Clean Up Time

Well, I don't want to say my day has been wasted, but it sure didn't include much that I wanted to get done today. Having been up most of the night, I slept until early afternoon, had a long phone conversation with my best friend from college, cleared out about a hundred emails from two other screen names, started reading the blogs on my FeedBlitz backlog, and spent the rest of the day on this:




You see, Georganna Hancock of Writer's Edge posted a link to a site for the Forbidden Library, which is about banned books. There I finally found specific details about two incidents in which Madeleine L'Engle's most famous book, A Wrinkle in Time, was banned or challenged. This is extremely helpful to me, because a couple of times a year someone will email me, asking why anyone would want to ban the book, and where and when and why it's happened in the past.

It used to be that anytime someone asked that question, I would dig into old AOL email on what used to be my main screen name, and crib from the answer I gave last time. But that was two computers ago, so I can't do that anymore. It really should be on my L'Engle FAQ pages, since it certainly qualifies as a frequently asked question.

So I opened up my FAQ page in Composer, wrote about the whys and wherefores, ranted a little bit about intolerance, and added the link to Forbidden Library. Then, since my L'Engle bibliography, The Tesseract, has resided on AOL Hometown since before it was even called AOL Hometown, I thought I'd better do some work on moving the thing to www.mavarin.com. That meant changing a zillion links on nine pages - not just to my other L'Engle pages, but to other pages I've been gradually moving off AOL, and to a bunch of images.

I figure it was about eight or nine hours ago that I read about Forbidden Library on Georganna's blog. Since then I've made a brief Safeway run with John, hunted for my Sprint phone (it was in my other pants), IMed with a friend, and posted Heirs of Mâvarin, Chapter Two, Part Seven over on Messages from Mâvarin. The rest of the time, I've been wrestling with HTML on pages written a decade ago in a program that doesn't exist any more. Weird stuff happened - links were blue on a blue background, even after I changed the css and the specific link's properties. Everything was flush left, and way too wide. And when I put the sky_blue.gif in as a background to replace the dark blue, I then had to scramble to change white and yellow text to navy and black. Well, it should be more readable now.

(Darn this entry! Darn Blogger! This is the second night in a row that an entry has been cranky about displaying the accent in the word Mâvarin! If it doesn't work this time, I'm giving up for the night.)

Also, since I last did the research on the actual bibliographic info for Wrinkle and other titles in 2001, I'm undoubtedly incompete in my listings of different editions of the books. But that won't be tonight's problem.

Anyway, this is all just to say that I did get all the L'Engle pages reposted to www.mavarin.com, or in most cases to lengleweb.mavarin.com. If you're at all interested, please take a look, and let me know of any links that still lead back to AOL. Except for the Project Quantum Leap link. That's another whole huge job, which I'm also not tackling tonight. Also please let me know if you find any completely dead links or broken images.

By the way, in case you haven't noticed yet, my sidebar now has several new sections of links, mostly resources for writers, researchers, and well, me. I was going to Musings just to find links to stuff that I use all the time, and that's just silly. So now they're here, handy for everyone who reads (or writes) this blog. I did all that a day or two or three ago, but I've had too many other things to write about, so I didn't mention it until now.

And here's the bit on Frappr, the "friend mapper" site with virtual pushpins nobody could find. I did hear back from them, but the email totally missed what I was asking, and therefore didn't answer it. Still, I eventually figured it out, with a little help from Shelly. See, it used to be that you could easily add a pin to anyone's map, but that's no longer true. Maybe it's because Frappr now belongs to Yahoo. Maybe not. But the key to using it is, you now have to be a member (it's free) and be logged in to add a pin. Even then, you can only add a pin to group maps without getting permission from the map's owner first. For individual maps, you have to go through a "friending" process. Either the map owner invites you using an email widget, and you accept, or you ask to "friend" someone using a similar email widget, and the map owner approves it, or doesn't. So far I've had two strangers and two actual friends try to "friend" me. One of the strangers I said no to, because his map was essentially an advertising site. The other I said yes to. Apparently he's on (or perhaps just slightly off) the west coast of Africa. Cool!

I know that many people will opt out of using Frappr, now that it's more confusing, harder to use and wants you to be a member. But it does have some neat features now - interest groups and galleries and blogs and profiles and stuff. So you may want to check my Frappr page again, and click on a link with the word "Friend" in it. If I know who you are, I'll approve your pushpin toute de suite.

In other news, the leg was looking much better this afternoon, but that's less true tonight. I haven't had much pain today, but it's becoming clear that I've hurt my back a little bit, or else that stress is making my back act as if this is so.

What else can I tell you? Oh, I'm going to New Mexico in April, to see my godson's First Communion. That should be great!

Karen