I didn't contribute to NaNoGenMo this year: on the spur of the moment, I decided to try writing 50,000 words of fiction, rather than generating it, and blogged briefly about it at Nannygoat Hill. I didn't even get around to feeding the results into a neural net, like I promised.

In lieu of that, this week I was cleaning out a shared network drive which was being closed down, and I found the source code from my first ever online generative text project: a beat poet named samuel who lived on my home page back in 1997, when if you worked for a university you could just put some HTML and Perl into the public_html directory of your home on the faculty file server and off you'd go.

I pushed it onto the host I use for this blog, tweaked a few things, and, what do you know, it still works.

samuel, beat poet

The source code

Speaking of home pages, my web presence has gone a bit haywire this year, with hardly any technical or creative blogging on this site, and not much more at the other blog. And it's no longer clear to me why I'm maintaining both of them, or what exactly the criteria which distinguishes them is. Why should writing fiction go on one, and procedurally-generated poetry go on the other? A couple of years ago, I would have said that NGH was "personal", but I don't think that's the case now.