Home Page—Mr. Initial Man’s Den

Welcome to my home page! This is the place where I keep my writings, the art others have drawn for me, the music I’ve recorded, and so on.

News And Mews: October 5, 2022

If you’re looking at the Hymns 2022 Challenge Quarter 1, Quarter 2, Quarter 3, or Quarter 4 pages in Recordings And Other Sound Files, you’ll see a new addition to their description: a link to the full list of hymns. Originally, I did have the page like this. But in August, I realized just how big the page was getting, and decided to split it up into three-month sections. When I was trying to look up a hymn, though, things being split up like that became annoying, so I decided to reinstate the complete listing.

Note that this listing does not appear in the navigation. My navigation is cluttered enough as it is without something completely redundant.

News And Mews: September 22, 2022

I honestly don’t know what it’s about me, that often when I post a new page, it sometimes requires me to update my Content Management System all the way down to the Document Type Definition.

News And Mews: September 19, 2022

Six more hymns up (See New Stuff (November 15, 2022) for that). Only two more weeks, and it will be time for Quarter Four!

News And Mews: August 21, 2022

I mention this in the New Stuff page, but I’ll mention it here, too. The Hymns 2022 challenge has been split into three (four come October) pages, as having all hymns on one single page was simply getting way too long. Those sections are:

Quarter 4 (October, November, and December) will be added when October rolls around.

News And Mews: August 6, 2022

I’ve been receiving emails from certain websites, namely DomainName, DomainAgents, and NameExperts, all claiming there is some client willing to pay big bucks for the domain name mrinitialman.com.

To any clients or investors involved with these, the answer is a flat no. This domain name reflects who I am, and it is not for sale. Go pester someone else.

News And Mews: August 1, 2022

So, I've been chugging away at my 2022 Hymns Challenge (good grief is that section getting huge!).

In further news, I added a couple more pages (as if my top menu wasn't big enough)—namely, the News & Mews Archive and an update archive; anything that's over a year old will be sorted into those (the New Stuff archive is hidden for now, as nothing in there is that old yet).

Also, I started participating in the Spectre Media Group Riffs Challenge again; I have two new riffs in that section!

News And Mews: June 29, 2022

... It’s a good thing I was poking around my webpage tonight. Doing so revealed that I completely broke my Links page, I have a custom Entity reference that no longer refers to anything (resulting in a Yellow Screen of Death), image files that weren’t linked properly (HostGator’s file system is case-sensitive; my computer’s is not), and that a bunch of cross-reference types don’t work.

The Links page required a quick tweak to the xpath query that I use in this website’s template (yes, I wrote the template virtually from scratch), the entity references and images were easy to deal with; the crossreferences... well, that’s going to take some work.

And some people say working with plain HTML is complicated...

In other news, I removed the above reference to the old Mr. Initial Man Show. It hasn’t been part of this website since I stopped linking to it years ago.

News And Mews: June 22, 2022

So, I cross-tested some stuff on browsers other than Pale Moon, and I discovered that the sound files on my recording pages didn’t work properly in Chrome or Edge. My Safari browser is far too old to be of much use for testing nowadays, since Safari no longer makes variants for windows. FireFox worked fine, but the fact remained: I needed to figure out a workaround or otherwise I would have to resort to HTML5 (bleah).

I had two rules for the workaround:

It had to allow the person viewing the page to decide when or if the sound file played, rather than the file playing automatically (especially since a couple pages have two sound files)
It had to be valid XHTML 1.1, which is the markup language I use on this site.

The only real way was to use an audio element; the problem is that element is in HTML5 (again, bleah) but not in XHTML 1.1. That meant if I coded it directly into the page, the W3C validator would squawk at me.

The solution: JavaScript! The script element is part of XHTML 1.1 (it’s actually been around since HTML 3.2), but what that script does is not the validator’s concern. So using a bit of JavaScript to sneak in the audio element means both my rules are satisfied.

If you think that I make things complicated for my self with the code that ends up in your browser, you should see what I put my brain through when it comes to the code the server has to deal with...

News And Mews: June 14, 2022

I discovered—the hard way— that entity references don’t play nice with PHP anymore, so I had to do some recoding, and that seems to have fixed the issue. Now all my credit links work.

News And Mews: June 13, 2022

So, clearly, my website still has a few bugs in it, but I’m still working those out. The works pages mostly, well, work, but the Characters pages still need to be finished.

Also, new main page: New Stuff will show minor updates and additions to my webpage.

News And Mews: June 5, 2022

It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

After almost eight years of letting this page lie, I finally have done an update—and it’s a biggie.

Reärranged Page

The main menu went to the top, the section list of pages that are broken up into sections will be on the left... Because I really needed a Table Of Contents for some of those sections, as they had literally dozens of works in them (my 2022 Hymns Challenge has, at the time of writing, over 40 links), and that will be on the right.

Also, new colour scheme. The background image (black with little white dots) is a little tip of the hat to the old Empire of Sampetra: Imperial Navy Serving Ublaz website, which also used it (believe me, it was probably the best background image I ran into from websites of that era; the one for KinDraco Fortress was sadly more typical—and that's not even getting getting into the animated ones.).

Speaking of KinDraco Fortress...

