Quotations Weblog

As we are completing our transition to the new site, many of you have sent comments and questions. I thought I would take a moment to answer some of the most common questions.

(These questions are all paraphrased from emails I have received; most have been asked by two or more people. I am not including contact information from the emails for the sake of users’ privacy.)

What happened to the “Number of Quotes” option on the Random Quotations page?

I didn’t include this option in the new site to simplify things, as I wasn’t sure if anyone used it. Now I know better – the Number of Quotes option will be added by September 15th for the final rollout of the new page.
UPDATE: As of 9/6/2000, this has been fixed.

The page is too wide for my screen. Is there a way to prevent this?

I’m currently working on ways of making the layout resolution-independent, both to display in a more narrow fashion for small screens, and to take advantage of the space on larger screens. This should be done shortly after the rollout.

What’s with the occasional repeated quotes on the Quotes of the Day and Random pages?

Apparently my random quotations aren’t quite random enough. This was actually possible on the old site too, but it seems to happen more with the new one. I will be fixing the problem by the 15th.
UPDATE: As of 10/20/2000, this has been fixed.

I read the Quotes of the Day regularly using AvantGo. Will this still be supported?

Actually, I didn’t have anything to do with AvantGo’s support for my site; apparently a user set that up. But I will be developing specifically for AvantGo and making sure it works later this month. Please Contact Me if you’re an AvantGo user, as I could use a few beta testers for this feature.
UPDATE: The AvantGo pages are ready. Follow the links at the bottom of the Quotes of the Day and Motivational Quotes pages to set up the AvantGo channels.

What happened to the Steven Wright, Dave Barry and Jack Handey collections on the Random and Search pages?

I’ve made the difficult decision to discontinue these for now for legal reasons. While I love these collections, the fact that they’re single-author collections (and the Dave Barry one contains very large passages from his articles) make them a lawsuit waiting to happen. I’m looking into legal ways of including these and other collections soon - stay tuned.
By the way, we’re adding several collections to make up for the loss, beginning with the Classic Collection, which will be up by September 15th.

Have you considered adding an index by subject or by author?

An index by author is coming soon. Subjects are more difficult, as we have to classify every quote, but we are working on this too.
UPDATE: As of 12/10/2000, the Author Index is now online.

Once again, I’d like to thank everyone who has sent comments about the new site. If you have comments, please use the Forum – which isn’t getting much traffic yet - or for more private comments, Send us email.