The latest issue of the Hoefler & Co. newsletter featured a couple articles from several years ago. Of note, this one about the ¶ character:

Like most punctuation, the paragraph mark (or pilcrow) has an exotic history. … in its original form, the mark was an open C crossed by a vertical line or two, a scribal abbreviation for capitulum, the Latin word for ‘chapter.’

I make liberal use of the capitulum on this site. I’ve adopted its meaning as a chapter marker and use it to mark the end of entries. It’s also linked to the permanent address of the item, conflating its appearance as a P.

I really just chose it because Heldane has a quite fetching rendition of the symbol. Aesthetics over semantics; you will hopefully see fit to forgive me.

Joshua Blankenship regrets:

For the last 5ish [sic] years I haven’t touched this site. It gave the haggard WordPress database long enough to get proper hacked by Pharma Spammers a few times.

…and reminisces:

I don’t know much, but I know I love you I know I miss 2004 web, personal websites, and curation that has nothing to do with algorithms. And maybe you do, too. So here we are, dusting off the URL, like a baby Blankenphoenix rising from the ashes of 27,000 deleted Viagra comments.

I restarted this site about six months ago and had completely forgotten how nice it is to just write something, even if no one else is reading.

My greatest regret is losing all the content from my old site. All that’s left of it is some screenshots and scraps of the HTML and templates that made it. I’ve also lost the domain name I used in 2003, but that’s okay. This one is better.

(Via Brent Simmons, blogger extraordinaire.)

Dr Drang writes:

because I think I’m clever, I didn’t want to do three non-regex replacements

Don’t I know that feeling. I’ve too frequently spent fifteen minutes debugging a regular expression when I could have done a couple simpler (regex or standard) replacements.

Knowing that backreferences to subpatterns technically require two digits may save me some time in future though.

A useful tool if you’re not quite sure what to call that dangly, curvy or sticky-out bit in a letter.

Update: The interactive web site, made by Christian Heilmann was inspired by this image by Martin Silvertant.

(Via Reddit user spekz.)

This has quickly become a listen-as-soon-as-possible podcast. David Tennant on his own is enjoyable enough, but thus far he’s had on some great guests and most importantly had some fantastic chats with them. Recommended.

John Gruber writes at Daring Fireball:

Dean was a magnificent bastard.

Writing about Textpattern the other day reminded me of this excellent piece reminiscing about Dean Allen after his death last year. I was an enthusiastic VC supporter of TextDrive and above all, an avid reader of Dean’s writing. He is missed.

Don’t miss the explanation of what all the things are here, in addition to seeing the ‘dwelling’ side of the van. This looks so cool.

The A.Word.A.Day list (to which I’ve been subscribed for nearly 16 years!) occasionally turns out a corker:

ailurophile

noun: One who loves cats.