Duramecho's Miscellany Site History

2008/5/9: Added hummus recipe: After three years of no new recipes, I have added another of my popular party recipes, hummus made in bulk, to the food section.
2008/4/27: More instructions for bulk regexp renaming of files: After questions from readers, I added some examples for common tasks to the instructions for my Recursive Regexp Rename program. The examples are simple search & replace for words, changing filename extensions, changing between different ways of representing spaces in filenames and how to escape special characters in the parameters from the command shell.
2008/4/26: HTML corrections to Balkan etc. folk dance pages: My correction to a program used to generate the HTML Balkan etc. dance note pages from AIDM source text to encode the HTML special characters into HTML-safe notation accidentally converted wanted manual linebreaks (' ') too, corrupting them. Fixed that.
2008/4/26: Corrected CSS mistakes: Accidentally found that the Opera web browser's optional error window can be used to syntax check CSS and found mistakes on this site. The main stylesheet had a misspelling of 'weight' in 'font-weight'. The stylesheet of Balkan etc. dance notes used 'align: left;' for aligning a table as in the deprecated HTML 4.0 attribute instead of the less concise but more versatile CSS equivalent 'margin-left: 0; margin-right: auto;'.Corrected them. Also corrected them for stand-alone versions in the program that formatted those dance notes.
2008/4/26: Corrected a 'transliterate' vs. 'transcribe' mistake: I found out that I have been using the words 'transliterate' (to make a reversible mapping of one alphabet into another) vs. 'transcribe' (to make a phonetic mapping of words into another alphabet or language) the with the definitions switched for 2 decades! This affected many of my Balkan etc. dance notes. Now corrected.
2008/4/16: Typo corrections article anent recovering lost emails from GDS cache: Corrected a couple of minor typos (one obvious 'not' missing and the date wrong in the source code version history) in my article anent recovering lost emails Google Desktop Search's cache.
2008/3/28: Updated Balkan etc. dance note page footers to new site CSS: Made a minor change to the program that converts the AIDM source code to HTML so they now use the same CSS styles as the rest of the site. I think that is the tedious, and unnoticeable to most readers, site HTML tidy-up complete at last.
2008/3/28: Converted site from HTML 4.0 to HTML 4.01 strict: Nearly all the manually generated pages had HTML 4.0 (with HoTMetaL extensions) as their 'DOCTYPE'. Converted all 78 of them to proper HTML 4.01 strict. Fortunately my conservative and standards compliant HTML turned out to be already 4.01 strict compliant so it merely needed a search & replace of the 'DOCTYPE' lines.
2008/3/21: Converted Cotswold Morris instructions pages from windows-1252 to UTF-8: Found that similarly, to the cheat sheet, the Cotswold Morris Dancing detailed notes pages were actually in windows-1252 instead of the expected ASCII or Latin-1 due to the original text having been edited in M$ Word 2k. Updated the program that generates them to convert them to UTF-8. Every HTML page on the site is now either ASCII or UTF-8 with all the UTF-8 ones correctly marked as such by use of 'charset' attributes.
2008/3/21: Removed windows-1252 from manually generated HTML: Searched the rest of the site for windows-1252 codes either left in raw in pages claiming to be UTF-8 or (by default) ASCII. Only found one case in the manually generated pages, in the page anent scanning photographic prints with a flatbed scanner. Converted that page to UTF-8.
2008/3/21: HTML corrections to Cotswold Morris cheat sheet pages: Edited the template and used the latest M$ Word generated HTML garbage stripper to correct the HTML version of my Cotswold Morris Dancing Cheat Sheet to correct the HTML faults that HTML Tidy found (no 'DOCTYPE', invalid numerical HTML character codes from characters being saved in windows-1252 by Word & converted to numerical representation; by HoTMetaL Pro after the charset line was removed). The whole site pages now pass HTML Tidy validation! At last.
2008/3/21: Updated program to remove garbage from M$ Word generated HTML: Found some more garbage that needed removing when investigating HTML errors that HTML Tidy found in my Cotswold Morris Dance cheat sheet. It turns out that Word saves HTML not in old 7-bit ASCII, a standard extension like Latin-1 or robust comprehensive UTF-8 encoded Unicode but the Windows' default character set ('code page 1252', a.k.a. 'windows-1252'). Updated my program to convert from that to UTF-8. Also made it add an HTML 4.01 Strict 'DOCTYPE'.
2008/3/17: HTML corrections to Cotswold Morris dance detailed instructions pages: Edited the programs used to generate the HTML Cotswold Morris Dancing detailed notes pages to correct the HTML faults that HTML Tidy found (no 'DOCTYPE', used '<PRE></PRE>' as an inline rather than block-level element, omitted some '<UL></UL>' or '<LI></LI>' in automatically generated nested lists which need both for nesting, used 'NAME' attribute anchors starting with numerals for table of contents that are incompatible with modern 'ID' attribute anchor restrictions). The regenerated pages now pass HTML Tidy validation.
2008/3/7: HTML corrections to Balkan etc. folk dance pages: Edited the programs used to generate the HTML Balkan etc. dance note pages from AIDM source text to correct the HTML faults that HTML Tidy found (forgot to convert the '&' HTML special characters into '&' HTML-safe notation, used '' for spacing in some places, some table summaries missing & CSS 'type' attributes missing). The regenerated pages now pass HTML Tidy validation.
2008/3/7: HTML corrections to manually formatted pages: Tested this site with HTML Tidy, wrapping it in a Perl script to recurse folders and detect character encodings. Found lots of errors in the manually generated pages. Every page had 3 duplicated errors: lack of 'type' attribute on CSS links & Javascript sections (because I thought it was not needed if using the default types) and my one remaining presentational HTML item (using '' for spacing before the horizontal rule separating the footers (because it was fewer characters than a class attribute for CSS styling). Also a few duplicate tags and unencoded '&' signs scattered about the site and some table summaries and image alt-texts accidentally missing from some of the Rainbow Labyrinth artworks. Fixed them all.