New Main Pages

KinDraco Fortress

While poking around on my computer, I discovered I had my old Redwall Online Community club KinDraco Fortress still on my hard drive. I decided that, for nostalgia’s sake, I’d upload it to my website and let everyone see what the web was like when I first got active in it. It’s also an admission of just how old I am (I’m over 40.)

Recordings : Blockflute Boogaloo

Way back in Ye Olde Days Of Yore, I had a link to a page that had various voice recordings on it. While the original voice recordings are lost, I decided to bring the Recordings page back and put some of my music on my site. In particular is my contributions to the early days of the SMG Weekly Riff Challenge, and my current challenge of recording 2 hymns per week.

Gallery Split

Art and Photos have been split into seperate galleries, since I figured I was getting enough photos to split those up. Also, a lot of new artwork up.

Character Pages

There are a number of characters I’ve written or roleplayed, and so I figured I’d list the lot—or at least as many as I could. This is going to be something of a work in progress, since I need to write out bios for my characters.

Thank-You Page Removed

I removed the Thank You page not because of any fallings-out or because I suddenly gained an attitude, but because 1) I haven’t heard anything from several people on that list in many years, and 2) having such a list in this day and age seemed kind of stalkeresque to me. You know who you are, I love you all, and many of you I still miss.

Library Cleanup

Some of my works I have removed from my library because I find them embarrassing; particularly for the amount of obscene language within. I hope to rewrite them to be better in the future, since they have the core of a good story, but for now, they’re off the site.

Trying To Date My Stuff

When I started this update, I wanted to add when and where each photo or piece of art was done, and (of course) by or for whom. That was pretty easy for the most part.

I also wanted to show when I wrote each story--and that last one was much easier said than done. For the longest time, I didn’t keep track of what was written when, so I’m pretty hazy on the age of my older works. The Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive was a lot of help (and it was kind of fun looking through old versions of my website) but I ran into a few limitations.

The Wayback Machine can’t archive everything.

There are some websites (Geocities comes to mind) that have a type of blocker that keeps away webcrawlers—those of the Wayback Machine included.

Server-side scripting stumps the Wayback Machine

0Catch and FurNation—like most free webhosts in the late 1990s and early 2000s—did not offer server-side processing, so my pages on those sites were plain old HTML, which the WayBack Machine’s crawlers had no problems archiving.

Furtopia, on the other hand, did. It’s the reason I started using Furtopia around 2004/2005. At first I experimented with SSI and later the more powerful PHP. Since Furtopia’s servers were taken down years ago, the Wayback Machine can’t run those old scripts and so can’t properly show those old pages.

I can’t have a look at the old Lofty-Bearing forums to see when I posted my early works there for the same reason—being a forum, it also used server-side scripting.

Long story short, in a lot of cases I had to rely on the Date Modified tag on my computer files or go off dates on other sites I posted stuff. Speaking of which...

Some of this stuff I wrote long before I put it on my website.

A good example is the The Tales of the Windschreieners were written for the Redwall roleplaying clubs Moonshadow Island and Empire of Samptera: Imperial Navy Serving Ublaz but weren’t added to my website around 2008, by which time both clubs were long gone. I was fortunate to have a backup that included old favourite links--those provided me URLs to look up on the Wayback Machine. I did get to look at its backup for the old site for EoS:INSU, but Moonshadow Island—which was a Geocities site—was completely gone. Not even Oocities (an archive of GeoCities) was any help there.

Stories such as The Old That Is Strong, Josef, and Beef In A Bottle were originally written for furry muscle groups which are also now defunct while Mr. Initial Man meets John-David first showed up on Lofty-Bearing.org (I think).

Some of my writing even predates me having a website. I wrote The Land Schooner for my own amusement so long ago that I think I wrote it using Microsoft Word 97 on a Windows 3.1 machine, but didn't upload to my website until 2006 (I have no old copy of the story itself, but I do have a listing of the characters therein dating back to 1999, so that’s what I went by). Star Wolf: The Search is in the earliest version of my library (according to the 2002 snapshot of my old, long-gone 0catch site)—and even there it’s mentioned as an early story.

The Wayback Machine doesn’t keep track of when a site is actually updated; only when their webcrawlers have a look at it.

From the website itself: Note: This calendar view maps the number of times [this url] was crawled by the Wayback Machine, not how many times the site was actually updated. (Emphasis theirs.)

Some of the The Wayback Machine's first snapshots of these other webpages already contain my works.

Again, there’s the Tales Of The Windscheieners. The oldest snapshot of the Missions page from the EoS:INSU library is from late 2001 and a link to Mission #436 (titled Tales Of The Windschreieners 6: Infestation in my own library; it was the last one I wrote) is in that snapshot; clearly it and every other Windschreiener story was written in or before 2001. Another is Rainy Day Exercises; the first snapshot of Gene Catlow’s fanfic page is from July 2002, and my story is there.

Besides using the Wayback Machine, I also looked through other websites, emails, old backups and whatever else I could think of to get an idea of when I wrote or received what. Some projects took me several years to complete (Website Creation In Plain English took me about a decade), which makes dating it all the more difficult.

But what I’m saying here is, when you see the words around, before, or between associated with the year a work was written, a photo taken, or a picture drawn, please understand I did the best I could.

That being said, using the Wayback Machine has let me take an interesting trip down memory lane, showing me how long I've actually had the website (2002; can you believe it?), and reminding me of the Geocities page I had—and completely forgot about.

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