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1. Wednesday, August 02, 2023:
   New Edition Day    The URI! Zone turns 27 years old this month, which is how old I was when I met Rebecca. Here's what I looked like at 27:     And here's what the website looks like at the same age. Clearly, one of us wears 27 better than the other:     By the numbers, here's what the URI! Zone looks like today:     over 197,000 unique visitors since 2003   4876 blog posts since 2001   9285 comments from 153 unique visitors since 2003   9761 images, MP3s, and other files, totaling 526 megabytes   over $4550 spent on web hosting since 2003     The URI! Zone will persist for years to come. I'm already saving mad dollar b...
2. Monday, August 01, 2022:
   New Edition Day    The URI! Zone turns 26 years old this month, which means that I'll have to kick it off my health insurance and out of my basement soon. By the numbers, here's what the URI! Zone looks like today:     over 190,500 unique visitors since 2003   4717 blog posts since 2001   9154 comments from 153 unique visitors since 2003   9340 images, MP3s, and other files, totaling 487 megabytes   over $4500 spent on web hosting since 2003   exactly $222 in prizes given away in caption and name-that-tune contests (this will become $232 if Asmodues ever collects his  2022 Census prize )   $0 in income from ad revenue, because ads are awful  &nbs...
3. Wednesday, June 01, 2022:
   Census Day Results    Congratulations to Asmodues for being the randomly selected winner of the  $10 census prize ! Email me with your preferred email address to claim your virtual Amazon gift card.   Asmodues has been visiting for nearly 19 years, commenting at an average rate of 3 times per year. His very first comment asked me if I was obsessed with  Alias  (I was). I have never met Asmodues in person, although I did bump into him in a World of Warcraft Warsong Gulch match during the brief era (2007?) where Level 49 and 59 cross-server battlegrounds were popular.   Congratulations also to Rebecca, for being the only respondent to follow my directions and reply to the 3 questions. There is no moneta...
4. Monday, May 16, 2022:
   Census Day    While there are several visible, distinguished visitors to this historic website, I still see some repeat visits in my website logs who have been coming for years but never posted a single comment. I see lurkers from Philly, DC, Ashburn, Centreville, and other exotic locales. There's one from Boston that arrived one day after Googling the name of someone whose wedding I attended, and they check in every few months to see if I ever mention that person again (spoiler: I never have). There's even exactly 1 subscriber to my Atom feed, which has been chugging along in underrated obscurity (not unlike the Netflix show,  Dark ) since 2008.   Who's still out there? I would love to hear from you. Regular or lur...
5. Monday, August 02, 2021:
   New Edition Day    The URI! Zone turns 25 years old this month which means that I should probably commission a celebratory parade in a local arena, complete with commemorative coins. I, too, have evolved subtly in this same period.     Though the URI! Zone was quite popular in the Web 2.0 era, it has shed visitors down to just a diligent few. (On any given day, 50% of traffic is Doobie, Evil Mike, or someone related to me). This reduction has been exacerbated by the general decline in blogs and people wanting to read blogs, such that the URI! Zone sometimes feels like an ancient diner whose interstate entrance was blocked in the name of progress, and the only people around anymore are crusty locals willing to drive on fo...
6. Wednesday, April 14, 2021:
   Release Day  Introducing the  Official Website of Don Maitz !     Don Maitz is a Hugo-winning artist whose artwork has appeared in hundreds of classic fantasy and science-fiction books, including books by Stephen King, Raymond E. Feist, Gene Wolfe, and Michael Moorcock. He is also married to Janny Wurts, whose website I rewrote last summer.   With this makeover, all of my pandemic website projects come to a successful close, just in time for other kinds of  new releases  at the end of the month! 
