If there are other features you’d like to see in WIST, please let me know. Future plans for the site are always listed in the “To Do” page, linked at the top.

After leaving off for the (US) Memorial Day holiday, I’m on vacation the rest of the week. I have, however, queued up the standard complement of quotations for Tuesday – Friday. The only difference my being away makes is that if there are any egregious formatting or spelling errors, I won’t see them until I return next week, and any comments left will (probably) stay unanswered until then.

I’m aware the folks who are reading this via Feedburner (directly or via email), feeds are still goofed up (presently the formatting is better, but the author name is missing — and that’s now causing a problem with other direct feeds). I know what needs fixing, but haven’t confirmed the latest approach to how is working. Apologies, and feel free to come visit the site in order to see the latest-greatest until I can get this corrected.

UPDATE (mere minutes later, of course):  Problem fixed, huzzah.  I will be spreading this out to other feed templates later today.

Well, irritatingly enough, though the Atom/RSS feed for the site looks fine in Google Reader, and in the viewer in FeedBurner, too, the email version that FeedBurner sends out looks … less than … good.

Apologies to WIST readers who use that feature. I’ll try to figure out what the heck is going on.

A combination of factors — a fractious PC that was causing me difficulty updating the old Movable Type site, a new mania for WordPress, and a touch of obsession — has led to my converting over WIST to a WordPress blog. I think it will provide, in the long run, some serious advantages in performance and ease of use, both for me and for my readers.

There’s still a lot to do here — my inability to update the old version caused me to rush this to production. Part of the needed changes are cosmetic — getting the WIST logo back in place. Others more more substantial — getting the feeds working properly, dealing with some odd formatting glitches, etc.

But I’m pleased to be able to roll this out. I hope you continue to enjoy reading and using WIST as much as I enjoy keeping it updated. And, at a rather appropriate cracking-the-7000-quote mark, it’s a perfect time for a brand new era.

UPDATE:  I was unable to make a final post in the old MT installation to let folks kno this, but … as part of the conversion, the RSS feed addresses for WIST have changed.  If you were using FeedBurner, then you’ll see a difference, but you don’t have to do anything.  If you had a direct subscription to the feed from the site, though, it no longer works.  Go to the RSS link at the top of the page to make a new choice over how you want to subcribe here.

Apologies for the lack of WIST entries yesterday. Technical difficulties on my PC (still ongoing) caused the problem, but I’m going to work around them today.

Meantime, I’ll catch up on the gap, and, hopefully, have some Big News for you later this weekend.

Again, thanks for your patience.

I’ve gotten the performance problems here cleared up by shifting my main blog (which was the spam traffic target) over to WordPress from Movable Type. I will probably eventually do the same to WIST, but that’s a ways off — I’ve done some serious tweaking to how I get MT to support WIST, and the migration of the data (the normal MT-WP export/import routine doesn’t include a good chunk of the data I store here), getting WP to behave the same (again, using categories for authors and such), and retaining all the permalinks to the current site (for the sake of Google and folks who have linked back) is going to be a non-trivial task.

In the meantime, though, things seem to be on an even keel here, and no more glitches in posting (knocks wood). Thanks for your continued reading and support.

I’m having serious performance problems at my WIST site, largely due to spammers bringing the server to its knees trying to work their evil ways. Nothing’s getting through, but whilst they’re crowded around the building, posting of new material is highly problematic, and some that does get posted is lacking authors by the time the system processes. I correct these problems as soon as I spot them — but sometimes it can take many, many retries for the correction to actually get through.

So apologies for quotations being posted (esp. through the RSS feed / e-mail distribution) without authors associated. I am working on the problem, though there is no trivial solution as this point.

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘:’ in /home/dave/public_html/wist/wp/wp-content/plugins/php-execution-plugin/includes/class.php_execution.php(270) : eval()’d code on line 1

A copule of things:

1. Yahoo has discontinued its site Search Builder program, in exchange allowing folks to do much more powerful (and complicated) customized search bits. As a result, the old Yahoo search box stopped working, and I’ve removed it until I figure out how to make Yahoo searches work from here again.
2. The FastSearch box is also acting persnickety, for reasons I cannot diagnose as yet. I’ve labeled it as “NOT WORKING,” and re-enabled the normal slower-but-more-thorough MT search functionality in the sidebar.

Apologies for any inconvenience.

