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.

It’s been a while (since February 2007), but for everyone’s edification, here are the current WIST stats:  

The “Total Quotations” number doesn’t quite sync up with the number at the top of the main page due to the latter including Adminstrivia posts (such as this one).  

The number is still not as huge as other sites -- but all of those quotes have been looked at, examined, and an attempt made to source them. I think that's worthwhile. 

As to the currently most represented here ...  

Dave Barry and Abe Lincoln fell off the Top 10; Russell and Franklin are the adds this time.  

I’m running Google Analytics on this page currently, as far as tracking visitors. I’m getting about 910 hits here per week, most of which come from Google. Not huger numbers, but respectable.  

Of the visitors, 57% are from theUS ; other countries are all below 10% each, with theUK ,Canda ,Ireland ,India , and Germany having the most visitors. About 50% are on IE (down from 61% last time); Firefox shows as 40%, with smaller blips for Safari and Opera.  

Not sure what it all means, but there it is. For myself, I've been pleased with my regimen to post five quotations daily here. I hope my loyal readers enjoy what they're seeing; I thank you one and all. 

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.

The "open beta" is still going on (cue crickets chirping), and the post for commenting can be found down here.

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.

The following are the folks who are currently quoted in WIST, along with a count of how many quotes there are for each.

(The links to the author names should eventually zero in to the first quote on the appropriate page, but for the moment only goes to the appropriate page itself.)

UPDATE: (17-Jul-07) This list as been removed, as there is now a whole page devoted to that (albeit without a quotation count).

In upgrading to MovableType 3.11, the plug-ins that segregated the sidebars so nicely (for site news vs the alphabetical listings) aren't working. Sorry for the mess ... excuse our dust ... your blog donation dollars at work ...

UPDATE: Thanks to the FilterCategories and CatX plugins for MT, all is well.

Now there's a WIST store at CafePress, where you can get t-shirts, mugs, mouse pads, and other goodies with the WIST logo and some quotation-oriented quotations. Being stylish, chic, and erudite was never this simple! Drop on by and see what you think! (And if you think of a design or quote you'd like to see, let me know!)

I've researched citations for E and F entries, added some quotes as I came across them, and have re-uploaded everything for A-F (plus the Authors list).

Slow slogging, though I've discovered two new tools to use:

• WikiQuote is an offshoot of Wikipedia. Some good info there, though very uneven and a work-in-progress.

• Amazon now has full-text searches for many of its books. A great way to find more detailed cites (though the Amazon search engine is fairly limited in its options).

The work continues ...

Finally got the "D" page updated, and so uploaded the most recent "A-C" pages as well (since, as I go, sometimes things get added).

Most interesting feature of "D" (that I can recall over four months) was discovering there were two Will Durants I was quoting.

A reader was kind enough to point out that the W page was showing V quotes. I discovered what the error was, and things seem to be working again.

I encourage folks to write me (via the Contact Me link in the sidebar) if you run across errors in structure or format. WIST relies on your help!

Finished going through A, B, and C for citations, and the updated files have been posted. (Of course, I added a bunch of quotes along the way. Otherwise, it would hardly be fun.)

I've reinstated one of the old features from the previous version of WIST, the list of quoted folk, now available in the Authors link in the sidebar.

I've not done it as a Table as I did before. It looked good, but, damn, it took forever to load a 1,500 row. Now it's just bulleted text, and much faster.

The names are hyperlinked; ultimately, they'll go to anchors on the right page where the person's quotes start, but I'll have to change the quotations exports to include those links. For the moment, they go only to the right page.

Just cut-over from the FrontPage pages to the MT pages. It appears to have gone nearly no hitch (a couple of graphics paths were a tad off).

One intersting item is looking at system resources used.

In FrontPage, the system took up 4.2Mb of space, consisting of 803 files in 41 folders under root.

In MT, the system takes up 2.2Mb of space, 153 files, 1 folder under root.

Note that's with 300 extra quotations. And with all the content being duplicated between two directories (for odd reasons I won't go into here).

Sweet.

For those who are interested in such things, here are some stats related to WIST.

First off, how many quotes do I actually have here?

Hmmm. Looks like I've been slacking. In reality, though, I've been focusing on cleaning up and fleshing out citations. Quality over quantity, so to speak.

Secondly, who said what -- and who are the most "popular" quote-makers here?