7. Monday, February 08, 2021:
   Release Day  2021 is off to a productive start with 2 completed side projects in my portfolio.   First up is a new  Janny Wurts - Official Forum  that finally replaces the ancient Perl-based forum that ran from 1999 to 2021.     The new forum is based on Discourse and was pretty straightforward to configure. The most challenging part of this move was migrating 17,000 old posts into the new software. These posts weren't in a nice tidy database, but 1,400 separate HTML files which allowed the forum to work without an additional database hosting cost. The company behind the old software actually went out of business in 2012, so I had reverse engineer the data format and write a data pipeline that cleans the old...
8. Monday, August 17, 2020:
   Release Day  Introducing the new and improved  Official Website of Janny Wurts !     Janny is the creator of the Wars of Light and Shadow series as well as the co-author of the Empire Trilogy with Raymond E. Feist. Her website had lingered in the aughts, as previous website administrators naturally moved on to other things in life. Having corresponded with her over the past 13 years as I built the  Wiki  for her main book series and in search of another quarantine project, I volunteered to help her modernize the site.   The key requirements upfront: simplify navigation (sites that have been around for over 20 years, like my own, tend to build up a lot of content warrens), make it work on phones...
9. Monday, August 03, 2020:
   New Edition Day    The URI! Zone is 24 years old this month! There have been 4403 blog posts and 8853 comments since the beginning of recorded history. I haven't touched the code under the hood at all this year although I've learned a few new web tricks from my side gig that I may end up implementing here if I ever get bored.   Blogging is all but dead these days, as you can tell from this graph of visitors over the years:     That said, I'll still be here churning out tasty tripe for the last few brave souls from the Web 2.0 cohort every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday into eternity. Thank you for continuing to take time out of your day to visit! 
10. Friday, August 02, 2019:
    New Edition Day    The URI! Zone is 23 years old this month! If it were human, this is the stage when it starts to question its investment in continuing education and wonders whether it made a huge mistake in its chosen area of study, potentially dropping out to become a barista while working on a screenplay. By the numbers, I have written 4247 blog posts which you clowns have commented on 8698 times. There were also over 32,000 attempted spam comments successfully blocked which amazes me more for the fact that link-spamming online pharmacies is still a lucrative business.   There has been absolutely nothing of interest changed under the hood of this website in the past year, other than the fact that I made my resume database-dri...
11. Monday, April 15, 2019:
    Old Internet Friends Day   Towards the tail end of the URI! Zone's first decade of existence,  Rachel  from Australia was a regular visitor, often arguing for hours in the Comments section with Beavis, Kelley, and Tree about societal problems without any sort of understanding of the problems' unique American causes. I met her playing  Warcraft III  and lost track of her somewhere around 2006 with only a few sporadic emails since then.   Last week was Rachel's 37th birthday, so I did my usual one-way shout into the void to wish her a Happy Birthday, only to find that her email had finally expired from inactivity. It's a peculiar feeling to completely lose a connection to someone from your past, especially in this era where ...
12. Monday, February 11, 2019:
    Census Day Results    Congratulations to Katie, who wins a $10 Amazon gift certificate for "showing up" for the  census ! Send me an email and I'll deliver it to your email in return!   There are definitely more lurkers in the ether that did not reply -- over the coming years, I'll have to see how high I need to increase the value of the prize before people start coming out of the woodwork.   Also, Evil Mike is welcome to choose a new adjective for his handle (should he want one), having outlasted Good Mike. 
13. Monday, February 04, 2019:
    Census Day  Blogging has become a charmingly quaint practice for old-fashioned people, not unlike going into the bathroom at work and hearing someone in the next stall tap out a message on their classic Blackberry, or watching America's Funniest Videos live on an actual TV. It is for this reason that visitors to the URI! Zone have gracefully ebbed over the years like a perpetual neap tide.     Are you someone that reads regularly (for the articles) and not just some undergrad music major that got caught in my honeypot of aural training cheat codes? Come out of lurking and say hello in the Comments section. All 5 trendsetters subscribed to my Atom feed will need to visit this website to find the Comments section.  &nbs...
