Quotations about:
    ~admin

Executive Summary: I’m changing the Social Media platforms I repost to in order to provide better service to the people who use them. If you access WIST via Mastodon or Diaspora*, this has an effect on your. If you don’t, it doesn’t.

The rest is technical insider baseball. Please feel free to skip.

In addition to this core WordPress site for WIST, I’ve been running a re-posting site on Mastodon since late 2022, set up during an early wave of Twitter exfiltration. It’s been fun and modestly successful (219 followers at the moment).

I’ve also been running a re-posting site for WIST on Diaspora*, ever since Google Plus went away. Not quite as many people there, but some nice engagement.

Well, the Diaspora* pod I’ve been on is retiring, which made me look for a replacement that would be accessible to both my Diaspora* crew and to the broader population of the Fediverse through the ActivityPub protocol, such as what Mastodon uses. I have finally settled on Friendica, which lets me communicate to ActivityPub and Diaspora* both.

In fact, it’s a better tool for interacting with the ActivityPub Fediverse than Mastodon is, as it lets gives me (theoretically) unlimited space for posts (unlike the 500 characters on my Masto server) as well as rich text (bolding, italics, etc.) which can be published across ActivityPub, even show on systems that don’t allow it for native posts (like Mastodon).

So with this change, I’ll be retiring both my Mastodon and Diaspora* sites in sort order. If you want to keep track of WIST (both new quotes and updated ones) in the Fediverse, you can look for @wist@my-place.social from a Fediverse application, or click on the Fediverse icon on the right-hand sidebar.

(As an historic note, I have 44 contacts at my Diaspora* pod, and 221 followers on Mastodon; let’s see how many of them come over to the new setup.)

If you have any problems, please leave a comment on this post.

Sidebar: While I’m yammering about that, just an added note that I am aware of the performance problems here on the wist.info site (all to aware of them, and struggling with them most days myself). This has been a problem since I was migrated to a new hosting company. I continue to work on resolving the time-outs and HTTP 500 errors, but I don’t have, unfortunately, any short-term answers beyond “try again” if you run into those problems.

My website host has shifted me to a new server which seems to be less well provisioned configured quite a bit differently than the one I was previously on, meaning that access to the site was very slow (if not actually timing out) over the weekend. I think I’ve gotten things battered into sufficient shape that I can actually post things (and have them readable), so, yay!

Since April, my RSS feeds (and, thus, my WIST-by-email stuff) has been kind of wonky. I do some non-standard things with WordPress to structure my quotations database, and each time I do an upgrade in the software I have go change the RSS feeds programming to output the right things in the right places (for the normal online blog, the theme takes care of that).

Well, in April, despite my best efforts and my being willing to swear up and down that I was, in fact, updating those RSS PHP files, the RSS feeds (and emails) were stubbornly remaining their default values — which meant that you couldn’t actually tell who was saying the things I was quoting, without drilling down to the underlying blog entry.

I took advantage of my family giving me some free time for Fathers Day to look at it again, and, lo! my assumptions about what PHP files were being updated in which domain turned out to be completely wrong. It’s almost as if Dante was trying to whisper in my ear yesterday.

Long story short (too late), I have now, it appears, fixed this problem. RSS feeds should look correct. Quotes by email should look correct. All’s right with the world. At least until my next WP upgrade.

And if none of the above makes any sense to you, that’s fine. If you are interested in the email or RSS feeds for this site, you can get more information here.

Apologies to those getting WIST via email or RSS. With the most recent upgrade on 17 April to WordPress 6.5.2, my RSS feed (which drives the follow.it email subscriptions) has defaulted to a “normal” feed, which loses the author information and other formatting. Unlike other instances of this (needing to replace the RSS feed modules with my customized version), it’s unclear why this is happening (the customized versions are still there). I’ll need to dig more deeply into this in my copious free time, unfortunately.

If you see a quote that seems interesting, and you want to know more (see more, see who said it, etc.) you can always click on the “title” to see the underlying WIST entry.

I’ll continue to work on this, but, yes, I’m aware it’s happening.

This is a Test. This is only a Test.

Today the WIST.info site hit 20,000 quotations, all individually curated over the last (mumblety-mumble) years (and, in many instances, re-worked, re-researched, re-fleshed-out, etc.). It appears this quote from Thomas Jefferson turned the odometer.