Bear in mind, of course, that things like having a Shakespeare Quote-a-Day calendar could influence the count ...

One last bit -- total visitors to the front page of WIST since June 1999 have gone as follows:

September 2001: 8,400
Februrary 2002: 12,859
August 2003: 46,958

Cool!

I neglected to mention that I'm using Atomz for the search engine here. As a free (limited) service, they do some very slick search stuff, and because they provide contextual results (showin the words they found, in context), they are ideal here. I heartily recommend them.

UPDATE (24 Jul 07): No longer using Atomz, but the internal MT search system (possibly to be someday updated to MT FastSearch, or even possibly MTGoogle). Atomz (now part of WebSideStory) has done well by me, so I still encourage you to consider it in your own site design, even if it doesn't fit mine any more.

Unlike what I scribed previously, it wasn't quite as trivial to plug this stuff into MT as I'd hoped, largely because of limits in HTML form entry sizes.

So instead I'm using Server Side Includes to bring in formatted text files to the entries. Still a lot of advantages to doing things this way (not least of which is that content and presentation are logically divided), but I thought I'd mention the problem I ran into.

Just going to show that I don't actually search my own database often, I discovered in the MT redesign that the Atomz search index was all frelled up, and since I'd turned off automated reindexing, it had remained frelled up for a lengthy period time. Sorry about that. I've turned the scheduled reindexing back on.

One disadvantage to how I'm doing this WIST implementation in MT is that I can't use MT's built-in search engine. But, hey-presto, no biggie, because I can still use Atomz -- and, it seems, Atomz is actually a better choice, since it gives contextual results. Cool.

This listing actually comes from a database I've put together myself. The database serves two purposes: to put together the web pages (in which case full typographical control is desireable) and to create the input file for my sig file (in which case the lowest common denominator is desired).

Rather than come up with something elaborate that translates stuff back and forth, for the moment you'll have to put up with italicized items in the quotation text showing up as *starred*, and _underscored_, and other Net-like typographical conventions. If you don't like it ... sorry. Maybe I'll do something fancier one of these days.

UPDATE (24 Jul 07): One of these days is now, since, working through MT, I can actually do rich text formatting and the like in HTML. Yay. I did some mass conversions of quotions to turn the _s and *s into italics -- in some cases that messed up, so if you spot a problem, please let me know.

For my e-mail sigs, I use a program named Siggy by Rick Osborne. It's the nicest program of its sort on the Net, for my money (which was $0, since it's freeware). Or at least it best fits my needs, which is much the same thing to me.

Rick Osborne doesn't offer Siggy publicly any more (since he's ostensibly making revisions to it), but if enough people ask him nicely, I'll bet he'd post it again.

UPDATE (24 Jul 07): Don't use Siggy any more, but it was a keen program for what I needed it for. Thanks again, Rick.

This quotations list is generated from a Microsoft Access database I threw together in an afternoon, after having absolutely no luck finding a reliable quotations program that did what I want. Once upon a time I'd have written a full-blown program myself, but my hair has gotten too pointy (to use a Dilbert reference) for that.

Fortunately, the tools have gotten sophisticated enough that I almost didn't have to do any programming at all. Hell, it will output both HTML and a text file my sig program will use; it almost makes the bloat worth it.

Almost. What I should be able to do is output this database to a static HTML format with few-to-no problems. But Access 97 had some serious limitations in going from report format to HTML, most particularly the bizarre idea that if a report has page breaks, Access should translate them into separate HTML pages. And Access 2000 either does the same thing, or else only works if you can run ASP on your server (or if you want to), none of which applies to me. Access XP only contniues the trend.

As a result, I had to do exports with manual HTML in them, and then do a lot of manual clean-up, which means that my WIST pages didn't get updated very often. I load in information into the Access database fairly frequently, but the pages are more like an annual event. Or biennial.

There are other databases I could use, of course. But Access is, ah, easily accessed by me. And certainly it will be around for a while, and I'd hate to get all this stuff into a database that then gets bought out or goes away.

I've now thrown Movable Type into the mix having a couple of years of blogging under my belt. The advantage of MT over my previous posting tool, FrontPage, is ...

... well, it isn't FrontPage. Which means it doesn't insist on occasionaly deleting everything else on my site, it doesn't crash, and it doesn't enrich Micro$oft's coffers.