It’s Election Day here in the US. On my “regular” blog, I’ve pulled some WIST quotations from some past US Presidents about the future before us.

Apologies for the spotty posting last week. I was on business in India and between a very full schedule and being 11½ hours off-kilter, I didn’t get update WIST nearly as often as I’d planned.

I’ll try to make it up this week by posting an extra quotation or two each day.

While the odometer at the top of WIST isn’t exact (it includes about 50-odd Administrivia posts such as this), it appears we’ve rollled well past the 6,000 quotations mark. While there are a lot of sites with more, I’d like to think that the loving attention I give to each and every quote I put up here makes WIST a bit special. 

It remains a labor of love, and I plan to be around for at least another 6,000.

Things are humming along ricki-ticki here at WIST Central. You may have noticed I’ve recently gone to 5 quotes a day, rather than 3. Thereby hangs a tale.
In addition to adding new quotations to the database, I am in a continuing effort to clean up existing entries — generally meaning sourcing them. Resources online for this sort of thing have grown tremendously in the years since I’ve started this effort, with three elements being of particular value in sourcing attributions:

1. Bartleby.com: Has some classic quotation books online.
2. Wikiquote: An ever-growing adjunct to Wikipedia, with user donated/vetted quotation collections.
3. Google Books: Google’s efforts to scan the libraries of the world have led to a lot of primary sources for quotes being put online and searchable. It fills me with joy to find a quote that is unattibuted anywhere in its original form and in context.

My re-research has tended to be alphabetical, going through the listings. I’m currently in the S’s (and, when done, will wrap again around to the A’s). This research, in addition to cleaning up entries (note anywhere the original and last-modified date are different), has two major outcomes:

1. I tend to find a lot of other quotes by that author. This leads me to a quote “surplus,” which means I don’t have to spend any research time each day, but can just grab five (or more, but five at the moment) from the ever-growing raw materials text file I keep.
2. I face a challenge in keeping the names all mixed up. Sure, I could have “Bertrand Russell” day (and, hey, that’s actually an interesting idea for birthdays and the like), but I’d rather provide a variety each day, both by person, and thematically, and even by alphabet clusters. I’d just as soon a given day didn’t have everyone whose last name begins with “R.” Still, observant observers will observe that some names come up with some frequency, until I go through the quotes I’ve grabbed for those names.

So, that’s what’s going on in the world of WIST. Hope you’re finding it all (except for those occasional bits of administrivia) entertaining, thought-provoking, and interesting.

Google has been very slow to rebuild its indexing of WIST, for reasons I can’t quite figure out. Granted, I originally caused the problems by unintentionally blocking the Googlebots IPs, but I’ve had that fixed for a couple of months. Still, when I look at “visitors” I’m seeing only a handful of Googlebot hits.
Yahoo’s Yslurp bot, though, has been hitting WIST like crazy, so I’ve added a Yahoo search box in the sidebar as yet another way to search WIST.
As an example of the disparity, a search for “liberty” comes up with 137 results in Yahoo, 71 in Google. On the other hand, I like the Google results better — the Yahoo outputs include lots of bits here and there that aren’t WIST-oriented, and it picks up the page description in the results text every time, which is a bit annoying.
But, for the moment, Yahoo’s results counts are coming out better, so I’ll be leaving the box there for the time being.

I’ve modified the screen layout for the author pages and the individual post pages to be two-column, rather than three. That should make reading a bit easier, and improve the crawling of the pages for the author info and quotation text.
The Google search feature is currently not working as well as I’d like, since I managed to inadvertently ban Google’s spiders from the site. My bad. That problem is fixed, but it may take Google a while to get up to speed. In the mean time, the non-Google search works passably well.
Most of the WIST pages are produced dynamically, which means the server builds what they look like on the fly from the WIST database. That’s very space-efficient, but it does slow down page loads and makes WIST more sensitive to any server slowdowns. I’m pondering going to static publishing, which creates a physical file for each page (i.e., for each quotation, for each author’s quotes, etc.); that would significantly speed up loading to any given page (and probably improve Google’s searches), but would each up a chunk of disk space, and would make each posting a bit slower for me to make (and redesigns aot more painful). As I said, I’m pondering.
Finally, I’ve now got a little “X quotes and growing” line at the top of the main page. The number is a little misleading, as it’s an entry count, and so it includes these occasional Administrivia items. That’s a small number (a couple of dozen), so I feel good enough about the number to live with it.
UPDATE: I’ve gone ahead and done the author and quotation pages as static pages. Let’s see how that works.
UPDATE: I’ve also revised all page formats, except the front page, to use the same two-column format. It makes for a cleaner, easier interface, and a better standard across the site. I’ve also shifted to using SSIs for most of the sidebar information, to reduce disk storage.

