A Test Page

No, pages don't help. Not very much, anyway. They don't allow you to twiddle with the url.

Here's what the novel title page/index URL, if I use it, looks like:

http://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_11.html

:-(

Random meditation:

I guess, if I want to really publish a novel the right way on the internet, I'll have to set up my own server. Since I can't afford a firehose to the house, it'll have to be a rental server somewhere. But rental servers have all sorts of limits, and probably won't allow me to use my own server software (ergo, my own replacement for apache/nginx/lighttpd/whatever) and my own interface language (php? hah.)

Ruby/rails, maybe, or perl+whatever, but if I'm going to go to all that work, I'm likely to go all out and experiment with gforth, instead, since I don't have time to fix my bif-c -- that is, rebuild it from scratch. Too much I want to do, and not enough money to support my family while I do it.

And all I want to do is have a relatively short URL that says the title of the novel point to the title/index page, and let the blog functionality here inform anyone who is interested that there is a new chapter up.

Google+ sort of does that for me.

What, the cost of a meaningful URL?

Heh. When I was a young engineer, a URL was a line in a file of permanent definitions. I tended to think of it in terms of pennies, although my managers would think of it in terms of dollars or tens of dollars. One minute of time at 2,000 yen an hour is 33 yen, and it invariably cost three minutes to open up the file, type the URL in, save the file, and record the change in the appropriate logs.

Nowadays, the URL exists in an market ecology (built, and polluted, to a large extent by Microsoft, geaugharggghh!!), and the explicit management costs far exceed the functional costs. It's no longer a matter of one engineer's hands on the keyboard of one server. Which is, really, why I want to manage the thing myself, otherwise, I have to limit what I do with those URLs or do it Google's way (since Google owns blogspot).

(And, while I go hang out the laundry to give my wife a break, this all sublimates into a rant about how support is not inherently female and functionality is not inherently male, and fame is not a third gender, and ...)

Stupid economic realities!