2008/3/7: Added another link for the Zetten Balkan festival: It is my favourite annual Balkan dance event but it does not have a site itself nor does Silviu Ciuciumiş whose DIONA Foundation does the publicity for it but that now has a page on the Eliznik site so I added that link to folk dance links list.
2008/3/4: Spelling corrections: Used the Myspell spellchecker in KompoZer to spellcheck all the manually generated HTML files on the site (boring) and corrected spelling mistakes in about 25 of them. (Also updated my spelling of 'e-mail' to use the modern hyphen rather a logical apostrophe (as 'e' stood for 'electronic').)
2008/3/2: Link corrections: Tested this site with Linklint (since KompoZer does not have an inbuilt link checker) and it found some broken links that HoTMetaL Pro had missed. These were one case mismatch (a risk of using M$ Windows for file management) which fortunately the webserver had been compensating for and 3 pages with link anchors wrong (FAQ, Privacy Policy and How to Stop Ant Infestations Humanely). These have been corrected. Also changed 3 mailto links that were accidentally left in the site to links to the contact page.
2008/3/2: Site history date corrections: Noticed that some dates in this page that should have been 2007/1/15 were written as 2006/11/15 (I use a copy, paste & alter method a lot and forgot to alter in that case). Corrected them.
2008/3/2: Christmas cards: Each year I make my own Christmas Cards. They have become quite popular and I get requests for back-issues from previous years so now I have put the complete collection that I have available on the WWW for anyone to have free. It took quite long time because some of them only previously existed on paper, I wanted them pixel-perfect, most are mixture of line-art & photography which needed chopping into PNG & JPEG sub-images for different optimisation and I had to find and switch to a new HTML editor (but at least it should only need updating once per year!). The cards, being so graphical, have almost doubled the size of this site to almost 6 MiB
2008/3/2: Change of HTML editor: Almost all of this site (other than the dance note pages which were formatted by my custom Perl scripts) was written using HoTMetaL Pro 5. Unfortunately it has got too old (it dates from 1999), in particular it is not compatible with Unicode/UTF-8 and has problems with the more strict filesystem & registry permissions on newer M$ Windows versions. After investigating the available free & cheap cross-platform (future-proofing) replacements I've chosen KompoZer (the latest in the Mozilla Composer - Nvu series) which is currently beta-ish buggy and lacks some of the HoTMetaL features I used but is better in some ways, including UTF-8 support, and looks like it will become popular and improved.
2008/1/21: More warnings and alternatives for empty directory deleting: A reader pointed that deleting empty directories has to be carefully applied as some empty ones might be needed by programs and the OS so I've added a warning anent that to accompany my program to delete empty directories. Another reader pointed out a couple of GUI file managers that now have the feature so I've linked to them. (Yippie! That is all the boring updates & corrections to this site complete for now so hopefully the next change will be something new.)
2008/1/21: Updated flavour list in novelty wine recipes: Corrected the novelty wines recipe page. Despite adding many more flavours in the 5 years since I first wrote the page, I'd forgotten to add them to the list in the introduction. Oops. Done now.
2008/1/21: Major update of folk dance site links list: Checked all the links in my folk dance links list. Over half had expired but I tracked down the current URLs of most of them and updated them, removed the few dead ones & updated descriptions where content had substantially changed. It was very very tedious to do! Also added some new links and tidied the page changing two layers of sublisting to headings and removing the parentheses that unnecessarily surrounded all descriptions.
2007/12/11: Added another counter spambot measure to contact page & script: After almost no spam for six months, started getting about 15 a day as some damn spambot is reading the human readable text of the form and deducing which fields are subject, from address & message. Added a simple checkbox which needs to be checked for messages to be sent.
2007/11/11 Added another Balkan(ish) dance: Added 'Kareve Yom', a Sacred/Circle dance, to my Balkan etc. dance notes. Unlike the previous ones I have not added it because I have taught/lead it but because a friend of mine put a version of my notes for it on the WWW over a year ago linking to this site as the original.
2007/10/30: More novelty wines: Added bay, muscovado, rose petal & kvas wines to my novelty wines recipe page.
2007/10/24: More rock cake options & a Sachertorte improvement: Added some recently found options to my rock cake recipe and a slight recipe easing improvement to my Sachertorte recipe.
2007/10/23: Animated Rainbow Labyrinths: Added 16 animated spectrum coloured labyrinths to my Rainbow Labyrinth art collection. Varying in styling from elegant to mesmeric to gaudy. Took a year from when I added the original static ones because of having to get around to making a format with files small enough for WWW use not the massive animated GIFs & MNGs my system originally produced. They are now 1/1000th of the size as Javascript animated HTML.
2007/10/21 Balkan dance correction: Corrected 'A, ya po lugu' in my Balkan etc. dance notes after getting the definitive region information and it turned out to be Russian not my guess of Ukrainian.
2007/10/18: Updated Rainbow Labyrinth generating program: Updated my spectrum flood fill program & its instructions to the latest version, which can now output HTML/CSS/Javascript animated fills as well as static images.
2007/10/18: Corrected Rainbow Labyrinths stylesheet: When improving this site's main stylesheet I forgot to augment the Rainbow Labyrinths stylesheet and one some of the features I added to make it robust against off-spec CSS implementation in some browsers overwrote what the later stylesheet expected resulting in black on black text so the explanations of the art on those pages has been unreadable for nearly 2 months. Oops. Fixed it.
2007/10/10: Added favicon.ico & robots.txt files: This site had neither as no icon usefully represents the mixture of content of this site and nothing is excluded from WWW 'robots' (programs that autonomously download pages, e.g. search engines) but many browsers & robots try downloading the site icon & robot exclusion settings filling my error logs with spurious 404 errors so I have added favicon.ico & robots.txt files. The icon is merely the first generic image in Microsoft Icon format I created (for an application in 1996) and the robot exclusion file is empty.
