Early Modern Notes

Fucking hackers.

I forgot about my fourth blogiversary in June. My fourth anniversary at this location (and using WordPress) comes up at the end of July.

Some things hardly seem to have changed at all. There were presidential elections that year too. We’ll have to hope for a better result this time around.

Other things have changed a lot. So many blogs I loved in 2004 that no longer exist or are quite different now.

And there were a lot of history blogs that started up around the same time as me: happy 4th birthday to all of you who’re still plugging away!

So, is there anyone still reading who’s been here right from the beginning? (Can’t say I would blame you if you’d got bored by now…)

The webhost has migrated me to a new server. With a slow shitty new control panel that apparently can’t cope with the concept of having the same user name for more than one database. And no phpMyAdmin. (Found it.)

Plus, I can’t currently download emails – and there’s nothing in the announcements to suggest why there would be a problem there. Not that they’ve had the courtesy to email me to tell me they’d started or completed the migration; all I had was an email last week that said it would be taking place ‘over the next few weeks’. [Worked it out. Had to change a + to @ in the account username settings. Like I say, some warning would have been nice.]

Looks like I’ll be needing to look up the suggestions you all gave me last month for new hosts. This control panel is going to drive me nuts.

If there is anything odd about the appearance of the blog today, please refresh the screen. (I tweaked the style sheet slightly at the weekend.)

Now back to our normal programmes…

I’ve been with my current web host for about three years now and have generally been satisfied. But there seem to have been a lot of outages recently – including this evening – which is the kind of annoyance that gets you wondering if it might be time to move…

Sorry for any inconvenience, dear readers.

(Also annoying: the host has recently removed SpamAssassin from the email facilities, without any warning. Its absence has rather exposed the limitations of Thunderbird’s junk filters when you get several hundred junk emails a week.)

Anyone got any recommendations for hosting services? I need plenty of SQL databases (some cheap hosting services are distinctly stingy on that one), but apart from that my wants are really quite simple: reliable and not too expensive. Not that I fancy the hassle of moving unless I have to.

Now let’s see if the server’s still up and I can post this, eh? [Answer: yes... but veeeeery slooooowly.... Oh dear.]

Well, for one thing, I promise not to join in the raving just because England beat France by being the slightly less awful team on the night. This does not make them heroes, and although some of them are ugly enough to warrant the label of bulldogs, that comes with the territory. But what bugs me more is the idea that they are ‘underdogs’, just because they’ve spent most of the last four years being rubbish. Teams with the resources and support England have at their disposal are not underdogs. Argentina are underdogs. England are just under-achievers. (Better than being chokers, though, some might say.)

[Update after watching the South Africa/Argentina game: Goddam, the ITV commentary was hilarious tonight. One of them (Will Greenwood, apparently) just could not stop himself from breaking off in the middle of his commentary on the game being played to talk about the England game ('Good pass... and what about that move by Jason Robinson last night then? And JONNY JONNY JONNY!!!') and gloating about the exits of the All Blacks and Aussies, while the other kept trying to lead him back to the matter in hand... except when he forgot and stopped for a quick crow of his own. Who needs unbiased commentary anyway? Priceless.]

Where was I? Oh yes, promises. Real posts in the not-too-distant future! I swear! Maybe even two of them! I’ve been sent a copy of Andrea McKenzie’s new book Tyburn’s Martyrs by the publishers. So I’ll write something about that fairly soon. Man, it’s nice when people send you free things.

I’ve been doing a bit of cleaning and tidying up over on EMR. So I promise to start getting more of those posts out of the black hole more commonly known as the ‘drafts folder’. (If you emailed me months ago to suggest a link and it still hasn’t appeared, that’s where it’s got to…) And I will try to post more events on Early Modern News. I’ve already taken the opportunity to post a CFP for a new series of seminars at the Globe Theatre in London, which may interest some of you.

The sparkly new all-singing all-dancing criminal bibliography.