Here’s to the next 20K!

Time for another “State of the WIST” post.  I last ran this report in December 2021, so this is more of a 3-quarter update than annual.

I’ve been pretty consistent about getting new quotes loaded in over the past year — my goal is  5-6 quotes posted per weekday. A gradually increasing number of quotes in my backlog turn out to be ones that I already have in the system, in which case, if I end up making substantive improvements (finding the sourcing, adding notes, expanding alternate translations), I count that upgrade as a “new” quote in my head for purposes doing my quotational duty (even if it doesn’t actually add to the “count,” doesn’t show up on the front page, and doesn’t go into my RSS feed).

What’s happened over here since last time?

Some changes that took place on the WordPress site the past year:

• Did a sweep through of some authors whose citations were all sorts of whacky-inconsistent. This often uncovered duplicates, which I cleaned out (more on that below).
• The tool I used to automatically mirror posts on this site (both new and upgraded) to my Diaspora* site has stopped working, so for the time being I am doing that manually (it adds a couple of minutes to each post).
• Feedburner finally shut down.
• Took concrete steps toward getting the theme updated to be responsive to different sized screens (more below).

Doing the Numbers

Let’s look at the numbers:

So continued progress, despite some housecleaning.

Broken out into a graph (and normalizing the time frame):

Limited Return to Office time does help keep those numbers up.

Note that, as always, all of these quotations are personally curated to some degree or another — digging out citations and online links when possible, finding author photos, etc. No mass uploads for me.

I currently stand at 685 quotes flagged as meme/visual quotations. That number’s gone up a bit since last year, though slowly; I generate one of these every few weeks.

Top Authors

Of the authors I have, who are the most quoted in WIST?

As the numbers get higher, it’s harder folk to do more than shuffle around, esp. barring I find any massive new source of quotations. Nobody was added this year to the list, or dropped, just adjusted in rank — Jefferson and Lewis swapped position, as they had in the 12/2021 list.

The actual quote count for Emerson, Shakespeare, and Shaw actually went down, as I did a clean-up of duplicates I had of them.

This table is more for curiosity’s sake than any real meaning, showing not just how prolific these folk are, but how interested I am in recording things these individuals said.

The Top Ten Author list is shown “live” in the sidebar (“Prolific Authors“).

Top Quotations

Here are the Top 10 Most Visited Quotations Ever (with how they’ve changed since last December 2021). I find these interesting, since it’s not driven anything I do, but page hits by visitors:

1. – (10,505, was 9,374) John Kenneth Galbraith, “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National Policy Committee on Pockets of Poverty (13 Dec 1963)
2. – (6,743, was 6,464) Aeschylus, Agamemnon, ll. 175-183 [tr. Johnston (2007)]
3. – (6,288, was 6,177) Robert Frost, “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942)
4. – (5,716, was 5,476) Bertand Russell, “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933)
5. – (4,972, was 4,938) John Steinbeck, Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962)
6. ↑ (4,910, was 4,512) Fran Lebowitz, “Tips for Teens,” Social Studies (1981)
7. ↑ (4,678, was 4,008) Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter to Clara Rilke (1 Jan 1907)
8. ↓ (4,649 was 4,590) William Hazlitt, “On The Conduct of Life” (1822)
9. ♥ (4,407, new on list) Plato, Republic, Book 1, 347c 
10. – (4,346, was 3,947) Isaac Asimov, “A Cult of Ignorance,” Newsweek (21 Jan 1980)

Some actual movement here, with the Lebowitz and Rilke quotes that entered the Top 10 last time rising in the standings, at the expense of pushing Hazlitt down and sadly losing a long-standing and fine James Baldwin quote.

Over 2022 to date, the Top 10 viewed quotes were, according to Google Analytics:

1. ↑ 933 views – Plato — Republic, Book 1, 347c
2. – 857 views – Galbraith, John Kenneth  — “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National Policy Committee on Pockets of Poverty (13 Dec 1963)
3. ↑ 700 views – Aristotle — (Attributed)
4. ♥ 676 views – Homer — The Odyssey [Ὀδύσσεια], Book 6, l. 180ff (6.180) [Odysseus to Nausicaa] (c. 700 BC) [tr. Rieu (1946)]
5. ↑ 645 views – Sa’adi — Poem on Humanity
6. ↓ 589 views – Rilke, Rainer Maria —  Letter to Clara Rilke (1 Jan 1907)
7. ↑ 495 views – Franz Kafka — Letter to Oskar Pollak (27 Jan 1904)
8. ♥ 388 views – Aristotle — Nicomachean Ethics [Ἠθικὰ Νικομάχεια] (c. 325 BC) (paraphrase)
9. ↓ 347 views – Lamb, Charles —  “The Two Races of Men,” Essays of Elia (1823)
10. ↓ 346 views – Fran Lebowitz, “Tips for Teens,” Social Studies (1981)