2007/10/10: Added favicon.ico & robots.txt files: This site had neither as no icon usefully represents the mixture of content of this site and nothing is excluded from WWW 'robots' (programs that autonomously download pages, e.g. search engines) but many browsers & robots try downloading the site icon & robot exclusion settings filling my error logs with spurious 404 errors so I have added favicon.ico & robots.txt files. The icon is merely the first generic image in Microsoft Icon format I created (for an application in 1996) and the robot exclusion file is empty.
2007/10/6: Added region to index table of Balkan etc. dances: Added to the index table of Balkan etc. dance notes the regions (typically countries) that the dances came from. I had intended to do this from the start and the code to extract regions from dance notes was in my table generating problem but had forgotten to include it in the output.
2007/10/6: Minor correction to Cotswold Morris detailed notes: Just corrected the spelling in my Cotswold Morris Dancing detailed notes, of one of the sides I learnt a dance variation from. I have found that this site has become very popular for Morris with 2 out of the 5 top Google.com hits for 'Cotswold+morris' & 'Cotswold+morris+dance' being this site!
2007/10/6: Minor update to Balkan etc. dances: Minor updates of A ya po lugu & Zhensko Svatbarsko Horo in my Balkan etc. dance notes adding more information anent alternative spellings.
2007/7/5: Linked directly from homepage to subdirectories: The section links on the homepage linked to section contents lists on the homepage which lead to the section subdirectories and pages therein. As the section directories also contain lists of pages therein, this was an unnecessary extra level of link clinking for visitors to go through so changed those section links to go direct.
2007/7/5: Added .htaccess redirect to new Lagabag site: Some sites are still linking to the old Lagabag Morris site which was a subdomain of this site. This causes problems as the server automatically redirects to this server keeping the old URL giving the appearance of a doppelg�nger of this site under a different name which will confuse linking visitors & search engines. There is not much hope of getting them all fixed as one of the main Morris Dance lists has not been updated for 3 years. Hence added an automatic redirect to the new Lagabag Morris site.
2007/9/3: Improved sort order of Balkan etc. dances: Improved the program that lists & formats my Balkan etc. dance notes so that it generates the list in close to alphabetical order rather than merely Unicode order (e.g. so that 'C' with cedilla comes next to 'C' not after 'Z'). Of course the ordering of mixed languages is somewhat arbitrary as different languages have subtle differences in their Latin derived alphabets.
2007/9/2: Added more Balkan etc. dances: Added the dances I lead at the August 2007 Youlgreave event that are not already there - Bulgarian party mix, Zhensko Svatbarsko Horo, A ya po lugu, Teen & Vayiven Uziyahu - to my Balkan etc. dance notes.
2007/9/1: Improved Balkan etc. dance note formatting: My Balkan etc. dance notes were formatted for use as stand-alone files for printing & emailing. They worked on the WWW but were not ideal so I've made a program which adapts them for this website. The resulting pages now fit the site CSS style, have the additional CSS style features in external rather than internal stylesheets, have links from summary to full versions & vice versa and from both to the index page, have links to their freeware licences and have contact links.
2007/8/23: Added more Balkan etc. dances: Added the dances I lead at the May 2006 Balkanplus - Mesjog Gur, Arap, Kratko Vlashko Kolo, Gaida Gynekios Makedonikos & Cavresli -to my Balkan etc. dance notes.
2007/8/23: Improved CSS: After finding that some web browsers did not rescale my headings proportionately with changes in the size & some font settings were not propagating into some elements in some browsers, I have made both those two explicit in this site's main stylesheet. Also reduced some duplication so the resulting stylesheet file is actually smaller despite specifying more.
2007/8/21: Added more Balkan etc. dances & changed their layout: Added the dances I lead at the November 2006 Balkanplus that are not already there, Preumblata & Kalagmatchkata, to my Balkan etc. dance notes. Also updated the disclaimers and layout to be more suited to a public website (previously I just emailed my Balkan dance notes to friends even though they were in HTML).
2007/8/19: Added a section for Balkan etc. dances: At last (I have been doing such dancing for longer than Morris dancing & it, not Morris, is my main type of folk dancing) started a section for Balkan, East European, Circle, Israeli & International Folk Dance Notes. As I am still undecided on how to present some aspects, it is still basically just a place-holder with only one dance on it so far. I chose Ege Kasilamasi, a Turkish scarf dance, to start it off as I keep being asked to lead that dance in different events by different people & it is definitely the most popular of my teaching repertoire.
2007/8/19: Removed extra linked page description from home page: Some pages linked to from the home page had secondary descriptions in addition to the hyperlink text whereas others did not. For consistency & to declutter, I removed them. Search engines these days will find them via the second level index pages anyway.
2007/7/23: Added Cotswold Morris Cheat Sheet source code: Added the source code (well, source text) of my Cotswold Morris Dancing Cheat Sheet and instructions on how to render it as the other formats. Although one could convert the HTML or text versions of it back to source, it is more convenient for readers to have the original plus instructions (& is more GPL compliant).
2007/7/21: Updated Cotswold Morris detailed notes: Updated to the latest version (admittedly even that is over a year old) of my Cotswold Morris Dancing detailed notes. Also removed the Zip compression from the PDF printer version, linked the pages to the local GPL copy, de-anonymised it (it previously had only my forename in the credits) and removed out of date link to Lagabag Morris's website that used to be co-hosted with this site (but now someone else administers that).
2007/7/21: Simplified Cotswold Morris Cheat Sheet download: Removed the Zip compression from the PDF printer version of my Cotswold Morris Dancing Cheat Sheet as the main search engines are probably sensible enough now not to return links to PDFs when HTML versions are also provided so I can unhide the PDF.
2007/7/10: Typo corrections: Corrected some typos in the page anent my Recursive Regexp Rename program.
2007/6/22: Corrected Computer Programs index page: In editing index of computer programs last week, I accidentally corrupted all the links. A site visitor kindly pointed that out to me. I've now corrected them.
2007/6/21: Added counter spambot measure to contact page & script: Getting almost daily spam via it now so made it a little more difficult for spambots by changing the standard ('Title', 'Body' etc.) parameter names to obfuscated ones. Makes no difference to legitimate users.
