Journals
I finally got around to adding latest-comments sidebars to Vardibidian's and Dan P's journals. Mary Anne's setup is a little different from ours, so I set up a temporary new page for hers; after she and I have ironed out details of how it should look, that page will become the default one. For now, you can use either that or her standard journal page to view entries.
I also shifted another year's worth of her old entries into the database format. For those who don't know, Mary Anne started her "Ongoing, Erratic Diary" back in 1995 (next December will be the tenth anniversary!), and she wrote it as plain HTML pages rather than using a database system for most of that time. I set up a database system for her three years ago, and later went back and converted the entries from 2001 to the database format. So now the entries from 2000 are also in the database format. The only real difference from a reader's perspective is that they're now searchable. Eventually I'll convert the rest of the old entries too.
While I was converting entries, I had to look them over to compare them to the originals and make sure I wasn't losing anything in the conversion process. It was kinda fun to glimpse various aspects of how M's life was going back then—among other things, she was working on a story called "Challah," which has blossomed into the novel she's writing now. (Later, in a 2001 entry, she notes: "I just realized that 'Challah' probably needs to be a novel.") There are also some entertaining bits of silliness, like the lullaby she was thinking about writing for Baby Zoe.
P.S. to Mary Anne: no going back and reading old entries if it'll distract you from interviews! : )