It’s been quite a learning experience. As it turns out, there are quite a few free applications out there that will publish bibliographies online, as long as you can handle databases. (If you’ve ever installed WordPress on a server, you already have an inkling; if phpmyAdmin is installed on your server, it makes it much easier than you might think.)

(This is a long and rather geeky post, so I’ll put the rest below the fold…)

(more…)

An email in my inbox today that’s really pissed me off: it’s from a marketing agency on behalf of a well-known educational institution to which I have linked in a past post (getting on for 2 years ago) using its top level URL. The email asks ‘if you would not mind either amending your current link text, or creating an additional link using the following target URL and link text’.

What are the changes they’d like? If it were to fix a broken link, I wouldn’t mind. But it’s clear to me that this is a marketing thing – trying to improve their Google rankings for a ‘why study at our institution?’ page, by the look of it. Clearly they haven’t got what this blog is up to, have they?

So the answer to this query and to any other institution that would like to similarly co-opt my blog for their marketing strategies at any point in the future is: yes I bloody well would mind. It’s my website and I choose what webpages I link to and exactly what text I’m going to put in the links. I am not here to provide you with free advertising.

My blog, my words.

So I upgraded to WordPress 2.1. All went fine (and like the look of some of the new features!), except that it would have been nice to have been warned that the upgrade would automatically renumber all my blogroll/link categories (appending them to the main categories series, which presumably is meant to streamline the database tables a bit). So, you know, it all ended up a bit broken on the pages where I’ve specified which link categories are to be displayed where and I didn’t know why. (Fixed now.)

Update: well, I discovered today that my old miniblog plugin doesn’t work properly in 2.1 (it’ll display existing posts, but something’s jiggered in the editing page so I can’t add any new ones), and I don’t think it’s being supported any more. So rather than fart about looking for a replacement plugin – and the miniblog was never entirely satisfactory anyway – I’m trying a different way of making quick ‘n’ dirty announcements posts. Some of you might have noticed the News page, which used to list entries from the miniblog and also aggregates stuff from various announcements blog and other site feeds – early modern-related conferences and seminars, CFPs, items in the news, that kind of thing. I’ve now set up a new blog purely for this purpose, Early Modern News, and added it to that page. (WordPress bloggers who want to know how to do this kind of thing: you can use WP’s own rss-functions code, or there are various plugins.)

Well, as I’ve said, I’m taking a summer holiday from blogging. I might post some photos (or put them up on my Flickr page), and there’ll be a notice about this month’s Carnivalesque to come before long, but don’t expect any real posts here for a couple of months. (Update: Well, there might be some occasional action in the miniblog…)

Two people generously offered to take over the History Carnival in my absence, and so they get to take turns. Both will be well known to some of you: Laura James of Clews will be deputising through to the 1 July issue and Another Damned Medievalist of Blogenspiel will take over from 15 July to 15 August. We have a fine line-up of hosts. Announcements about upcoming editions will be posted in various places, but if at any time you’re not sure where the next edition will be, just use the submission form to send nominations and they’ll get to the right place.

And… I have a newly acquired good reason for taking some time off blogging for a couple of months: I’m starting a new job in August. I’ll be managing two online primary source projects at the University of Sheffield’s Humanities Research Institute: The Proceedings of the Central Criminal Court 1834-1913 (a continuation of the Old Bailey Proceedings Online, of which I’m a great fan, as you may recall) and Plebeian Lives and the Making of Modern London 1690-1800. It’s going to be utterly cool. But the next two months will be more than a bit frantic.

So, have a good summer everyone, and I’ll be back in late August or September.

Early Modern E-prints is now up and running. At the moment it’s very small, but I have plenty more entries to add over the coming months.

You can help out if you know of examples of the following, on any early modern (ie, c.1500-1800) topic:

1. Research papers and publications archived at academics’ personal webpages, which can be particularly hard to track down.

2. Articles, chapters, papers and so on from sources (journals, books, e-seminars, etc) that aren’t specifically devoted to early modern history (this may include graduate student journals, as long as they’re peer-reviewed).