2007/6/14: Separated Perl Advocacy from Computer Programs index page: The bit on the page anent why I wrote the programs in Perl was not really part of the index of computer programs so I've split it off into its own page.
2007/6/11: Added referrer page URL to contact script information: Not the referrer itself (which would normally just be the contact form) but the page that the client came to the form from hidden in the form by simple Javascript. This is not for security (it is easily faked) but because some people contact me without specifying which page they are writing about!
2007/6/11: Removed a duplicate CSS: One less file. No change to site appearance.
2007/5/27: Added more paranoia to my contact CGI script: I have now got a 'bot' spamming me via my contact script. Drat! Only once so far so I have not bothered to add more antispam features but it made me realise that a 'bot' might try using it for spam even though it is custom made and with a fixed hidden 'To' field so added extra, probably unnecessary, security. Also added logging of client IP address and browser name.
2007/4/29: Sachertorte recipe minor improvements: Added a couple more helpful comments to my Sachertorte recipe.
2007/4/15: Dates with patterns: Added my program for finding calendar dates with patterns. As visitors are not likely to download a program for such a silly and obscure thing, I based the page around precalculated dates for 1990-2019 in text and zip files, with the program as an extra, and put it in the miscellaneous rather than computer programs area.
2007/4/15: Removed Organic India link: Removed it because Organic India (a relative's company that manufactured high-end Indian ready-meals from organic ingredients) has gone bust.
2007/4/10: Recursive Regexp Rename: Added my program for bulk file & directory renaming (supporting recursion into subdirectories, regular expressions for the search & replace terms, regular expression file name filter and a dry run mode) to this site. (It is good to add something new at last. The past 10 changes have just been updates, corrections and administrivia albeit time consuming.)
2007/4/9: Minor typo corrections: Corrected insignificant typos that have been noticed in the article anent what is object oriented programming & the wordsearch solver (where I had accidentally dated the page three years older than the program).
2007/4/7: Novelty wine recipes updated: Updated my novelty wine recipes page with typo corrections, some observations on they matured (in 3 years banana wine changed from revolting to nice and ginger beer did the opposite), some measurement unit conversions and some misc tips.
2007/4/6: Added privacy policy statement: Added a Privacy Policy statement saying what data this site collects about visitors (not much: basically the host uses cookies to count unique visitors and I store the server logs minus the IP addresses). Boring.
2007/4/6: Updated article anent recovering lost emails from GDS cache: A disappointed visitor told me that my programs for recovering lost emails Google Desktop Search's cache no longer work. That is not surprising as they worked by screen scraping and GDS has been through 2 major versions since the one I wrote them for. Added notes to that effect but left the page on-line as the principles explained there are still valid and someone might want to use them or update my programs. Also added my email back-up strategy.
2007/4/6: Removed homepage Lagabag link: Rewrote the explanation of why this site is intentionally bland to remove promotional link to the old Lagabag Morris website. I used to maintain that site but now another member of the team maintains it and the URL has been changed.
2007/4/5: Added a link to another PDF creator setup program: Added a link to Cute PDF Writer (lite) to my article anent how to create PDF files for free after I found that it worked very easily.
2007/1/15: Updated FAQ: The section in my FAQ anent why this site is anonymous is out of date now that is not anonymous so I replaced it one giving variant spellings of my name (so that people looking for me from my academic papers etc. can find me), an apology for not having written a biographical summary and a bit about how and why this site used to be anonymous and how and now is not.
2007/1/15: Added Anent section index page: Added an index page to the Anent section of this site. It is not really needed because the pages in that section are just administrative type support pages that are linked to from the places where they are needed but I put it in for tidiness & completeness and to stop search engines getting an automatically created index page for that directory which lists all the contents equally including the files that are better reached via other pages.
2007/1/15: Corrected Contact email page: Fixed a typos I spotted on my contact form that I noticed when updating the contact links.
2007/1/15: Updated all manually edited pages with recent author, contact & license changes: Rather tediously went through all the pages on this site (other than the computer-generated ones which will be updated next time they are regenerated) changing the author name (from my pseudonym, 'Duramecho', to my real name, 'Andrew Hardwick'), the contact link (from the overly spammed direct email link to contact form that hides the real email address) and the license (from a remote to GPL or unlinked CC-by-sa to a link to my licence explanation page that in turn links to remote GPL & CC-by-sa and a local GPL copy). It was a boring housekeeping type task but needed to be done and could not be done by global search & replace as not the pages had the same licence or same author & contact presentation.
2007/1/9: How to convert audio tape recordings to CDs: Added an article explaining how to convert tape recordings to CDs (& MP3s). The article started when a friend asked me by email how to do that as I have done it often in the past. My reply was detailed & I have other friends ask me it in the past so I augmented the article and put it on this website for anyone else to use.
2007/1/9: Corrected the contact email CGI script settings: The error did not affect operation as far as readers were concerned hence this is the first change to my site that make (other than this note about it) absolutely apparent no change to the site on the WWW.
2006/11/15: Contact email CGI script: Added a form to contact me via that sends to a CGI script I wrote which emails me on a private email address. This is so that people can contact me from this site more reliably than using the public email address I put on this site which gets so much automated spam that I probably discard many legitimate emails with the spam. By using a CGI script I can provide an alternative route that does not reveal the private email address to spammers. Remains to be seen if there are spamming programs that bother to submit web page forms at random.
2006/11/7: License text added to site: Where I have used GPL on this site, I had lazily linked to the master copy of the GPL license on the GNU site but it technically requires a copy to be distributed with the material it covers so I should have a copy on this site. I now have put a copy of the GPL text on this site and a page summarising the licenses (GPL & CC-by-sa) used on this site.
2006/11/7: Removed spurious covered by GPL notices: When using information pages as templates for index pages, I accidentally copied the covered by GPL notices to some of the index pages (including the home page) where they are irrelevant. They are not harmful but look silly there so I've now removed them.