Dropping from the list were a Voltaire, and one of the few “Other” quotes to previously rank this high (it came out at #11 for the period).

Several, but by no means all, of the above have a graphic image / meme associated with them on their page, and many are the overall Top 10 list. But a few are new to the list this year; the Homer (which was added this year) and the second Aristotle (which I did updates on).

Who Are You People?

As Google Analytics gets more complex, figuring out old simplistic stats becomes a bit more difficult. As far as I can tell, though compared to the end of 2021, I am getting 128 visitors / day (vs 127) and 168 pages visited / day (vs 151). So traffic is fairly stable, despite mobile data downchecks from Google (see below).

Over in social media, I’m posting to Twitter  (143 followers, up from 134). I have 69 contacts on my Diaspora* mirror (up from 50), and I actually get some good engagement over there with likes and discussion.

Those numbers aren’t huge, by any means — but this is a labor of love, and it’s nice to see that some folk are finding it of use and/or interest.

Gender (identified in 32% of visitors), splits 51-49 female-male. For age (identified in 30% of visitors), the 18-24 visitors are 28% (college papers, I assume), 25-34 cohort is 20%, 35-44 is 17%, 45-54 is 14%, 55-64 and 65+ cohorts are about 10%.

Not surprisingly, for language the vast majority (82%) of visitors to WIST.info are flagged as one flavor or another of English-speaker, with the US (65%) and UK (13%) topping the list (about where they were last December). From a national representation (where users were so identified), 53% were from the US, 7% from the UK, 5% from India, another 5% from Canada, and 2% from Australia.

Browser-wise, Chrome retains the lead at 55%, with Safari at 27%, Edge and Firefox just about 5% each. That’s interesting to cross-reference with OS, where Windows is 33% of the users, iOS and Mac each another 20%, and Android at 19%. The iOS and Android numbers are interesting, given my site’s “unfriendliness” to mobile users (see below). None of those numbers have changed substantially since 2021.

The Year Ahead

The biggest plan I have for WIST in the next few months is that I’ve hired someone to put in a responsive theme. Google is consistently (and not without justification) dinging my rankings because my site is “unfriendly” to mobile users (text too small, links too close together, etc.).  A responsive theme will adjust the display automatically for different sized screens (PC vs mobile, for example).

The complexity here is that I have highly customized my post display (post titles as citation titles, e.g.), which means it can’t just be done out of the box, and, honestly, it exceeds my own limited programming ability. So I’m going to be hiring someone from outside to make it happen. I have a project requirements document prepared, I’ve had one failed attempt on UpWork … let’s see if I can get it done.

Other goals?

• Continue backfilling tags as I come across quotes that have captured my eye again. Maybe do some tag cleanup (there are some that are redundant — plural vs singular) and others where I’ve inadvertently concatenated terms).
• Continue making some author sweeps to normalize how some works are organized.
• Continue work on parallel translations of foreign works.

And that’s the end of the Q3 report for 2022. See you next time I get an urge to do this!

WIST will be on vacation until May 31.

By happenstance, spotted the quotation counter in the right-hand margin today. As someone who’s curated (and often typed in) every single one of those 19,000 quotes, I’m kinda proud of the milestone.

(For the picky: that’s almost certainly not the right number: it includes a number of drafts, as well as admin posts like this one. But it’s close enough. 😁)

I just learned that Google is sunsetting its Feedburner email setup in July, which is what I use here to send out daily email collections of the quotations here. At present, about three dozen people are using this service for WIST.