Apologies for the hiatus the past few days — illness, weekend, and a business trip far busier than expected are all to blame. We should be back on track for three added quotes daily starting today, and if I get a chance we may get a few extra tossed in to make up for it.

Interested in getting quotations delivered right to your e-mailbox daily? Have we got a deal for you!
I have a Feedburner e-mail feed set up for this site. While it won’t select a random quote, it will send you a copy of every quote I add to WIST (usually 3-4 each weekday). That’s not a single Quote of the Day, but 3-4 Quotes of the Day! What a deal!
You’ll get an e-mail each evening titled “Your WIST quotation update.” It’s all handled through Feedburner, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
Just click here.

I’ve updated this blog to MT 4.01. It appears to have gone smoothly, and everything seems to be working, but if you run across any problems, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

I’ve found the FastSearch add-in for MT to be pretty handy — quick, and eminently configurable to look like any other page here. But it does have some limitations, most especially in not being able to search by author.
So I’ve added into the sidebar a customized Google search bar, which harnesses the power of Google (yadda-yadda) and does a search just within the site. It should be a good additional tool for folks (myself included) to use in accessing content here at WIST. It’s advantages:
1. It’s Google-fast. Whee!
2. It searches everything on the page, including the author and biography and all that.
A few limits the Google search has:
1. As I have it set up, the result page isn’t very customized. A little WIST logo, that’s it. There are some ways to do more of that sort of thing (bringing results to one of my own pages, for example), but that was more time than I had to immediately invest.
2. The search isn’t very discriminating content-wise, just as Google is not. You may get individual quotations back, author pages back, even the front page (if that’s where a quote match was), all mixed together. If I’d known I was doing this, I would have organized the virtual pages here differently — but I didn’t, and it’s kind of too late now. You also end up with any sort of match — if I have a particular word in the sidebar, it will flood every result.
3. It’s a Google search result — you get a little context, but not necessarily the whole quote.
4. The content is limited to the last time Google crawled the page. A quote I entered in the past few days most likely won’t show up (not sure how often Google crawls here, but it’s not hourly, that’s for sure).
But that all said, I’m pretty happy with it as an added tool in the WIST tool kit. Heck, if it works out well here, I might use it on my main blog …

Sorry about the gap in posting new quotes here — life’s been busy, and I’ve hardly been spending any time online the past week or so. Regular posting will resume shortly.

Things are running pretty stable as far as visitors goes. I wouldn’t mind seeing more, but I’m seeing enough traffic to make it worthwhile for me.
I’ve been pretty consistent with putting 3+ quotes up every weekday — and not just quotes but quotes with some research into where it was actually said. I’ve been going through multiple sources to keep a (hopefully) good variety. Remember, if you subscribe via e-mail, you’ll get those quotes delivered straight to your in-box.
I keep seeing Google and Yahoo both indexing pages, so hopefully more folks will continue to find WIST.
One thing that I have been light on is feedback. A few comments, but not as much as the visitor stats would warrant. Feel free, then, to comment on quotes you like, suggest new ones, to link back to a particular quote, or to comment on posts like this as to what you’d like to see here at WIST.

I have a post over on my main blog about problems with the .info top-level domain being associated with spamming and malware — even though there are perfectly legitimate users of it (such as WIST, and New York’s MTA), and the rate of “bad stuff” isn’t all that much higher than from .com domains.
The current problem is that some software vendors and hosts are actually discriminating or blocking things associated with .info, e.g., Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger, as well as some mail systems that block or downcheck e-mail from a .info domain.
I don’t plan on changing the WIST site any time soon — but I will be monitoring the situation.

Everybody knows who, say, George Bernard Shaw was. And it’s not likely anyone’s going to question which “Abraham Lincoln” to whom to attribute an Abraham Lincoln quote.

But then you get someone like “Gil Atkinson.” There are a ton of Gil Atkinson quotes on the net. But who is Gil Atkinson. Ah … there’s the rub.