2006/9/29: Tautology removed from rock cakes recipe: A friend of mine noticed that the flapjack recipe his wife had found via Google and was using was mine! His wife, who is a good proofreader, then looked through the rest my recipes and spotted a tautology ("dried sultanas") in one. I've now corrected the rock cakes recipe.
2006/9/13: Recovering lost emails from Google Desktop Search's cache: I made some programs to help a friend recover copies of thousands of lost emails from Google Desktop Search's cache after a mailbox/archive failure, I thought it could be so useful to other people that I have bunged it on this website (with lots of explanation: it seems that most GDS users did not even realise it keeps copies of deleted emails; I don't use it myself & my friend found out but accident) as soon as possible.
2006/8/23: Punting disclaimer: Added a disclaimer to my punting instructions. Also some spelling collections & an explanation of Cambridge/Oxford differences.
2006/8/16: Rainbow Labyrinths: Added a collection of my pretty coloured in labyrinths to the site along with explanations and the program I made to do the colouring. This is a big change in several ways from the previous content on this site: it is purely artistic, not practical; it has gratuitous graphics (although it still downgrades gracefully to pure text when needed) it has a different stylesheet (the artworks looked better on black); it is dual licensed with CC-by-sa in addition to GPL (so readers who just want the pictures need not take the program too); and it includes the first non anonymised pages.
2006/8/16: Art section: Created a new section in the site to display some of my artworks. The only content it will have today is my Rainbow Labyrinth collection.
2006/8/16: Renamed 'Photography' to 'Photography Advice': As I am now going to have an art display section on the site, a title of just 'Photography' might mislead readers into thinking that was a photograph gallery.
2006/8/16: End of anonymity: I have not included my name on the pages of this site (although it is in the source code of the programs and the domain registration record) because, when I started the site, personal web pages were not commonplace so I worried that it would look too arrogant and that potential friends would judge me wrongly based on the very small sample of my opinion I included in the pages so I just used the alias 'Duramecho'. However, thesedays personal web pages are ubiquitous, most have much more embarrassingly naff content than this site has & publishing of personal information that is totally useless to the general public is considered fashionable rather than disgustingly vain. Therefore I'll put my name in the credits of most of the new web pages.
2006/5/22: To do list updated: It has been over a year since I have added fully new material to this site (plenty of additions and corrections to existing articles though). The reason is that I have been creating other things on my home computer. Some of these, particularly my hundreds of art photographs which have now been scanned, indexed & captioned, my film reviews and some computer artwork, are in formats close to WWW compatible and are likely to appear on my website sometime in the future when I get around to finishing them (and getting a bigger bandwidth allocation for the case of photographs) so I have not been completely neglecting to make new material for this site. Updated To Do list.
2006/5/22: Typo corrections: Corrected a typo in my article about C++ const spotted by a reader and two other typos that I found whilst correcting that (how many more typos remain?!). Corrected some typos (including an embarrassingly missing 'not' in a safety disclaimer!) in my novelty wine recipes.
2006/3/16: Updated Cotswold Morris Cheat Sheet: Updated my Cotswold Cheat Sheet including HTML, PDF, plain text & Palm Doc versions.
2006/3/15: Updated Cotswold Morris Detailed Notes: Updated my detailed detailed Cotswold Morris dance steps. Only one more dance but lots of corrections to the notes themselves and one correction to the program the converted them to HTML (I found that I embarrassing had an HTML syntax error that screwed up formatting duplicated across 74 pages!).
2006/3/9: More dance links: Added a link to a friend's page advertising a local dance club to Dance Links page, added another found on the WWW & amended one to a site that had moved as requested by its author.
2006/3/2: Site synchronisation correction: A reader pointed out an alternative to my program to delete empty directories. I thought I had included that alternative a year ago. It turned out that I had not uploaded that replacement page! Oops. Wiped & re-uploaded the whole site. It should be fully synchronised now.
2006/3/2: Another dance link: Added a requested link from someone whom I had met at a dance event years ago to their site of Balkan dance videos & music recordings to the Dance Links page.
2006/1/26: Advised on negative, in preference to print, scanning of photographs: With the recent improvements in consumer grade negative scanners, I added advice to use them in preference to scanning prints to my articles anent Scanning Photographic Prints & Photographic Reprint Colour Consistency.
2006/1/26: Correction to Approx. Physical Constants: A reader, Chad Althouse of Pennsylvania State University, spotted a typo in my list of approximate physical constants. I had missed out the "1+" from "ln(1+x) -> x" in 'Small Value Approximations' section. That typo was 17 years old! Corrected it.
2006/1/7: Silent CD: another use: Added another practical use, suggested by a reader, of my CD of silence to its list of uses.
2005/12/18: More detail to 2 recipes: Added some notes to my melting moments recipe & an improved biscuit mashing method to my chocolate freezer cake recipe.
2005/7/23: Minor correction & alterations to Approx. Physical Constants: Corrected a spelling mistake in my list of approximate physical constants. Also added 2 more Imperial units (thou & fathom) & tidied some spacing.
2005/6/9: Another dance link: A friend of mine who runs an international dance group in Bognor Regis has created a website so I added it to my list of dance links.
2005/6/9: Typo correction: The smallest change yet to this site. Added in a missing closing single quotation mark to my C++ const article. Amazingly that rather cynical, but informative, article as become the top in (English language) Google for 'C++' with 'const' despite me not being a trained nor keen programmer!
2005/5/8: Renamed the 'Food Recipes' section to 'Party Food Recipes': It is more informative. It also removes the unintended implication that my normal diet consists of just cakes & alcohol!
2005/5/8: Correction to flapjack recipe: Corrected a typo in my flapjack recipe that a reader noticed. I had missed out what to do with the sugar! It is amazing that I have had so many compliments anent that recipe with such a big error in it.
2005/3/19: Humanely Stopping Ant Infestations: Got around to writing up a humane way of stopping ant ingress into houses.
2005/3/19: Spelling corrections: Corrected a couple of spelling mistakes a reader spotted in the article anent what Object Oriented Programming is.
2005/3/19: Silent CD: Added a joke CD of silence to download.