3. Free samples (eg, book chapters) from publishers’ websites.

4. Postgraduate theses and dissertations.

Just leave a comment, or send an email, with the links (or at least enough information that I could find them through Google).

Apart from the basic requirement of being free to access, they must be ‘proper’ academic research publications or papers (peer-reviewed, heavy on text and argument and referencing, etc – the kind of thing you’d tend to print out to read rather than browse on a screen). This can include historiographical discussions, but I’m not looking for book reviews unless they’re substantial review essays (I already have a book reviews resource page, and there are millions of the things out there). Also, I’m not going to include anything from Google Book Search or Amazon’s text search facility.

I hope that eventually there will be full-scale open access repositories for history and this resource will no longer be needed. But in the meantime it should help to facilitate access to good quality academic research for people who are studying early modern history but don’t have access to well-stocked university libraries, and it may also encourage the development of open access publishing/archiving by historians.

I’ve decided to create my own publications archive page. At the moment, this will involve self-archiving the publications on this site, since Aberystwyth (unlike a growing number of UK universities) doesn’t provide an institutional open access archive, and there isn’t as far as I know any kind of discipline-based OAI-compliant self-archiving option for history publications (comparable to ventures like arXiv for scientists), except in a few specialist and science-orientated fields like medical history.* Something needs to be done about that. But personally, I want to do something now rather than waiting around for more ideal solutions to happen.

The immediate spur to action was article by Steve Harnad (thanks to Jeremy).I’d been thinking about self-archiving my publications for a while, to make them more widely available to any interested readers who don’t have access to well-stocked university libraries. I was a bit concerned about the copyright issues, but on actually doing some homework I’ve been pleasantly surprised to discover that at least two of my publishers already have policies in place which allow me to do this, with some conditions (eg, how long you have to wait after publication, and whether you can post PDFs of the actual published works or only copies of the final accepted drafts).

So I’ve made a start. There will be more to come, along with some of my favourite unpublished conference papers, and later I may use it for pre-print publication as well. I would also like to set up a kind of directory of open-access scholarly publications in early modern history at some point – there are plenty out there but they’re not always easy to find. But that’s going to have to wait till I’m a bit less busy.

By the way, authors can find out their publishers’ policies using SHERPA, which also has a lot of useful guidance on self-archiving.

More useful resources:

Open Access overview
what you can do to promote open access
Promoting open access in the humanities
Open Access News blog
Budapest Open Access Initiative
Open Archives Initiative
OAIster (searches over 600 repositories)

…

*If I’m wrong about that, I’d be happy to be corrected…

This is one that I’m hoping readers might be able to help with. Because I do not have a clue.

What’s a trailing slash? It’s the / that may or may not appear at the end of the URL in the address bar above this page on your screen.

And I have a real problem with a trailing slash that Google so far hasn’t been able to solve. If you visit the URL http://www.earlymodernweb.org.uk/emn/index.php/, some very, very nasty things happen to the layout of the page. [Not any more, see update below.]

The following URLs, however, are fine:
http://www.earlymodernweb.org.uk/emn/index.php
and http://www.earlymodernweb.org.uk/emn/

So WTFFF is going on? (It’s not a browser or PC v Mac issue.) Now, I can easily set up an autoredirect so anyone trying to go to /emn/index.php/ will just get sent to /emn/ – but I really want to know why this is happening so I can fix it properly.

Please help if you can…

Update: Have done the redirect, so no one can land on index.php/ any more. OK, I don’t know exactly why the layout breaks in the way it does, but I should have learnt long ago that using an address that ends “index.php/” is a kind of category error that’s probably just asking to break things. (And now I’m going to put Moll back up the top of the page because she’s much more interesting than this stuff.)

You may recall that I was building up to some serious redesigning the other day. I had some ideas as to what I wanted, and some recent WP designs that had got me thinking.

Well, here it is. I like it and I hope you do too. I think it makes a nice change from the usual way of doing these things.