Ninety-nine percent of the quotes in Google have nothing other than the name. A very few identify him as an inventor and businessman (1827-1905) of that name, who invented the automatic sprinkler. There are also a couple of cases where the quotes are attributed to an American historian by that name.
Problem is, the quotes themselves are all over the map. A couple sound plausible from an historian. A couple of others from an inventor (though few of those sound appropriate for someone writing at the turn of the 20th Century). Most of them sound like a (rather trite) motivational speaker or sales consultant (and are quoted most enthusiastically by those same sorts). But there are no Gil Atkinson websites, no “live” comments by him anywhere on the web (by that name), and no books at Amazon by him.

And none of the sources touting they know “who” Gil Atkinson is are reliable enough for me to just take their word — and assume they didn’t just plug in a description from elsewhere.

So, who was Gil Atkinson? Or who are they? Are we talking about multiple folk by that name, of different professions, and how, without actually finding the source of some of these quotes can one really, actually tell?

My conclusion — though I originally had my (one) Gil quote attributed to a contemporary historian, I’m going to backtrack on that, and just leave the name as a contemporary (based on the vocabulary and syntax of the quotes). Which really irks me, but what can you do?

Anyone with any citeable insight into this is more than welcome to chime in.

Though you’d never know it from a lot of quotation sites (including, I’ve discovered, my own), there is in fact a difference between Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley — which difference is sometimes muddled by the latter sometimes being known as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and both of them sometimes being referred to as Mary Godwin (after MW’s husband, and MS’s father, William Godwin).
Mary Wollstonecraft was a philosopher and commenter on human rights. Mary Shelley was the author of (among other things) Frankenstein. Their quotations are quite different, but often appear misapplied one author to another.
So when recording in a quotation from one or the other of these ladies, do a little bit of research to confirm that your source has the right author. There’s enough bad quotation info out there — no point in adding to it if you can help it.

I chose the WIST acronym to go with the natural, catchy phrase, “Wish I’d Said That!” I did note at the time I grabbed the domain (long after) that the .com version of the domain was long gone — which was okay, because the .info domain was a natural for a site like this. (Though, to be sure — how many .info domains are there? Should be a lot more, IMO.)
Anyway, a miskeying led me to a whole bunch of sites that share the WIST name, if not exact domain:

1. Wist Auto Products (proud owners of the .com).

2. WIST Radio
3. Wists (Web Lists, a “social wish list” shopping bookmark site)
4. Women In Surgical Training (an organization within the Royal College of Surgeons)
5. The Wist Family (proud owners of the .org)
6. WIST (a PHP Web interface)
7. WIST (a NASA Warehouse Inventory Search Tool)
8. WIST (Women in Sport Touring – a women’s motorcycling site)
9. wist (the archaic form of “wit” as in “knew”)

Glad to have met each of you (virtually) and to share your name.

It’s been a bit over a month since I relaunched WIST, and I’m pretty much pleased as punch with how it’s going. I’ve been adding 3-5 quotes a day at least, so subscribers to the feed or the e-mail delivery are getting their money’s worth, and traffic is slowly increasing, which is also quite nice.
Feel free, as a visitor, to leave feedback. Except for spammers — spammers can fry in hell. But the rest of you are surely welcome here.

A couple of sidebar notes.
1. I’ve added a new “Research Info” link list into the right-hand sidebar. It’s got some of the sites I use most often to find/source quotations and to get biographical info on the authors. I plan on writing a more complete article on that at some point to replace the links to earlier posts where I discuss those topics (in the “WIST Info” sidebar section), but for now, aside from “Google is your friend,” those are the places I would point anyone for sweet quotey action.
2. I now am keeping a list of the three most recent entries here over on the sidebar of my main blog. That will, I hope, drive a bit more traffic here. We’ll see.

I’ve installed Fast Search on this blog and — yow! Searches that used to take take 15, 30, 60 seconds with the out-of-the-box search capabilities all come back in just 2 or 3. It’s fantastic.
There are a few limitations vs. the normal MT search. It doesn’t do comments (yet) — but that’s not really a problem here. It’s search parameters are a bit more limited — no Regex, no Case Sensitivity, no OR or NOT.
But if you’re looking for a word or two in a quotation here (or a fragment of 4 letters or more), the new Search will rock your world.
I’ll probably be installing it (as an option) on my other blogs. But the best fit was here. If it continues to perform the way it has over the next week, I’ll definitely be dropping something in the tip jar.

