Editor Log: February 2008

As a longtime user with a few hundred writeups I get a couple of those messages almost every day. Once I received five the same day. I like them, they make me feel appreciated, and gives me hope that perhaps it was my work that led someone to take the next step and become a noder. But the real benefit of these little messages is they often lead me back to pieces written a long, long time ago. Which leads me to re-read them. In the case of a daylog I have to re-read them because I can't remember what it was all about.

Like many people I am a very bad copy editor for things I've written recently. The words are too familiar for me to see my errors and typos. I read what's in my mind more than what's on the screen. But when I read a piece I haven't seen in perhaps a year or more they stick out like a sore thumb. So do awkward sentence constructions and other errors. So I use the moment as a opportunity to do a bit of node maintenance. Sometimes I even bring them up to date with new material. Doing maintenance when you get a "somebody liked" message is a good way to keep upgrading your writeups, but without getting overwhelmed and discouraged by the sheer numbers of an organized campaign. The writeup must have value, after all somebody liked it. Why not give it a tuneup right then and there? Over time the result will surely be a much nicer body of work.

Fixed a pervasive and annoying error in the linking navigation of the Teach Yourself Scheme autonoding whereby nodes with apostrophe quotations (e.g., 'let') were linked with backtick/apostrophe quotations (e.g., `let').

Two notes: First, this error has apparently gone unreported since 2000. Please, if you see typos in pipelinks, send a message to me or any of the other editors. Links are what keep E2 from devolving into a primordial soup of writeups. Second, if you plan on noding a serial of writeups, please take care to check that you pipelink your navigation links accurately, thereby avoiding the problem altogether.

Thanks! —eien