2005/3/5: Program to solve wordsearch puzzles: Added a wordsearch solver program.
2005/3/5: Referenced HTML Tidy: Added a link from my download page for my program to strip formatting from Microsoft Word generated HTML to HTML Tidy which I've found also does that task. Also improved the version history in the source code of my version.
2005/3/5: Minor edit to approximate physical constants list: Removed a couple of duplicates from list of Approximate Physical Constants.
2005/3/5: Shell script to delete empty directories: Added a GNU/Linux/Bash shell script alternative to Perl program to delete empty directories.
2005/2/26: PDFCreator linked to from PDF files creation article: A reader, VoltageX, kindly told me that PDF pseudo printer driver setup is now automated by the PDFCreator freeware so I added links to that to my article anent How to Create PDF Files.
2005/2/7: Corrections to attribution of Irish Tea Cake recipe: In correcting the origin of the Irish tea cake recipe, I messed up some grammar. That is now fixed.
2005/2/6: Updated one dance site link: Updated one link on the dance links page after being notified of the change from that site's maintainer.
2005/2/6: Correction to attribution of Irish Tea Cake recipe: Corrected the origin of the Irish tea cake recipe. I had attributed it to the wrong grandparent. I also corrected some spelling.
2005/1/16: Google likes this site: Last month a reader informed me that that this site was the top hit in Google for Sachertorte+recipe which seemed rather unfair to the many sites with more sophisticated or authentic recipes. I checked & found it to he the top hit in the English language search & second from to in several other languages. Maybe it was because my page was simple plain text that search engines can easily processes. It is now down to third but flapjack+recipe, tea+cake+recipe, melting+moments+recipe & rock+cakes+recipe are all top hits! In the case of tea+cake+recipe, it top out of 573,000 hits & even for tea+cake it is 3rd out of 2,600,000 hits. I wonder if I should feel pleased that I am giving so many people enjoyable food or guilty for fattening them (though, with those search terms, I expect they were intending to produce cakes anyway). At least they can get fit dancing as this site is the 3rd hit out of 202,000 for morris+dances.
2005/1/12: Addition to Kmail to Eudora mbox transfer instructions: Added a simple comment anent changing line breaks to how to correct the 'Who' field when transferring mbox e-mail (email) to Eudora.
2004/12/31: Program to delete empty directories: Added a very simple (one line!) Perl program to delete empty directories.
2004/12/30: Kmail to Eudora mbox transfer: Although the two programs have so similar mailbox formats that e-mail files can be copied directly, a small non-standardness in Eudora's version typically messes up the display of the To/From information. Here is how to correct the 'Who' field when transferring mbox e-mail (email) to Eudora.
2004/12/30: Typo correction: Corrected a typo which a reader, J.O. Williams, spotted in Why C has Pointers. I had changed the order of program lines in a pair of examples without changing the output data to match.
2004/12/30: Removals from To Do list: Removed some things which have been done (but which I had forgotten to remove from the list) and my intention of writing an M$ Word tips article (although the principles would be the same, many readers would probably want details for specific recent versions of Word whereas I stopped updating at Word 2k and intend to migrate Open Office or similar) from the 'To Do' list.
2004/10/9: Source-Highlight linked to: After finding GNU Source-Highlight which is far more sophisticated than my own Source Files to Tabless Text, I added a recommendation that readers use that instead.
2004/10/9: Golden syrup translated: Added the USAnian English translation of golden syrup to flapjack recipe.
2004/10/4: Latest version of Cotswold Morris notes: Updated both my Cotswold Morris detailed notes & Cotswold Cheat Sheet.
2004/10/3: PDF creation for Mac & Linux users: They don't need my article anent how to create PDF files because (unlike in pitiful M$ Windows) they have it set up automatically for them when they install the operating system so I added a comment to that affect near the beginning of the article to save them time.
2004/8/17: A bit more anent dust removing: Added more details anent automated dust removal & named GIMP & Photoshop Elements equivalents of the Paint Shop Pro dust filter I used in my article anent scanning photographic prints
2004/8/17: Stupid search engine sends computer gamers to this site: update: I got no reply to my message informing them of their mistake but it seems that they have acted on it because my Cotswold Morris dance cheat sheet is no longer amongst their top recommendations for computer gamers looking for game cheat codes.
2004/7/30: Correction to OOP article: A reader, James Denvir, had spotted that I had accidentally labelled 'overloading' as 'polymorphism' in "What is Object Oriented Programming". Fixed it.
2004/7/19: Removed faulty Java example from C++ const article: Removed references to Java 'in:', 'out' & 'inout:' parameter types from The C++ 'const' Declaration: Why & How because I have now programmed in Java and regrettably found that Java does not have them either. (I should have tested it myself rather than relying on examples from an MSc lecturer in a rather dodgy MSc course.)
2004/7/19: Flapjack recipe augment & spell-check: Added a definition of 'golden syrup' to my flapjack recipe after a North American English speaker queried as to what it was. Also spell-checked it. I somehow forgot to do that both when I made the page & last edited it. There were embarrassingly many spelling mistakes for the most popular page on my site! So I spell-checked this page too and found quite a lot.
2004/7/19: Flapjack recipe augment & spell-check: Added a definition of 'golden syrup' to my flapjack recipe after a North American English speaker queried as to what it was. Also spell-checked it. I somehow forgot to do that both when I made the page & last edited it. There were embarrassingly many spelling mistakes for the most popular page on my site! So I spell-checked this page too and found quite a lot.
2004/7/19: Stupid search engine sends computer gamers to this site: Checking the server logs, I found a surprisingly high number of visits from one search engine (a disreputable one which gets its users by deliberately having as its domain name a common URL typo rather than by the quality of its searches). Even more surprisingly, these were for searches for computer game 'cheat codes' of which this site has none. Instead the lousy search engine was listing my Cotswold Morris dancing cheat sheet in its first page of game cheat sites! By coincidence it had started on April 1st but was not a joke as it was still going on 3 months later. I sent a message to the search engine admin' as it both wastes my bandwidth & annoys their users. I doubt that many computer gamers are interested in Morris dancing but maybe a few of them have been converted :-) .