Some evolving thoughts here on noting the sources of quotation (as part of their citations).
In my old Access database, I had a column for in the quotes table for “source,” where I would put where I’d found something — not necessarily the origin of the quote, but where I’d gotten it (in case someone said, “Hey, where did that come from?”). Often it was a hyperlink — sometimes to the article in question (e.g., a quote from someone in Time magazine), or to a Bartleby entry, or to a primary source.
(If someone is only quoted in a second party’s work, I’ve often shied away from using that work as the citation, both because of the space involved and because it’s a secondary source. I have not been consistent about this, however.)
I also used the field for notes about the quotation — “Not found in the works of Fred Smith,” or “Also attributed to Joe Bloggs,” or “Sometimes given as ‘alternative translation.’”
I hadn’t displayed that material in my previous WIST collection, but I made a conscious decision this time out to do so. It’s the follow-up sans serif text that appears underneath some quote. In some cases it’s an URL, in other cases it’s notes on the source.
One thing I’ve discovered, though, is that I can now easily make actual hyperlinks out of this material. Rather than just giving the URL to the Bartleby page, I can say “Source” and make that a hyperlink to that URL. That may clean up the look of things, and allow for some more even useful ways of putting stuff in here. I’d do something similar in the actual citation (e.g., link to the essay or book or whatever), but the “Title” field in MT isn’t as suited to that (just as the Category Description isn’t well suited to putting in a hyperlink for the Wiki page for an author).
I don’t plan on en masse going back and cleaning these things up, but I will do a bit of cleaning as I go along in adding new and updating old material.

I’m not happy about the peformance going to individual author pages. In part that’s because archives are the most complex item for MT serve up, and the individual authors are categories.
I’m seriously considering turning the normal author categories into permanent (static) files, rather than dynamic. That should dramatically improve performance, but …

1. The disk storage will go way up.

2. Posting new stuff will take a bit longer (an added file to generate).
3. category rebuilds will seriously churn things up even more.
4. I do occasionally rename categories (authors) – will that leave obsolete files out there. Yeah, probably. Trivial issue, I think, but worth considering.

I’m most concerned with #1 and #3, esp. #3. It irks me to do rebuilds, and the category rebuild is already a huge churn.
I will ponder this.

A moderate design shift for the front page. Rather than having the most recent Adminstrivia post showing at the top of the first page, I’ll have an excerpt of the most recent Adminstrivia in the sidebar on the front page — something visible for those looking for such things, but not getting in the way of the quotations.
Because, after all — the quotations are what it’s all really about.

So now that the dust has more or less settled on the WIST redesign comes the question, “what next?”
In particular, options include:
1. Continue to add more quotes.
2. Revisit existing quotes without decent citation and work on cleaning those up.
3. Improve the search speed.
4. Try to figure out a “quote of the day” functionality.
5. Come up with a good resources page with the current places I get or research quotes from.
Anything else you can think of? This site is for your use, after all.
Two previously-requested options are not likely:
1. Allow users to add quotes: Sorry, this isn’t Wikiquote (which is, in fact, a wonderful site). I’d rather not open things up to the world to break/spam the site. Though, that said, if you have a quote you want to see in here, leave it in a comment in some post (I’ll see it) or contact me by e-mail, and I’ll see what I can do. (If I don’t care for the quotation, I won’t use it, but there’s no accounting for my tastes).
2. Tag/categorize quotes: Not only would this be a massive task with the existing 5K-odd quotes at the moment, but I’ve always found such schemes and taxonomies to be somewhat arbitrary and rarely complete. Honestly, I find word searches a better way to find what one’s looking for. There may be ways of opening that up to the public — but that runs smack-dab into the spamming thing again.