Beyond that, it lets me control the formatting through templates, and lets me take Access query output (rather than report output) and plug it into the MT entries with relative ease. That's a Good Thing.

So the way I'm producing this page now is to run a query of all the quotations, with various HTML code bits thrown in. I export that to a text file, input it to Word, tweak around some things to generate line breaks, meld together quotation chunks of over 250 bytes, etc. Then I cut the quotes out by author letter of the alphabet and paste them into their respective 27 quotation entries.

That sounds like a lot of work, but it's about 25% of what I was doing to get the stuff into FrontPage.

Ideally, I'd still like to produce the static pages directly out of Access, or else come up with some simple, unobtrusive way to generate pages for individual authors. If anyone reading this ....

• ... knows how to make Access output to a static HTML format that doesn't break at every page ...
• ... has an idea for a program to use that will either do much the same, or else will let me keep the database on the Web page without any fancy-schmancy add-ons that ISPs will charge me for ...
• ... has an easy way to go from queries to an MT input format that I could repopulate the database with
• Has any other ideas.

... then I'd love to hear about it. I might even pay for it. A little bit, at least. I'd certainly give credit where credit is due.

UPDATE (24 Jul 07): As later entries note, I've gone away from both the Access setup and the need for a custom system to something that works in Movable Type. Which only slighly bends the product beyond its parameters, so it's all good. Would I mind a full-blow online quotations database dropping into my lap? No, but the need for it is a whole lot less urgent than it once was.

(And why the heck do I say "whence"?)

I've been collecting quotes for years. Here are some good places I've found for the budding (or wilting) researcher.

Books of quotations: Yeah, I actually read these things. Scary, isn't it? Bartlett's is the classic here, but Bergen Evans' Dictionary of Quotations (which I borrowed in college from my friend, Dave Sutherland, and took to like a crack addict) is an even better source. One of these days I'll list my quotation books more thoroughly.

Internet mailing lists: There are dozens of Internet mailing lists which will shoot you one or more quotes a day. I used to have an extensivel list here of ones that I subscribed to, but I realized that (a) I really was getting way too much e-mail, and (b) I was getting way too many repeats. Do some Googling on "quotation mailing list" and similar bits, or search in various mailing list directories (e.g., Yahoo).

Quote-a-day calendars: I always try to get at least one per year. Now you know what to get me for Christmas. This sometimes distorts my statistics, but, what the heck, it's good fodder.

Internet research: Just do a search on "quotes" and "quotations" and stand back. A lot of places are pretty awful, but there are some real gems out there. I'd recommend the Bartleby.com quotations page. This has the (searchable) contents of the 1919 Bartlett's, the 1996 Columbia World of Quotations, and the 1998 Simpson's Contemporary Quotations, making up some 86k quotes all told. The citations are pretty good, too.

Another good site is Xrefer, though much of its content is no longer free.

Sometimes, especially with contemporary or "gaffe" quotes, verifying them is also important. The Urban Legends Reference Pages does some good debunking here.

Reading: I read a lot. A lot. If I run across something that looks worth quoting, I quote it. That leads to some authors being quoted in WIST who aren't found in many other places. Just doing my part to add to the primary material out there.

So, how do I find out who actually said something?

Unfortunately, the Net, where I get a lot of my quotations these days, is no better than anywhere else about citations. In most cases -- though not all -- you'll get at least the last name of the person who first crafted the quotation. Sometimes you'll get a date range for their life. Rarely will you get the name of the work.

I've tried to fill in all the citation info in WIST that I can; if you have additional data or corrections, please feel free to contact me at the address in the sidebar.

The biggest problem one has in this sort of endeavor, after just plain old getting the data, is something most people probably wouldn't think of: how to order people's names.

For example, Fred von Smith. Is that under "V" or under "S"? If you set up a rule saying it should be "V" but everyone refers to him as just "Smith," should that change your mind?

And there is, alas, no consensus. The two works I consulted most, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and my Webster's Biographical Dictionary both came to opposite conclusions on the matter in a number of cases. They also had some intereresting variant spellings of names.

I've tried to take my cue from Bartlett's. Where writers have pseudonyms, I have grouped their quotes under the more common name. The Search box should let you find where something is.