I’ve removed the link for that mode of subscribing, and I’ll be looking at alternatives to provide that service, and will let you know what that looks like. In the meantime …

1. If you don’t want the email feed any more, please unsubscribe via the links that Feedburner sends. My intent is to transfer the email addresses of subscribers over to whatever new, different thing I do.
2. Check out the feeds/subscription page for WIST, which will show you alternate ways to get your WIST updates.
   1. Using an RSS reader, Twitter, or my Diaspora mirror (currently down due to a data center issue, but returning Real Soon Now) are all ways to get notifications.
   2. There are a number of services that will do a daily email from an RSS feed. (That’s essentially what Feedburner is doing.) One of my alternatives may just be to provide other recommendations for that, but if you have a favorite, this would be a fine time to switch over (but do let me know what your recommendation is).

One issue I have is that, while there are plugins that will allow email subscriptions pretty easily, they tend not to do so as a digest, but as different emails for each post. That might be annoying to folks. At the same time, I’d just as soon not work with a mail service like MailChimp to set up something elaborate.

Leave any questions or comments in the comments. I’ll be communicating further with you on this before I make any changes.

Time for another “State of the WIST” post.  I last ran this report in April 2017. In the intervening time there were some long periods when I was not getting much posted, though that’s largely recovered this past year or so. I try to get 5-6 quotes posted per weekday; I’m no longer posting daily images, but when a quote seems fitting for one, I’ll do it.

What’s happened over here since last time?

Some changes that took place on the WordPress site the past few years:

• • Upgraded to the most recent versions of WordPress. Which turned out to be easier than expected (and a good excuse to get rid of some plugins I no longer need).
  • Turned on secure connections (https: access). Not that there’s anything here that needs that, but site that don’t get little nasty messages on the browser, so I did.
  • Lost (and haven’t yet found a good way to fix) a mobile theme that works well. WIST is still usable on phones, but, as Google is always reminding me, it’s not “optimized” for that.
  • I added a Random Quote button.

• My mirroring to Google+  has gone away with that site, and I no longer mirror to Facebook — but I am mirroring to a *Diaspora site (automatically), as well as my Twitter feed.

Doing the Numbers

Let’s look at the numbers:

So continued progress.

Broken out into a graph (and normalizing the time frame):

There’s a slight decrease in slope over the past few years, but it’s nearly unnoticeable.

Note that, as always, all of these quotations are curated to some degree or another — digging out citations when possible, finding author photos, etc. No mass uploads for me.

Top Authors

Of the authors I have, who are the most quoted in WIST?

As the numbers get higher, it’s harder folk to do more than shuffle around, esp. barring I find any massive new source of quotations. While everyone’s overall numbers went up, that’s esp. more true for folk toward the top — Emerson added 41 since last time, Shakespeare 20, etc. (Lewis actually went down slightly, as I deleted some duplicate quotes I’d entered.)

Martin Luther King, Jr., is back on the board again, displacing Eric Hoffer from the Top 10.

This stat is more for curiosity’s sake than any real meaning, showing not just how prolific these folk are, but how interested I am in recording things they wanted to say.

The Top Ten Author list is shown “live” in the sidebar (“Prolific Authors”).

Top Quotations

Here are the Top 10 Most Visited Quotations Ever (with how they’ve changed since last April 2017):

1. ↑ (7,786, was 5,019) John Kenneth Galbraith, “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National Policy Committee on Pockets of Poverty (13 Dec 1963)
2.  – (5,979, was 4,803) Aeschylus, Agamemnon, ll. 175-183 [tr. Johnston (2007)]
3. ↓ (5,926, was 5,019) Robert Frost, “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942)
4. ↑ (5,073, was 3,552) Bertand Russell, “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933)
5. ↓ (4,882, was 4,589) John Steinbeck, Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962)
6. ♥ (4,171, new) William Hazlitt, “On The Conduct of Life” (1822)
7. ↓ (3,920, was 3,360) James Baldwin, “In Search of a Majority,” Speech, Kalamazoo College (Feb 1960)
8. ↓ (3,746, was 2,960)  Molly Ivins, “Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of Guns,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram (9 Mar 1993)
9. ♥ (3,375, new) Isaac Asimov, “A Cult of Ignorance,” Newsweek (21 Jan 1980)
10. ♥ (3,322, new) Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “The Historian as Participant,” Daedalus (Spring 1971)

Some actual movement here, with three quotes entering the top 10 (losing a Thomas Campbell and a spurious Albert Einstein). I find this interesting, since it’s not driven anything I do, but page hits by visitors.