A previously unexpected benefit of my new database / layout / etc. here at WIST has come to my attention. I can see, if I Google around a bit, various folks who have wholesale copy-pasted huge swathes of the previous version of WIST pages to their own quote pages. (It’s not quite spotted by the same trick as dictionary publishers who put in false words — but it’s related, if uintentional.)
Now, I don’t mind sharing the wealth. By the very nature of a quotations database, that would be silly. And heaven knows I’ve garnered quotes from a lot of places, online and off.
But … there’s a reason I have a Creative Commons “By” license off in the margin. If you copy stuff from here — especially big chunks o’ stuff — I do ask and expect some sort of attribution or link-back or hat-tip. Because the work I’ve put into gathering this info is a lot more than just copying and pasting stuff. I’ve spent a lot of time sourcing material, updating it, arranging it, etc. A few props wouldn’t be out of line.
And, at any rate, that sort of mass copying won’t be as feasible. Previous iterations of WIST had whole letters of the alphabet’s authors, with their quotes, on a page. Now only a given author’s quote are on a page, and each one has the author citation at the page top. So someone who wants to borrow something has to do a little bit of work to do so. That’s not intended to discourage finding and using quotations that you like — but it’s a nice unintended consequence that many, many hours or work cannot be simply copied with a single swipe of the mouse and a few clicks.

Well, the site’s been up for a few weeks now, and all seems to be pretty stable. I’m enjoying plahying with the e-mail feed service from Feedburner, which provides a very nice daily e-mail of any quotations added to the database. Since I’m trying to add one or two every day, that’s not a bad deal. Check it out in the sidebar under “Subscribe by e-mail” …

Welcome to the new WIST. I’ve been pounding away at this, on and off, for the last year, and it’s finally ready (I hope!) for prime time.

I’ve been collecting quotations for many years. I’ve had my collection online in one form or another for a number of years, but it was always a rather clumsy, static thing. I’ve devised this new site to use Movable Type as a sort of quotations database. You can read more about it in the general Administrivia category, but for the moment it simply means that I can no much more easily add and edit quotations online. It also means that you can more easily find things around here, as well as comment on quotations I have (e.g., to provide a citation, or to point out an error or duplicate).

With the capability to comment comes a sense that WIST is becoming more of a community effort. While I’ll continue to post quotations up myself (not giving up that particular “power”), your feedback is essential in improving the site and, most importantly, its content.

I’ve been beta testing the site for the last week or two, so I know it works. When I shift it from its test site to the actual wist.info domain, a few things might break, so have patience while I pound away at them.

One thing that’s changing with the new system is dropping the “WIST” quote-a-day mail. It’s something I’ve been, as you know (if you subscribed) pretty lax about recently, especially as I continued work on this site. Instead, though, what you are welcome to do is to subscribe to this site either via RSS (directly or via Feedburner) or by e-mail. Then any new quotations added, whenever they happen, will appear to you automatically. And, yes, that will be an incentive for me to keep adding quotes.

In putting together WIST, I realized I really needed to fill in the post title for all quotes (I believe MT actually requires it). Since I’m using the citation for the title (which was a brilliant improvisation but has caused me no end of trouble in displaying stuff), I had to deal with the vast majority of quotes I have that have no actual citation associated with them.
Alas, people tend to throw quotes out there with just the author, not with any idea of where it comes from. Sometimes you can find it with extensive use of Google and other references (and I’ll toot my horn to say that, for the ones I’ve researched, I’ve added a lot of hitherto-unknown citations to common quotes out on the Net). Sometimes not. And sometimes you just don’t have time.
Enter “(Attributed).” If I don’t know where something came from — either because it’s just plain old not known, or because the source hasn’t been cited, that’s what I’m using for the citation. Because, honestly, unless you can point to where it was originally said by the person, it is, in fact, just “attributed” to them, no matter how much people “know” it was said.

I’m throwing this open to an “open beta” amongs the folks who read my blog. Please comment below.
I’m most interested in structural/site issues: menu options that go to strange places, things that don’t seem to be working quite right (or at all), stuff like that.
Aesthetic notes (”Ew! Where did you get those colors?!”) are welcome, too.
Feel free to offer up favorite quotes, too, but I’d rather you hold onto those for post-go-live.

The new version of WIST makes full use of Movable Type as a database to make it a lot easier to search, comment, edit, and add to the quotation database.
Essentially, each quotation is an entry/post; the title is the citation, and the extended entry field is used for source material or other notes. Each author is a category (using the Category Description for the long author citation), with a couple of special categories for Administrivia, “other” authors, and sig lines.
Finding just the right combo of fields that I could search on, display when needed, etc., was a bit of a trick. I talk about it much greater length on my regular blog (especially here), and random vagueries of my schedule made it a much longer process than anticipated. But … I think things are just about ready to release to beta.
Good things about this arrangement

1. I can easily add new entries and have them show up immediately.

2. I can update/edit/revise or even delete entries and have it immediately show up.
3. It’s a database. A real database. All sorts of possibilities there.
4. Relational database (Categories to Posts, i.e., Authors to Quotes). Nice.
5. Search by text is much easier.
6. I can get comments. (And trackbacks, though that’s unlikely.)