The other questionable item is nationality. Once I decided I wanted to give a little bit of biographical info on the various authors (since that provides context for the quotes), I initially took the lead from the Webster's, which seems to use the nation in which the person eventually flourished (and or became a citizen of). Thus, Einstein was American. Later, I found that a number of places gave a mixed heritage -- birthplace and flourish-place. So Einstein would become a German-American. I've made some changes based on that practice, but I'm not yet consistent.

Okay, one other possible stumbling block. Who actually said something? This can take a number of forms:

• A citation says "Jones," with no other reference as to which Jones actually said it. This is relatively rare. Sometimes the name is so famous (Hawthorne, Melville), it's obvious. Other times, it's a crap shoot. A related problem is two people with the same name, but at different periods, who could have said something (the two Oliver Wendell Holmes, Senior and Junior, for example, or the two Senecas). I've made my best guess at this, but welcome any corrections.

• Did the person to whom a quotation is attributed actually say it? Or were they quoting somebody else? The more general the aphorism, the more people who may have said it (the record that I've found is five distinct names attributed to a particular quotation). Did they all say it? Were they quoting a common source, or coming up with a similar idea independently?

  And, of course, there are problems with possible misspellings of attributions. I have a citation for a quote that says it was made by Fred Jonson. Nobody by that name in Webster's, but there's a Fred Johnson in there. Was the attribution a typo? Do I look like an idiot for changing the citation, or look like an idiot for leaving it as is?

When it comes to names, the other issue is how much of the name to put in. If someone has many given names (Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill), should it be cited as such? If someone is usually known by the first initials (H. L. Mencken), should I spell out those names? If someone is commonly known by their middle name (John Calvin Cooledge), is there value in giving the first name? I've made a number of choices here, trying to reach a balance between accuracy and still having the person be recognizable. Your mileage may vary. Mine certainly does each time I go through this exercise.

Given that I don't have a wide array of biographical tools to exhaustively research every individual, and that I've grabbed the quotes where I can, sometimes the name listings are a little slim, missing dates, even first names. If you know who is being referred to there, please write me and let me know. (I would say, conservatively, that it takes me as much time to research and update my author biographies as it takes me to gather the quotes in the first place.)

One place I've found to search for biography is (surprise!) on the Net. It's by no means a sure thing, and the tendency of quotations (complete with errors and misattributions) to be passed around the Web like monks passing along typos from copy to copy is certainly a barrier to good scholarship.

I'd say that WIST is one of the better-researched sites, but I acknowledge that the level of confidence in attributions should be placed somewhere around a high school senior paper.

That having been said, a few particularly good places on the Web to research:

• The Dead People Server (it has live people, too)
• The Biographical Dictionary Search Page
• Biography Find
• The Internet Movie Database (good for movie and TV personalities; also a good source itself for quotations)
• The McCain Library Online Catalog (library catalogs often include author born-died dates, as well as dates for the works themselves.)

Or, of course, you can just do a Google search for the name (searching both "Firstname Lastname" and "Lastname, Firstname" often gives different results). That's what I did this most recent pass for all the names I couldn't find otherwise.

Sometimes, when not able to find anything about "Reginald Knickerbocker," I've found doing a Web look-up on the quotation is sometimes productive. You may find that the quite is attributed to "Reg Knickerbocker" (about whom you can further research). You may also find that the quotation is actually attributed to Hyman Fernly, which is valuable information in and of itself.

Some people can't be found, at least through the Web. Since this is not my Real Job, I don't have time to do more research than I do, but it's still a bit disconcerting when the only thing on the Web about Hyman Fernly is that he uttered a particular sentence. It does make one wonder.

In June 2001 I started running a free "quote a day" e-mail list. In April 2002, I changed from Topica (great service, excellent price, ugly ads) to my own listserver.

You can subscribe to it by going here.

Since I have some space to kill here, I'll answer one of my most frequently asked questions (thus demonstrating that nobody asks me any questions), "So how do you put your daily WIST together?"

Well, around 5:30 p.m. or so, every day, I get a reminder up on my computer screen. "Have you sent your WIST today?" If I didn't get this sort of warning, it would never happen. Read from that what you will.

I open up a blank e-mail. I put in the address I have for posting mail to my list.

I go into the body, and click on my "signature" button. This pulls in a random sig line from my copy of Siggy (see "Software" for more information).