Over 2020, the Top 10 viewed quotes were, according to Google Analytics (albeit with a gap between March and September):

1. 682 views – Rilke, Rainer Maria —  Letter to Clara Rilke (1 Jan 1907)
2. 661 views – Galbraith, John Kenneth  — “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National Policy Committee on Pockets of Poverty (13 Dec 1963)
3. 482 views – Plato — Republic, Book 1, 347c
4. 440 views – Hazlitt, William — “On the Conduct of Life” (1822)
5. 393 views – Voltaire — Questions sur les miracles (1765)
6. 387 views – Lamb, Charles —  “The Two Races of Men,” Essays of Elia (1823)
7. 359 views – Sa’adi — Poem on Humanity
8. 292 views – Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. — “The Historian as Participant,” Daedalus (Spring 1971)
9. 283 views – Asimov, Isaac — “A Cult of Ignorance,” Newsweek (21 Jan 1980)
10. 275 views – Aristotle — Nichomachean Ethics (c. 350 BC)

Not surprisingly, most of the above have a graphic image / meme associated with them on their page, and many are the overall Top 10 list. Only a few, though, were on the same year list in April 2017.

Who Are You People?

The gap in Google Analytics data makes it hard to see a full snapshot, but looking at the last three months, my traffic is up from April 2017, with each day, on average, 138 visitors (vs 45), and 183 pages viewed (vs 73).

I still have 25 people who get a daily email (via FeedBurner) of WIST content

Over in social media, I’m posting to Twitter  (132 followers, up from 127). As noted above, Google+ has gone away, and I’ve dropped Facebook. I have 33 contacts on my *Diaspora mirror.

I’m skipping over my Tumblr and Pinterest numbers, give that I have not been manually mirroring to those sites in a while.

Those numbers aren’t huge, by any means — but this is a labor of love, and it’s nice to see that some folk are finding it of use and/or interest.

Gender (identified in 40% of visitors), splits 54-46 female-male. For age (idenfied in 31% of visitors), the 18-24 and 25-34 cohorts are each around 25% of visitors. the 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, and 65+ cohorts all hover around 12-13% each.

Not surprisingly, the vast majority (87%) of visitors to WIST.info are flagged as one flavor or another of English-speaker.  Nationally, 56% are from the US, another 8% from the UK, with India, Canada, and Australia rounding off the Top 5 (at 6, 5, and 3%).

57% of visits here over the last year used Chrome (up), 29% Safari (up), 5% Firefox (down), 4% Edge (up), 2% IE (down). 34% were Windows users (down), 24% Mac (up), 20% iOS (up), and 17% Android (up). Those last two numbers are interesting, given the “unfriendly” nature of the site for mobile users.

The Year Ahead

I don’t currently have any major plans on WIST for the coming year, but some things i do have in mind:

• Continue backfilling tags as I come across quotes that have captured my eye again. Maybe do some tag cleanup.
• Do another “are they dead yet?” sweep of the authors.
• Figure out how to better support mobile access. The way I customize the display makes finding a usable (customizable) theme difficult.

And that’s the end of the not-very-annual report for 2020. See you next year!

No quotations added to WIST today, but I have gathered up a couple of WIST quotation collections over on my regular blog:

• Quotations on an Election Day
• Quotations about the Presidency (WARNING: my political opinions may be expressed in the margins)

I have added a new button at the top of the sidebar, letting you pull up a random quotation from the bowels of WIST. Give it a try!

A helpful correspondent (waves at Mardy) noted that the Feedburner emails were not including any citations as to who actually said the quotation in question. This appears to have been the case since 5 May, when I last updated WordPress for WIST; the RSS files are customized due to my non-standard way of using the data elements in WP for this blog (e.g., using the title for citation, using the category for author information, etc.). Long story short, when I update WordPress, I have to manually restore those custom files, and I didn’t, thus losing the “who” part of the quotations in RSS feeds, including the one that generates the Feedburner emails.

This appears to be now working properly, so future emails should go out correctly. Sorry for the snafu.

I have finally bitten the bullet and upgraded WIST to version 5.x of WordPress. The immediate impetus was the need to update the mobile version of the page, as JetPack is dropping their mobile theme and the existing theme doesn’t provide adaptable design for smaller screens. Updating the theme really means first updating the underlying platform.

(I’ve actually already turned off the JetPack version, so if you access WIST from a mobile device, you’ll simply be looking at a smaller version of the web page.)