Not-so-good things about this arrangement:

1. Search by author isn’t organic; it requires going to the author page and doing a browser search there (or doing it via Google). That’s just kind of awkward.

2. The huge number of categories (authors) is pushing the speed limits of MT, especially when I go in to edit them (e.g., add new authors, update biographical data). It also means I can use most MT external clients.
3. Some difficulties in managing different types of archive displays (and links thereto). Admin posts are substantively different from quotation posts, and should display differently. I’ve finally bashed that into shape, I think, but there are likely ‘behind the scenes” bits that will be more difficult to maintain because of it.
4. Weird visual oddities from the post “Titles” being the citations — the vast majority of which are “(Attributed),” but even where there is a cite, it doesn’t include the author name.
5. Some of the hiccups between MT’s dynamic and static arrangements meant I had to make more pages static than I wanted, requiring more rebuilds.

Most of the “not-nice” bits are more inconvenience and extra work in setting it up than in what the visitor will see. I hope.

I’m pretty close to having the site ready for an “open beta” — announce it on my normal blog (nofollow) and let folks come check it out and try to break it. The dancing around between multiple category archives is causing me problems, but I think I have all the labeling finished.
I’m not happy about the resolution of author searches — directing folks to the All Authors pages and telling them to search there — but it’s workable. The only alternative is using Google for searching (which may yet happen).
Things still to do:

1. Going through each page.

2. Doing a FireFox vs IE6 comparison.
3. Create a Favicon (this can happen during Beta)
4. Modify the default search template: Include the category (author), delete the blog author (me)
5. Modify the default search template: Mention / link to the All Authors page.

Post go-live:

1. Google Analytics

2. Feedburner

Like I said — close.

I’ve been making great strides toward getting the new version of WIST into shape. I made a breakthrough on the category listings — doing the author categories subsidiary to the alphabet-letter categories, etc. Slowly filling in the sidebar info. Things left to do (of substance) include:
1. Figure out what’s on the front page.
2. How the ~~Admin stuff will be displayed.
3. How the Miscellaneous and Sig Line archives will work.
I really want to get this finished, both because of the improvement it will provide to everyone and so that I can get back to entering stuff into it.

To update the above, as of the Feb. 2007 upload of data, here are the current WIST stats:

As noted in the News section, this update didn’t add a lot to the system (mostly sourcing clarifications), but it did add some.

As to the current “most popular”:

Alas, FastCounter is no longer functioning here. I have SiteMeter running, but no idea of the “since when” it’s counting. It shows, though a current total number of visits of 73,185. eXTReMe Tracking says the number of unique visitors since Aug. 2003 is 77,459. So I’ll take that number, and add it to the below tally to get:

September 2001: 8,400

Februrary 2002: 12,859

August 2003: 46,958
February 2007: 124,417.

Of those, 71% are from North America (14% from Europe, Finland making up half of that, interestingly), 81% use Windows, 61% are on IE (22% on FireFox), 60% get here from a search engine (half that from web sites, including cross-reference, the Atomz search, and web rings); Google has half the search pie there.

I’m resetting the Extreme search for its new version, so (for my future reference) it will be zeroed out at this point.

After about three-plus years of (apparently) lying fallow, I’ve posted an update to the WIST data.

Why so long?

Well, aside from having a day job and eleventy-dozen other projects going on, WIST as it presently stands takes the better part of a day to fully upload. That means I don’t do it trivially. So I was waiting until I finished my next pass on the database, consisting of trying to source a lot more of the quotations. I’ve done a good job of that (and added a few besides), but had only gotten up to Robert E. Lee last check.

So I’ve not finished that sourcing, and there are some new quote authors I’ve not doubled back on for bio info, and I’m sure all sorts of other little glitches are in there. Consider it (as always) a work in progress, with recommendations or problems always welcome to be reported.

I really want to get this into an online database, for searching purposes as well as for ease of updating. Does anyone know of a good package that runs on Apache/MySQL that would do the trick?

At any rate, thanks for your patience and support.