Blackbird Founders Archive | Progress Log

announcements to start; reports of material changes to follow

Reporting in on Wednesday after work last week and the past few days.

I am up to v10n2. I also added a missing Afterword section in v9n2.

I’m now intersecting with issues that K worked on from the other direction. I’m also still making changes that I had not directed K. to make as I am now more in tune with many more bits and bobs that need updating.

That said, I realized as of this issue that a search and replace I was doing to replace the code for the open current issue button (which had pointed all the way to an index file) was too granular, of course, to find any other uses of the URL with the historically VCU-required www prefix. I’m going to mend that for v9n2, but then will need to look again in previous issues on a second passthrough later.

Sidebar: I was in a conversation with someone some years ago now who disputed that there was ever a requirement for the www in VCU URLS. I can assure there was, I told him. It was the subject of complaint in many meetings in the mid nineties and after. One school, as I recall, put up a billboard with their URL on it lacking the www and it didn’t not work. That was a dust up. I even specifically remember a specific employee named Vernon, whose office was somewhere downtown in the sub-basement of a building there, explaining, deadpan, and slowly, why this couldn’t be changed.

I tell this because it speak to how common it is, if you have been working for somewhere for a couple decades plus, just how short institutional memory is, and how quickly people who were not witness to that past confidently proclaim that someone speaking to a fact of history is simply wrong.

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