The theme update may be a while in coming, as it requires a lot more modification for the data field customization I’ve done here. But at least the WP engine is up to current standards and, thus, security.

If anything on the site seems to be operating oddly, please let me know at dave@wist.info. Thanks!

Time for another year’s “State of the WIST” post.  I last ran this report a year ago.

What’s happened over the last year?

Some changes that took place on the WordPress site this year:

• I cleaned up the page design a bit — nothing radical, just some color and typography improvements.
• Mobile phone access (that’s actually readable on a mobile phone)! Woot!
• Behind the scenes, I’ve made some performance improvements (fixing some stuff that was dragging performance waaaaay down, but also putting some better technology in place).
• I’m continuing to post one “graphic” / meme quotation each time I do my five. I’ve had to change from PixTeller, though (who changed their underlying system to suddenly become much less usable) to Canva.

Doing the Numbers

Let’s look at the numbers:

So continued progress. Generally speaking I post five quotes a day, every weekday — though, to be honest, that number was a lot spottier starting mid-2016 (due to new employment, then some more unemployment).

Broken out into a graph (and normalizing the time frame):

Note that, as always, all of these are curated to some degree or another — digging out citations when possible, finding author photos, etc. No mass uploads for me.

Top Authors

Of the authors I have, who are the most quoted in WIST?

I had nobody new on the Top 10 Quoted Authors list this year, just some shuffling around within the stats, with Emerson rising to the top when I came upon a new trove of his quotations (the man was prolific, between his lectures and his journals). Runners-up (Bertand Russell, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Thomas Fuller, Abe Lincoln, Martin Luther King) are all within spitting distance of getting on the list if I run across a good source of unused quotes for them.

The Top Ten Author list is shown “live” in the sidebar (“Prolific Authors”).

Top Quotations

Here are the Top 10 Most Visited Quotations (with how they’ve changed since last year):

1. ↑ (5,019, from 4,459) Robert Frost, “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942)
2. ↓ (4,803, from 4,587) Aeschylus, Agamemnon, l. 179
3. — (4,589, from 4,120) John Steinbeck, Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962)
4. ↑ (3,688, from 2,635) John Kenneth Galbraith, “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National Policy Committee on Pockets of Poverty (13 Dec 1963)
5. ↑ (3,552, from 2,696) Bertand Russell, “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933)
6. ↓ (3,350, from 2,915) James Baldwin, “In Search of a Majority,” Speech, Kalamazoo College (Feb 1960) –
7. ↑ (2,960, from 2,391) Molly Ivins, “Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of Guns,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram (9 Mar 1993)
8. ↓ (2,797, from 2,631) Thomas Campbell, “Hallowed Ground” (1825)
9. — (1,815, from 1,660) Albert Einstein, (Spurious / Synthetic)

Nothing new on the list, just jockeying for position. That’s not surprising, since the numbers have gotten so big and have been tracked for so long.

Over the last year, the Top 10 viewed quotes were, according to Google Analytics:

1. 803 views – John Kenneth Galbraith,  “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National Policy Committee on Pockets of Poverty (13 Dec 1963)
2. 587 views – Isaac Asimov, “A Cult of Ignorance,” Newsweek (21 Jan 1980)
3. 566 views – Bertrand Russell, “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933)
4. 375 views – Albert Einstein, “My Credo,” speech, German League of Human Rights, Berlin (Autumn 1932)
5. 374 views – T. S. Eliot, Preface to Transit of Venus: Poems by Harry Crosby (1931)
6. 358 views – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “The Path of Law,” 10 Harvard Law Review 457 (1897)
7. 301 views – Robert Frost, “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942) –
8. 294 views – Molly Ivins, “Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of Guns,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram (9 Mar 1993)
9. 275 views – Theodore Roosevelt, Letter to Henry L. Sprague (26 Jan 1900) –
10. 273 views – Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Trumpet of Conscience,” Steeler Lecture (Nov 1967)

Not surprisingly, a number of the new entries on the list above were quotes that have graphic images associated with them.

Who Are You People?

Google Analytics shows me my traffic was up this year, vs the last two, with each day 45 visitors (vs 32) making 50 visits (vs 37) and viewing 73 pages (vs 51).

I have another 25 (vs 19) people who get a daily email (via FeedBurner) of WIST content

Over in social media, I’m posting to Twitter (127 followers, up from 112), Facebook (31 likes overall, up from 25), and Google+ (roughly 66 followers, up from 26).

