October 2, 2010
Once again, I've made some minor changes to the Star Trek ship comparison charts and general sci-fi ship comparison charts.
Once again, I've made some minor changes to the Star Trek ship comparison charts and general sci-fi ship comparison charts.
The site search is now back online. Ironically, I’ve gone back to the previous search engine that I used years ago, Fluid Dynamics. It doesn’t automatically re-index my site (which was the primary reason why I stopped using it), but it’s just as effective at finding pages on my site, and it works without any advertising at all.
Once again, screw you, Google!
Dear Google: Thanks so much for killing my custom site search without notice. How long has it been since it actually worked?
It’s going to take a while to find an alternative searching solution that (a) isn’t tacky as hell, and (b) integrates as nicely into my website as the previous solution. My apologies for the inconvenience.
<rant>
Why the hell has Google killed their existing APIs anyway? The only reason that I can figure is that they don't like having websites show customized search results without showing useless advertising. After all, if I search for something like “Braxton” on Star Trek Minutiae, I really want to see advertisements for how to “Save on Braxton” when I’m actually looking for pages referring to the character of Captain Braxton.
And they want to charge me $100 per year for the privilege of not showing any advertisements on this site. I find it laughable that they expect they could make $100 in advertising revenue from searches on my website. It's certainly not worth that much money to keep advertising away from my website. But it's also not worth it to add completely useless and gaudy advertisements to the search results, either.
In other words: Fuck you, Google. I'll find another search solution for my site.
This may not be exactly new material, but it’s been pretty tough to find for a while! From the depths of my hard drive, I recently managed to find a bunch of old files from Star Trek: Renaissance. Check out the newly-republished series primer, character profiles, image gallery, and technical manual.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I hate it when clichés are true. Clichés like “My, how the time flies!” Because that’s my only explanation for why I very nearly missed a big milestone. Because as of this week, “Star Trek Minutiae” is officially ten years old.
I don’t have any momentous new content at the moment. I don’t even have any insightful or witty retrospective commentary. I may not be updating this site as often as I used to, but that doesn’t mean that I’ve lost interest. I’d like to think I’ve only lost the ability to spend hours on end writing and drawing new content. Leaving college and moving on to a real life will do that to you.
But even though nothing’s really changing, this is as good an opportunity to take stock of things. Maybe reorganize the site, maybe figure out what sections in Starfleet Academy need fleshing out. Heck, maybe I’ll even get around to finishing that damn History of the Earth-Romulan War that’s been languishing for forever.
So here’s to another... well, I won’t say another ten years. Because who knows what the future will bring. But here’s to the continued existence of “Star Trek Minutiae”!
Thanks to everyone who wrote in about the hugely inaccurate length of the Eagle from Space: 1999. If I’d ever watched that show, I probably wouldn’t have gotten it so wrong.
Once again, nothing much new except some tweaks to the starship size comparison charts. Many thanks to David Polenšek for digging up some great side views of some Stargate ships!