I think this is pretty much done now. I probably have one or two little extra features I want to add later, but it’s time to take a break.There’s one or two little odd behaviours in IE that I need to work out (nothing serious as far as I can tell), but everything seems right in Firefox. I haven’t checked it in Opera yet.* Finally, if someone can test it out in Safari** for me and see if there are any problems, that’d be much appreciated (though I can’t promise to be able to do anything about them).

(Much of the rest of this post will be deeply boring to most of you. Stop reading now unless web design turns you on.)

It was a matter of working out just what I wanted and what I really wanted rid of – and then finding out what was possible (or to be more precise, what I was able to work out).

It struck me that what was really grabbing me about some of the new designs was not that they jettisoned scrolling (I don’t mind a bit of scrolling, within reason), but that they got rid of the sidebar. I hated those sidebars. So what if they’re the norm? I didn’t want to lose all of the information conventionally contained in sidebars (although no question that mine had got filled up with a lot of baggage), but how to escape from them while retaining key information in a convenient location?

As a solution, I stole the idea of the central horizontal menu bar below a single post on the front page from Squible. But I didn’t want the rest of that package. I wanted more posts on the front page in the conventional manner, to run below the horizontal bar (and I didn’t want just short excerpts. You’d think it’d be possible to alter the default length of excerpts (120 words), wouldn’t you? But no, apparently not).

I wasn’t entirely sure if breaking up posts on a page in this way was actually possible in WP. The solution I discovered was a template tag I hadn’t noticed before: get_posts, which allows you to do exactly that (by creating ‘multiple loops’ within a page, for those familiar with the WP terminology).

So on the front page there’s now a ‘middlebar’ and ‘bottombar’, which have been seriously streamlined compared to the old sidebars. I’m also thinking about whether it’s possible to put a bit more info on other pages without cluttering it up again. We’ll see.

…………

*Update: Opera seems fine except that there’s a clear space 20-ish [now reduced to about 10] pixels wide down the right-hand margin of the page. No idea why (I’ve noticed that it does the same thing to EMR, to a lesser extent). And IE has a funny little bug I haven’t quite figured out: the white border line down the left-hand side of posts should start right below the underlining on the post title, but it doesn’t always show properly (on my screen anyway). [Both of these are fixed. I think.]

**Further update: found a useful tool for this: iCapture takes a screenshot of how your webpage looks in Safari. There was a problem with the middlebar which I think I’ve sorted out. Other than that, one or two very minor variations that I can live with.

EDITED TO ADD (5.40pm): Yes the place does suddenly look different. I think I’ve got to the point with the redesign where the front page looks about right, so I’m going to keep it up and work through the minor bugs I know I have to deal with. If something is broken, DON’T PANIC! … Yet.

…………

I discovered largely by accident yesterday that the search engine for the blog wasn’t working properly. I’m pretty sure I’ve found out why (an absolute vs. relative paths thing in the technical lingo – the search was set up wrongly for use on pages other than the main page) and I think I’ve fixed it, but if you’d take a couple of minutes to test it out for me, it’d be much appreciated.

What I’d like you to do is to run a quick search (the box is in the righthand sidebar) for anything that takes your fancy (and gets some results!).

1. Do the search from the main page (www.earlymodernweb.org.uk/emn/).

2. Go to the individual page for this post and repeat the same search.

3. Do it one last time from this post’s category page.

If you get identical results each time, it’d be quite helpful, but not essential, if you just leave a comment saying it was OK. But if you get different results each time, it’s really important that you leave a brief comment (or email if you’re shy), giving the search word/phrase you used.

Thanks!

Other WordPress users who have search boxes on multiple pages of their blogs (ie, as well as the main page) might want to check this out too…

Therefore, naturally, I keep getting this intense urge to redesign the entire blog. And now the Easter holidays are here, I think it may become inevitable.

So, dear readers, is there anything that would increase your viewing pleasure?