2004/4/21: Debug: The programs recently put on the Tips for Scanning Photographic Prints with a Flatbed Scanner page had bugs. Replaced them with a debugged versions.
2004/4/14: Minor alterations to programs section: Updated HTML external image links remover utility to only rewrite files that have been altered not all files so as to preserve modification dates of files which did not have links removed (it also runs faster). Added links to the programs (Morris Dance HTML page & PSP Python scripts) elsewhere on this site to the Computer Programs index page.
2004/4/10: Additions to scanning advice page: Added yet more Tips for Scanning Photographic Prints with a Flatbed Scanner. Also added the Paint Shop Pro Python scripts I use to the page.
2004/4/5: Corrections & more FAQs: Some minor corrections to links on home page (one was missing, another doubled) & some additions to the FAQs.
2004/3/30: More dance links: Added more links to the dance links page.
2004/3/18: Additions colour consistency & scanning advice pages: Added the (successful) results of my solution to The Problem of Colour Consistency in Photographic Reprints and added a few more Tips for Scanning Photographic Prints with a Flatbed Scanner.
2004/2/13: Photography advice pages anent colour consistency & scanning: Added pages anent The Problem of Colour Consistency in Photographic Reprints & Tips for Scanning Photographic Prints with a Flatbed Scanner. This has increased the number of images on this site two dozen fold from just 1 to 24!
2004/2/13: New top-level section: photography: Created a section for things related to photography & moved my check-list of Things which don't Look Good In Photographs into it from the Misc. section.
2004/1/4: FAQ: Added a Frequently Asked Questions (and answers) page anent this site.
2004/1/4: Stylesheet changes: Reduced the font size from 12 pt to 11 pt to reduce scrolling. Computer monitors have become clearer since I first created this site and the popular web browsers at last (to a limited extend) allow text magnification so the large clear fonts are not as necessary. Also changed active link highlighting to hover highlighting as browsers now apply 'hover' where Netscape originally applied 'active'.
2003/12/29: To-do list: Added a list of things I intend to add to this website. Made an 'Anent' subdirectory for such pages. Also moved this Site History page into it from the top level.
2003/12/14: Spelling correction: A reader pointed out that 'ambidextrousness' in How to Punt should be 'ambidexterity' so I corrected it.
2003/9/28: More novelty wine flavours: Added some more silly flavours to my Novelty Wines Recipes.
2003/9/28: Sobig worm/trojan: The e-mail server for this site now specifically blocks the Sobig worm but before that block was put in place, the e-mail address I use for comments, info@duramecho.com, received over 600 copies of it. Of course I was not stupid enough to run any but it was a bit irritating deleting them. At least it shows that this is site is well visible on the WWW.
2003/8/11: Typo correction: Corrected a typo in some C syntax in Why C has Pointers.
2003/6/21: Bugfix for Copy File to Next Version and Open utility: Removed a M$ Win32 specific system call accidentally left in Copy File to Next Version and Open & added a work-around of a bug in M$ Office's command-line processing so the program could invoke M$ Word as an editor if one wants it to.
2003/6/19: Updated Morris dance notes: Uploaded latest versions of my Cotswold Morris Cheat Sheet & Cotswold Morris dance notes.
2003/6/19: Updated Copy File to Next Version and Open utility: Put the latest version of my Copy File to Next Version and Open program on the site which replaces both the old M$ Win32 specific version & the cut-down Copy File to Next Version (without opening) version (thereby removing the first program I ever put on the WWW!).
2003/5/20: Improvements to various pages: Minor improvements to the Sachertorte recipe (a way of reducing whisking time), Dance links (a couple more added) & Novelty Wines (three more flavours added).
2003/4/21: Physics (approximate) data sheet: Added an HTML version of my old physics (approximate) data sheets (which I originally made when I was at school but are still useful for order-of-magnitude calculations).
2003/3/1: Powerpoint poster making tips: Followed up my article anent how to do Powerpoint animations, which was one of the founding pages of this site, with one anent How to do Powerpoint posters.
2003/2/20: Cleaning up site structure: Removed the temporary redirects from the old locations of the Morris dance notes. Added shortcuts on the home page to the subsections as the list now scrolls well off the bottom of the screen. Added subindex pages for Dance and Misc categories, even though they only have 3 items apiece, so as not look like an error if visitors reverse up the site's directory tree after jumping into it from a websearch (it had automatic directory listing enabled on the server but thesedays most WWW users do not expect to see such raw 'computery' pages). Also changed the link from the home page of an example of a more artistic site of mine from BTexact Avatar site (for which its year-2000 UK Millennium Dome fame is getting rather out-dated) to a link to my recently produced Lagabag Morris side website.
2003/2/17: More dance links: Added some more links for Balkan/Israeli/International/Circle dance notes to my dance links page.
2002/12/12: Minor alterations to Cotswold notes: Made a correction to the Cotswold Morris dance notes which was pointed by a reader of this site & hyperlinked the pages to Lagabag Morris's website (which I recently created).
2002/11/25: Corrections: Corrected some awful grammar on the food index page.
2002/9/28: Novelty wine recipe. Food sub-index. Removing faulty program: Added novelty home-brewed wine instructions as this site's first non-cake recipe. Added a sub-index for the recipes to encourage readers to move from the overly popular Flapjack to the better Sachertorte. Removed a simple program for removing comments from C, C++ & Perl source files from the site because it had a serious error (I forgot to ignore comment characters which are in string constants) which fixing of would have made the program considerably less simple. This is the first time any section has been removed from this site.
2002/8/21: Corrections: Corrections (repairing a slight file corruption) to my Cotswold Morris Cheat Sheet.
2002/8/18: More Cotswold Morris summary notes. Tidying structure: Added several more dances to my Cotswold Morris Cheat Sheet and moved it from a top level directory to a subdirectory of the 'Dance' directory. Removed the temporary redirects the 'ComputerInformation' directory from its previous location.
