Author: James McNally

Pages of the Past

The Toronto Star has digitized every daily issue of their paper, from 1892 through 2001, and put them online. It’s all searchable, too. What a monumental task. It isn’t free, but this will make researchers jobs much easier. I hope other newspapers follow suit. For now, you can check out all the 1945 issues gratis. (via mefi)

UPDATE: The Globe and Mail has done the same thing, with every issue from 1844 onward. Not available for individual access, but apparently some public and university libraries have paid the site licence fees.

Paper of Record appears to be a sort of super-database consisting of scanned newspapers from Canada, the US, the UK, and Mexico. This could become a great resource.

Announcing: Runner-Up!

Well, I’ve been putting this off for some time now, but I figured it’s finally time to let the cat out of the bag.

Back in April, I began a new weblog. It’s called Runner-Up. As you’ll notice, it’s a collection of stories, mostly sports-related, about “non-winners”. I’ve often found that the most interesting stories never get heard in our “winner-take-all” culture. I was particularly inspired by the Olympics, that now oft-maligned celebration of sport and idealism that comes around every few years.

But it’s not only in sport that we find these interesting people and experiences. They’re all around us. From the start, I envisioned Runner-Up as a group blog, with contributions from the worlds of sports, the arts, politics, wherever. I’ve held off publicizing it until now mostly because I’m too lazy and/or unskilled to design the sort of attractive templates that I feel the site needs. So, I’m making an appeal, for two kinds of help:

  1. Most urgently, if you’re a web designer comfortable with Movable Type, I’d love to see some gorgeous standards-compliant web templates that would fit the overall theme and spirit of the site. The tagline (“Where 2nds Count”) will probably stay.
  2. I’m also looking for more long-term help, with contributing writers for the site. You need not contribute often, but if you think you can contribute a story that is in the spirit of the site, please get in touch. I’d especially like some non-sports-related stories that would fit the themes of the site.

Mutual Admiration Society

I think it’s downright hilarious, and oddly touching in a geeky way that after the blogging “explosion”, two blogging “personalities” can still be awed by meeting each other in person.

Recently, in San Francisco, Matt Haughey and Heather Armstrong met for the first time. Though both have been blogging for years and surely must have become jaded with their modest celebrity, each gushed without shame:

mathowie: “[OMFG] IT’S THE DOOCE.”

dooce: “We could barely breathe through gasps of air, and I caught myself bowing and kneeling on the ground beneath him, Oh God of The Internet and the Web and the Thing. I so badly wanted for him to reach out and place his hands on my unworthy head and cleanse me of all the sins I have committed against the Internet.”

Perhaps the most touching example of blogger admiration occurred a few weekends ago, when two web superstars I’m glad to call friends committed their lives to each other. Congratulations and Mazel Tov, Heather and Derek!