I’m contemplating following the in crowd with one of the recently emerging WP themes that do away with forever scrolling down the front page: they show just the most recent post (or even just a chunk of it) and titles/summaries of previous posts below. Chapati Mystery and History:Other are both using versions of Squible (which also does away with the sidebar). Or there’s the similar Hemingway reloaded theme. But neither of those feels quite right. The one that’s really got me thinking since I saw it in operation at Alun’s place is kiwi. Mmm.

The downside I can see with this type of theme is for irregular visitors. It’s fine for people who subscribe to the RSS feeds and/or come by every day for their, um, fix. But not everyone does that. There are blogs that I stop by maybe once a week or so. Then it’s more convenient just to scroll down the page and see what’s been happening. So I like the fact that kiwi (in Alun’s version anyway) shows the full text of the most recent post plus excerpts of the previous posts. Takes up more space on the screen, but it’s more accessible. Squible is lovely aesthetically (I think) but just too compressed.

Whatever happens, I can guarantee it won’t be straight out of the box. (Because that would just be too easy.) So your ideas and requests are welcome.

Now I’d better get on with some real work…

[Update: Frustratingly, the link to download the theme so I can take a look at it seems to be buggered. Same with the site forums. And can I find an email contact address anywhere on the site? Pah. Anybody got an up-to-date copy of the zip file they can send me? Please?]

If you’ve been trying to email me at my earlymodernweb address lately and got nothing but ‘mailbox is full’ messages in return – sorry about that. It should be fixed now.

Blogging here has been a pretty haphazard, stop-start, affair since Christmas, with far too many breaks for Real World intrusions. Yet visitor numbers keep going up. I find this both pleasing and puzzling.

Fortunately you lot don’t get to see it because of the spambusting Akismet, but for the last few days I’ve been inundated with particularly vile p*rn spam. Eugh. Still, I have been mildly amused by the lame joke spam comments from (apparently) a Zoroastrianism (?) site. Very odd.

[Update: Looking at the stats more closely, I was getting a lot of traffic from spambots. Not happy with that, not least because it eats bandwidth which I pay for, dammit. So I've installed Bad Behaviour for the time being. It blocks the little nasties from being able to visit the site in the first place. I'm worried that it might throw out real visitors too, so I'll be keeping an eye on it.]

I went for a job interview a few weeks ago. I didn’t get the job, but I did get a book recommendation from one of the other interviewees, which I want to pass on to the rest of the world: Havoc, in its Third Year, by Ronan Bennett. It’s set in the 1630s and its central character is a Yorkshire coroner. It starts out like a whodunnit… and then turns into something else.

Firstly, I can tell you that the author wrote a PhD on law enforcement in mid-17th-century Yorkshire (which I have finally got round to ordering on interlibrary loan): he knows the history. Secondly, it’s a great, beautifully written, disturbing novel about religious fanaticism, moral panic and political corruption. Not subtle in its parallels between the 17th century and today, mind you.

“We live in bitter times and the world is divided in two: those who live inside the godly nation, and those outside. Inside is righteousness and strength. Outside is barbarism and terror. You chose to live outside.”

“I chose rather not to live inside,” Brigge said.

“It is the same… There is nothing in between.”

There’s also a great scene involving cruentation. And the scribbling woman likes the book too. Great minds think alike.

For anyone interested, I’m listening to Karen Mantler and Her Cat Arnold Get The Flu, and eating Tyrrell’s sausage and mustard crisps. Both excellent experiences.

It’s official: this is the Best Expert/Scholar Blog in A Fistful of Euros’ European Blog Awards.

Now where did I put my acceptance speech and my fancy frock?

Thanks to everyone who voted for me.

I love you all!!

There is so much going on right now (including some really exciting developments that I won’t go into), things on the blog will be very very quiet for a bit. Visitors are as always very welcome to browse around: use the ‘archives’ link in the menu bar above or the ‘EMN choice’ links in the sidebar to get an idea of what I get up to. It should all be back to some sort of normality in a couple of weeks.