2002/8/9: More Cotswold Morris detailed notes. Tidying structure. Amendments: Added several more dances to my Detailed Cotswold Morris dance notes and moved it from a top level directory to a subdirectory of the 'Dance' directory. Also added a few sentences more detail to the description of my program for stripping formatting from M$ Word generated HTML and my explanation of 'const' in C++.
2002/5/19: Perl script correction: Added another cake recipe, that for Melting Moments.
2002/5/19: Perl script correction: Corrected a mistake which made a regexp ambiguous in the version incrementing file/directory copy program & the version incrementing file/directory copy & open program.
2002/4/20: Minor tidying: Renamed the 'Computers' directory to 'ComputerInformation' to make it distinctly different from the new 'ComputerPrograms' directory and put in redirects from the old URLs to it. Added a sub-index for the Computer Information directory.
2002/4/16: Object Oriented Programming explanations & photography tips: After having a yet another person independently ask me to explain what Object Oriented Programming was and knowing that the confusion comes from it normally being made to seem unnecessarily complicated by keen advocates, I added an article explaining what Object Oriented Programming is without the hype. I also put some advice I wrote 7 years ago about things which don't look good in photographs on the site and moved my dance links from the 'misc' folder to a new 'dance' folder.
2002/4/12: Flapjack experiments: After seeing from my server logs that the most popular article on this site was my precise flapjack recipe, I added a write-up of the flapjack cooking experiment I used to arrive at the recipe. This included adding the first image to this site (a purely functional photograph of the resulting cakes). It has a text alternative, of course.
2002/4/11: Many more Perl scripts: Added Perl scripts which will add a table of contents to an HTML page, .extract 'ALT' text from an HTML file for easy editing and put it back again, remove formatting & garbage from HTML generated by M$ Word, remove remote image links from download web pages for off-line reading, convert multiple C, C++ & Perl source code files into tabless text & remove comments from multiple C, C++ & Perl source code files. Added cross-platform linebreak converters to the installation instructions page.
2002/4/3: Made Perl script collection more systematic: Separated computer programs from other computer information and made a sub-index for the computer programs, added some basic installation instructions and split the version incrementing file/directory copy & open program extended version off from the basic version incrementing file/directory copy program.
2002/3/24: Copy to next version Perl script: Started putting some of my useful little general purpose programs on this site with a Perl script for (a version incrementing file/directory copy program).
2002/3/13: C programming explanations: I converted some explanations of C/C++ programming language features - pointers & 'const' - from e-mails I had sent friends into essays in HTML.
2002/1/18: Correction: Corrected a serious typo in the Irish Tea Cake Recipe; the ingredients should not have included margarine.
2002/1/4: PDF making instructions: As making PDF files was not at all straightforward, I added instructions to this site on how to make PDF files. As it used a Definition List for its problem-solution pairs, I added formatting for it do the site's style sheet. I also added instructions for ink jet printers (originally it was for laser printers) to my instructions for doing two sided printing in a normal one-sided printer.
2001/12/21: Improved printer versions of the Cotswold Morris notes: At last I found out how to produce PDF files at good resolution (my previous software would only produce low resolution big file bitmapped text instead of embedded fonts!) so my Cotswold Morris Notes & Cotswold Morris Cheat Sheet are now available in good quality printing form (as well as HTML, text, Palm Doc, etc.).
2001/11/29: Corrections: Typo corrected in flapjack recipe. Language element moved from <BODY> to <HTML> elements.
2001/9/30: Flapjack recipe.: Added a flapjack recipe
2001/8/24: Dance links.: Added a Dance Information Link List containing links to Balkan, Israeli, Scottish & Morris dance websites.
2001/8/20: Powerpoint animation amendments: Corrected some typos & added comment on a Powerpoint 2000 bug.
2001/7/8: Recipe corrections.: Corrected some typos in some cake recipes.
2001/6/6: Cotswold Morris Dance Notes, multiple page: Added more dances to Cotswold Morris notes, both details & summaries.
2001/6/4: Cotswold Morris Dance Notes, multiple page: Quintupled the number of files on this site by adding a version of my Cotswold Morris Dance Detailed Notes separated into individual files per dance (another Perl script job). Also GNUishly added the source code (which, Zip compressed, turned out to be a tenth the size of the resulting files!).
2001/5/30: Cotswold Morris Dance Notes, single page: Added my Cotswold Morris Dance Detailed Notes more than doubling the size (in bytes) of the site custom formatted into a huge page of HTML from Word RTF by a Perl script I wrote. Also added a printer-formatted RTF version. Had to slightly improve the site's CSS after finding that the default paragraph first line indenting was also being applied to preformatted text messing up the layout (I don't know a cure though for the Netscape bug that messes up CSS specified paragraph fonts after a use of preformatted text).
2001/5/20: Cotswold Morris Cheat Sheet: Doubled the size of the site by adding my Cotswold Morris Dancing Cheat Sheet (i.e. quick reference instructions) in HTML, text, Word, PDF & Palm Pilot Doc format. Also added instructions on how to do two sided printing on single sided printers for readers to print out the cheat sheet compactly.
2001/5/20: Change from partly business to purely personal site: This http://duramecho.com site is no longer in commercial use so removed the little remain business stuff and moved this information section to the top level so it now comprises the whole site. Changed my pseudonym to Duramecho to match the domain name.
2000/10/20: Freezer cake, rock cakes, Irish tea cake, standard deviation: Added recipes for alcoholic chocolate freezer cake, rock cakes & Irish tea cake by request. This was getting to look too much like a cookery site so I also added an explanation of why there is the "minus one" in some formulae for standard deviations.
2000/9/16: Start, Sachertorte, Powerpoint animations, punting instructions: Started this site with a recipe for Sachertorte, instructions on how to do animations in Powerpoint & instructions on how to punt. The web-space is a virtual server hosted on Virtual Names UK, it being the cheapest WWW hosting I found with CGI support.

N.B. The dates here are the dates at which the changes were uploaded to the public website and so may be slightly later than when they were written.