Unless it's something completely wrong for the day, I then glean a one or two word subject, put it in the subject line, and click Send. And away it goes.

My host's MailMan magic mailing system does the rest of the work, appending in all the other stuff that fills each post.

I occasionally do a "theme" week, but by and large, it's all randomly selected for your WISTing pleasure.

And now you know. And, as GI Joe would say, knowing is half the battle.

UPDATE: (17-Jul-07) I've disabled the mail link above because the new setup doesn't support an automated process, and I'm not going to continue the WIST-by-mail unless that's working (or is trivial to do).

Here are some other fine resources, web rings, and the like you might want to consider in looking for quotations.

I'm a member of:

I'm also a part of the following WebRing sites:

Quotes [ Join Now | Ring Hub | Random | << Prev | Next >> ]   Quotes Are Our Friends! [ Join Now | Ring Hub | Random | << Prev | Next >> ] Famous Quotes Webring [ Join Now | Ring Hub | Random | << Prev | Next >> ] Inspirational Quotes [ Join Now | Ring Hub | Random | << Prev | Next >> ] The Galaxy Of Quotes [ Join Now | Ring Hub | Random | << Prev | Next >> ] Quotes 'R Us [ Join Now | Ring Hub | Random | << Prev | Next >> ]

And let us not forget:

Because those who forget the past should have written it down:

• December 1988: WIST is born as a hardcopy Word document, to be distributed as a Christmas gift to friends.
• June 1999:WIST goes on-line with about 1,600 quotations.
• November 2000: WIST is "upgraded" to FrontPage, with about 3,600 quotations.
• June 2001: The free WIST-a-Day list begins on Topica.
• February 2002: WIST gets its own domain! Minor formatting changes. New edition has about 4,300 quotations.
• April 2002: The free WIST-a-Day list moves onto the Hill-Kleerup.org server.
• June 2003: WIST is moved onto a Movable Type platform.
• August 2003: WIST on MT is made "live" on the wist.info site.
• July 2007: WIST v2 is launched, completely reorganized to use MT on a per-entry basis.

(Last updated 25-Jul-07)

WIST is organized by author, alphabetically (I'd love to be even more elaborate, but that must wait for a future revision). The letter links in the sidebar will take you to the page of those authors with names beginning in that letter. You can also search for authors (or quotation text, or sources) in the Search box.

(The section of links under that goes to various other informational parts of the WIST site. The Sources section includes information on how I alphabetized some names.)

Where items are cited to Anonymous or where ordering them by author name makes no sense (because it's a one-off quote by an obscure individual), I've put them under the "~Misc" category. I've also included sig lines in that category where:

• It's a quip, a bon mot, something that would fit on a bumper sticker or a button.
• Who said it is utterly unknown, or else who said it is so well known that to cite it adds no value and detracts from the quippiness.
• Where I felt like it.

I've been collecting quotes, aphorisms, maxims, and sig lines since junior high (which is more years ago than I care to relate). I read books of quotations. I dog-ear pages in books I'm reading so that I can come back later and copy particularly good bits out. And, more recently, I quickly jot quotes I see down in my Palm so I can have a record of them.

When I first put together a quotations collection (a hard-copy effort, given as a Christmas gift to people who didn't mind something that was cheap if it had the personal touch), I called the collection "WIST" for "Wish I'd Said That."

That name is important because it's not altogether true. This is not just a collection of quotations whose sentiments I agree with. In some cases there are ideas that I disagree with, firmly; in those cases, though, I've included the quote either because I admire the turn of phrase or else I thought it was so absurd, it made me smile just to read it.

But me repeat that in big, bold lettering, so that people don't miss it:

In other words, don't e-mail me a complaint just because I quoted someone saying something you object to.

Now, the fact is, I do agree with most of what I quote here. Hopefully it will become pretty obvious when I don't (or, again, when it isn't a matter of agreement, but just enjoying a particular expression of thought). And, of course, there are some quotations where I agree with them sometimes, disagree with others.

So if I don't always wish I'd said something, why not change the name? Tradition, I suppose, plus it's a handy catch phrase.

I'm experimenting with how to make WIST work, with minimum fuss and maximum ease of updating, in MT. So far, so good.

One potential problem is that I want to have different ways of presenting entries -- the alphabetical quotation pages very stripped down, but things like these News entries with the full date info and so forth. Haven't figured that one out yet.