Every so often I succumb to the urge to write an editorial. A couple of editorials ago I wrote an editorial entitled “If you build it they will come” in which I mused about the traffic this site was getting and where it was coming from. They keep coming; the pace keeps picking up. It tends to run about 3-5 thousand hits a day currently. Most of this traffic comes from the humor page; the Darwin awards page is the main entry point.

I don’t quite know what to make of all of this. I didn’t really set out to create a popular humor site; however that’s what it appears that I have done. The intent was to create an e-zine of personal journalism, a junk heap of the mind. The collected bits of humor were just lagniappe, things that tickled my fancy. The humor seems to be what my public wants. The public is crazy.

To be honest, I have played a part in this; about half of the pages in the site are jokes. There is a good reason for this. I get them from various sources – email lists and the odd posting in newsgroups. I cut and paste them into template pages. It’s easy and quick and it doesn’t involve any creativity on my part. This is good. A lot of the stuff in these pages is the product of my dubious creativity. Read it and weep. Maybe the public is not so crazy after all.

My regular readers may have noticed that I have taken another step towards making this collection of crap look more like a e-zine. From now on new pages will have links back to the table of contents for the month in which they appeared. I am also standardizing the format used in the new pages. This is about the fourth or fifth new standard format that I have gone through.

I have noticed, and I suppose my readers have noticed, that these pages have a distinctive appearance. Tacky is the term, I believe. The thing is that web pages tend to come in one of two types. Type I is the raw text page that has virtually no HTML gadgets except for the bare minimum. Type II are “designed”; they have all kinds of graphics goodies, ranging from frames to animated gifs (type IIa have a lot of noise, er, sound as well). My pages, however, have a minimum of graphics but they use various simple HTML goodies to jazz the pages up so they aren’t quite so barren.

I feel like I am doing the equivalent of a fancy mimeographed fanzine while everybody else is doing the latest razzmatazz desktop publishing. Hey, that’s not so bad, now that I think about it. Think of this site as being published on a virtual mimeograph.