I also started posting the quotations with graphics on on Tumblr (1 whole person following!) and Pinterest (10 people following!).

Those numbers aren’t huge, by any means — but this is a labor of love, and it’s nice to see that some folk are finding it of use and/or interest.

Age-wise, for the blog the biggest cohorts are 18-24 and 25-34 (24% and 22% respectively); the other cohorts are about 10-15% each. In gender, 57% of the visitors are female.

85% of visits are by English-speakers; no other cohort gets above 1.25%. Nationally, 57% are from the US, another 8% from the UK, with India, Canada, and Australia rounding off the Top 5.

51% of visits here over the last year used Chrome (up), 23% Safari, 11% Firefox, 7% IE, 3% Edge. 48% were Windows users (down), 21% Mac, 15% iOS, and 13% Android.

The Year Ahead

I don’t currently have any major plans on WIST for the coming year, but some things i do have in mind:

• Continue backfilling tags as I come across quotes that have captured my eye again. Maybe do some tag cleanup.
• Doing another swing through the authors to give pictures to all who have at least 3 quotes.
• Do another “are they dead yet?” sweep of the authors.

The biggest question mark I have is how changing to being employed again (whenever that happens, soon I trust) will change posting patterns again. We’ll see.

And that’s the end of the annual report. See you next year!

I’ve not been as diligent on the whole “five quotes every weekday” thing as I’d like to be this past month. A combination of a new job (where I can’t get WIST work done during the day) and National Novel Writing Month (meaning I spend a couple of hours every night after work writing fiction as fast as I can) has interfered a lot with WIST this month.

That said, November is almost over, and December couldn’t possibly have any other conflicts on my time, right? Right?

Regular quotation publishing will resume shortly.

I’ve activated (and tweaked) the WordPress JetPack mobile theme for WIST, so that people on smaller mobile devices don’t get eyes strain trying to visit the place. If you visit on a mobile phone or any device below a certain resolution, you will get a streamlined version of WIST which should be much easier to read. If you want to shift back to the original, there’s a link at the bottom that says “View Full Site” that will take you there.

I am still having a few formatting problems, particularly with the humongous “WIST” logo at the top. My apologies for that — I’ll strive to fix it as soon as I can figure out how.

Please leave comments with any problems you are having. Thanks!

As those who visit the site should notice, I’ve made some design changes here to make things look a bit more modern and tidy, and (I hope) improve readability (through some different fonts and graphic elements).

If something looks crazy on your screen, or there’s some aspect of the site design that’s causing you problems, please let me know. Thanks!

I’m away on holiday this week. I will be publishing a few pre-queued posts each day, though, with full production back to normal next week.

Time for another year’s “State of the WIST” post.  I last ran this report a year ago.

What’s happened the last year?

Some changes that took place on the WordPress site this year:

• I made visible the quotation “topics” field, etc., which I’ve been adding for 2+ years now on new quotes (and backfilling on quotes that I edit). I’ve also been adding topics to the most popular quotations in the database.
• I’ve started adding a meme / graphic to at least one quotation a day, using PixTeller. These have been pretty popular (in terms of views), though I haven’t seen any “in the wild” yet. I also have been backfilling graphics on the most viewed quotations in WIST.
• I have extended the author pictures to all of them with at least four quotes in the system; all new authors get a picture, of course, and as I add quotes any for existing authors without a picture, I add it.
• I added in a plug-in to show “possibly related quotes.” If nothing else, I’ve found it useful in spotting duplicates.

Doing the Numbers

Let’s look at the numbers:

So continued progress. Generally speaking I post five quotes a day, every weekday. Sometimes I miss a day, but rarely (being unemployed helps with such projects). I’ve also combined duplicate quotations as I’ve found them.

Broken out into a graph (and normalizing the time frame):

Note that, as always, all of these are curated to some degree or another — digging out citations when possible, finding author photos, etc. No mass uploads for me.

Top Authors

Of the authors I have, who are the most quoted in WIST?

I had nobody new on the Top 10 Quoted Authors list this year, just some shuffling around within the stats, with Shakespeare pulling ahead of Jefferson again. Runners-up (Bertand Russell, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Thomas Fuller, Abe Lincoln) are all within spitting distance of getting on there if I run across a good source of unused quotes for them.

