Well, it seems like it may not be a complete waste of time writing about software that isn’t available yet, because I’m finally starting to get a few hits from search engine queries. After being invisible for so long it’s strangely gratifying to get any such visits.

Some of my very first search phrases:

"html image background dont move" – an interesting one, I thought pretty amazing since they’re fairly generic words, but then I noticed the missing apostrophe in dont, and realized that I make that mistake all the time.

"analysing donny darko" – again, surprising, but then it was pointed out to me that it donny should be spelt donnie

"open binary file text editor" – Very pleased with this one! Generic terminolgy and very relevant. Except for the word open. Which probably means Open Source. Ouch!

"text editor utf8" – Lovely! Just perfect! [it's a pity that my editor isn't actually available yet...]

"chm editor" - Very relevant to HTML Editor [see previous lament]

It’s exactly this sort of stuff I need to see in order to get the motivation thing happening again.

Pragma

Just fixing up eLibrary with its new List Control and noticing what a hideous hodge podge the file parsing was. Basically I was trying to keep the program itself general, so the specifics about how to parse Gutenberg index files were being stored in hideous Regular Expressions.

When programming it is easy to get into the habit of trying to generalise everything, and in this case, I was trying to write a general case free etext download manager. In hindsight this generalization was a waste of time because a) Gutenberg index files have so many inconsistencies in their formatting that a regexp just aint going to cut it and b) I have not found anywhere besides Gutenberg to download these text from anyway. So now I am hard-coding the system, to speed it up and get some glitches out. Then it will be sexy and good, and I’ll put it back online again, and everyone can use it!