14. Friday, October 19, 2018:
    Weird Search Day   or "How I Stumbled Upon the URI! Zone"       rasputin sex tuba  Let's pretend that the user didn't just misspell the word "tube". More likely, this is some adventurous sex position popularized by Grigori Rasputin involving his apocryphal giant penis.     vintage rottweiller figurines with signature on bottom     Historians say that the artist went into politics after being rejected from art school twice.     hole "dig deeply"  This sounds like the eHow Wiki instructions for digging a hole.   Locate a plot of ground where you suspect there may be a concealed hole.   With your shovel, dig deeply t...
15. Wednesday, August 01, 2018:
    New Edition Day    The URI! Zone is 22 years old this month. If it were human, it would now face the depressing dearth of notable birthday values between 21 and 30, and probably decide go back to grad school for a master's degree. By the numbers, the URI! Zone has had 4091 blog posts, 8537 comments, and over 171,944 unique visits in recorded modern history.   Like Old Faithful, this site continues to have a persistent eruption of mediocre to decent content on a semi-regular basis. The inexorable journey to future fame will continue in year 23, with regular posts on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Fan favourites like  12 of 12  will remain, and I'll make sure to post enough raw data about Maia's digestion to support any...
16. Monday, June 11, 2018:
    Data Day: Cloud Hosting Costs  The URI! Zone has been running IN THE CLOUD for just over  three years now , so I thought I would compute the costs to see if I'm really getting my money's worth. The answer isn't completely cut and dried, as I do a lot more with the flexibility offered by the cloud, spinning up new servers on the fly to work on  Sparkour  or taking over hosting duties for the  Paravia Wiki . Still, I'm very satisfied with what I've gotten for the amount I've paid.   In the olden days, I was spending $240 a year on the "complete" hosting package for the URI! Zone. I could login to my space on the shared server and upload files but not much else. When I moved into AWS, I added a 3rd server (Web/App/DB instead ...
17. Tuesday, November 14, 2017:
    Comments Fix Day    I just fixed the " An invalid character [32] was present in the Cookie value " error that was preventing people with a space in their name from posting comments. The side effect of this fix is that you'll have to re-enter your name for your next comment, but it will then get remembered for 30 days as usual. Let me know if you run into other issues! 
18. Wednesday, August 02, 2017:
    New Edition Day   Now with 100% more babies!      Happy Birthday to The URI! Zone, which turns 21 years old this month! As a special promotion for turning 21, anyone who visits my house during the month of August will get a free craft beer (as long as I have one in the fridge at the time of the visit).   This month marks the first full year of my "three updates per week" rhythm which I found much more pleasant and doable than five per week, and prevented me from running with retarded post ideas like "List Day: 5 Other People Named Brian". Looking ahead, I plan to keep posting three times per week, mainly about things I'm up to day-to-day and things I enjoy that you might enjoy too.      ...
19. Monday, August 01, 2016:
    New Edition Day    The URI! Zone turns 20 years old this month, an epic yet ultimately pointless achievement not unlike driving a Prius for 8 hours without a pee break or watching the entire series of  Everybody Loves Raymond . From its roots as a static HTML homepage through the evolution into a daily blog, this website has existed in some form for almost as long as Yahoo! (although obviously, the URI! Zone has retained its modern relevance and artistic appeal, while Yahoo! today is only known for its awful video player that refuses to work with ad blockers).   To mark TWO DECADES of existence, I have put together a one-minute movie history of the website, set to the tune of  The Llama Fanfare  which originall...
20. Thursday, July 21, 2016:
    Plans for the URI! Zone    The URI! Zone will remain online after its 20th birthday, ensuring that my future political opponents can cherry pick from an inordinate amount of inarticulate historical archives when challenging me if I ever decide to run for public office. However, I will be cutting back to 3 updates per week to more effectively reflect the overall decrease in visitors over the past 10 years.   Posts will come from 3 categories: What I'm Doing, What I Did, and What I Think.      What I'm Doing : Weekend Wrap-ups, End-of-the-Month synopses,  12 of 12 s, and travelogues from all of the amazing places I visit, like Grindelwald, Denver, and Mellow Mushroom.    What I Did ...

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