The Top Ten Author list is shown “live” in the sidebar (“Prolific Authors”).

Top Quotations

Here are the Top 10 Most Visited Quotations (with how they’ve changed since last year):

1. – Aeschylus, Agamemnon, l. 179 (4,587, from 4,530)
2. – Robert Frost, “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942) (4,459, from 4,019)
3. – John Steinbeck, Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962) (4,120, from 3,331)
4. – James Baldwin, “In Search of a Majority,” Speech, Kalamazoo College (Feb 1960) – (2,915, from 2,550)
5. ↑ Bertand Russell, “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933) (2,696, from 2,400)
6. – Thomas Campbell, “Hallowed Ground” (1825) (2,696, from 2,430)
7. ♥ John Kenneth Galbraith, “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National Policy Committee on Pockets of Poverty (13 Dec 1963) (2,635)
8. ↓ Thomas Campbell, “Hallowed Ground” (1825) (2,631, from 2,430)
9. – Molly Ivins, “Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of Guns,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram (9 Mar 1993) (2,391, from 1,825)
10. ♥ Albert Einstein, (Spurious / Synthetic) (1,660)

Over the last year, the Top 10 viewed quotes were, according to Google Analytics:

1. John Kenneth Galbraith,  “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National Policy Committee on Pockets of Poverty (13 Dec 1963) – 735 Views
2. John Steinbeck, Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962) – 586 Views
3. Molly Ivins, “Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of Guns,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram (9 Mar 1993) – 405 Views
4. Robert Frost, “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942) – 297 Views
5. James Baldwin, “In Search of a Majority,” Speech, Kalamazoo College (Feb 1960) – 259 Views
6. T. S. Eliot, Preface to Transit of Venus: Poems by Harry Crosby (1931) – 257 Views
7. Aldous Huxley, “Sermons in Cats,” Music at Night and Other Essays (1931) – 215 Views
8. Charlotte Gilman, Suicide note (17 Aug 1935) – 204 Views
9. James Baldwin, “Faulkner and Desegregation,” Partisan Review (Fall 1956) – 185 Views
10. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “The Path of Law,” 10 Harvard Law Review 457 (1897) – 180 Views, tied with …
11. Bertrand Russell, “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933) – 180 views

Some overlap there, as you might expect, but definitely some up and comers from some more recently added quotations. 

Who Are You People?

Google Analytics shows me my traffic was flat this year — a precise match for the stats last year — with each day 32 visitors making 37 visits and viewing 51 pages. I have another 19 people who get a daily email (via FeedBurner) of WIST content. Over in social media, I’m posting to Twitter (112 followers, up from 92), Facebook (25 likes overall), and Google+ (26 followers). The social media aspect hasn’t taken off as I’d hoped, but, honestly, I’m not doing this (mostly) for the publicity. Though it would be nice. Tell your friends!

Age-wise, the biggest cohorts are 18-24 and 25-34 (a bit over 20% of the sessions each); the 55-64 cohort is at around 17%, and the other cohorts are roughly equal. In gender, 58% of the visitors are female.

87% of visits are by English-speakers; no other cohort gets above 1.2%. Nationally, 63% are from the US, another 7% from the UK, with India, Canada, and Australia rounding off the Top 5.

44% of visits here over the last year used Chrome, 20% Safari, 15% Firefox, and 14% IE. 54% were Windows users, 19% Mac, 13% iOS, and 10% Android.

The Year Ahead

I don’t currently have any major plans on WIST for the coming year, but some things i do have in mind:

• Continue backfilling tags and graphics
• Doing another swing through the authors to give pictures to all who have at least 3 quotes.
• Do another “are they dead yet?” sweep of the authors.
• I’m beginning to get an itch to redo the blog design. We’ll see.

The biggest question mark I have is how changing to being employed (whenever that happens, soon I trust) will change stuff. I may need to change to posting in the evenings, and the graphics may end up being reduced in number. We’ll see.

And that’s the end of the annual report. See you next March!

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 the US ; other countries are all below 10% each, with the UK, Canada, 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.

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.

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 lot 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.

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 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:

• It’s Google-fast. Whee!
• 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 …

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.

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 performance 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.

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 unintentional.)
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.

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” amongst 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 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).

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!

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.

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.

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.

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 continues 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 slightly 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).

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.