Catalogue

This page catalogues the changes made to this website since its on-line inception. The following types of changes are not recorded in this catalogue:

the addition of individual elucidations, except as this is reflected in changes in the bibliography or search engine pages
changes in the tutorial or user's manual pages as a result of feature changes already described herein
minor changes that are not likely to interest users (as if the rest does...)

12 Oct 2005

launched site, with just over 71,000 elucidations

13 Oct 2005

added a few more steps to the tutorial page

16 Oct 2005

added a catalogue page to record website changes, accessible from the search engine page
changed all cross-references appearing within elucidations (e.g. [016.04], [.02], [008.09-010.23]) in beautified mode into hypertext links that can be clicked on to jump directly to the referenced location within the collection
slightly modified the behaviour of the "Overwrite" option on the search engine page to automatically change into the "Append" option after one shorthand selection

18 Oct 2005

added the "Classics" brevity to the search engine page and moved the "Huckleberry Finn" shorthand to it
added the "Thomas Moore: Irish Melodies" and "Thomas Moore: other works" shorthands to the "Classics" brevity on the search engine page
added Linux font installation instructions to the Fweet Figla font page (contributed by phooky)

25 Oct 2005

following an October 15 short review of Fweet by Languagehat (thank you, Languagehat; thank you, Patrick...) and a comment posted there by Martin Langeveld, lamenting the absence of Finnegans Wake text alongside the elucidations, added the "Show FW Text" display option to the search engine page, enabling the display of the Finnegans Wake text associated with the elucidations on a line-by-line basis

29 Oct 2005

added the ability to change search and display options from within the results page

5 Nov 2005

added the "O. Henry: The Four Million" shorthand to the "Books" brevity on the search engine page
added the "Chamber Music", "Dubliners", "Exiles" and "other works" shorthands to the "Joyce" brevity on the search engine page
added the "Newspapers" brevity to the search engine page and added a (baker's) dozen shorthands to it
removed the need for the confusing "James Joyce" shorthand by using longhand forms ("Joyce", "James Joyce") within the collection

12 Nov 2005

the site is one month old, with over 3,000 searches run
added a dozen shorthands to the "Books" brevity on the search engine page: (Ardill, Borrow, Budge (2nd), Chart, Collins, Cosgrave, Crone, Crow, Gaiety, Haliday, Hargrave, Herold)
removed the need for some confusing or unhelpful shorthands in the "Miscellany" brevity by using longhand forms within the collection ("Blessed Virgin Mary", "County", "Dublin", "Harriet Shaw Weaver", "Roman Catholic", "World War I")

19 Nov 2005

changed all page-dot-line location references appearing on the results page in beautified mode into hypertext links that can be clicked upon to see all the elucidations for that line
added a dozen shorthands to the "Books" and "Classics" brevities on the search engine page: (Hughes, Jespersen (2nd), Jones, Joyce (W.S.J.), Lane-Poole, Mackirdy, Millington, Molloy) + (Le Fanu (x2), Macpherson, Twain (2nd))

26 Nov 2005

added shorthands to the "Notebooks" brevity on the search engine page to allow searching notebook entries by crayon colour
added a dozen shorthands to the "Books", "Classics" and "Newspapers" brevities on the search engine page: ("St Malachy", Peter, Ridgway, Sauvé, Travers Smith, Warburton, Webb, Werner (2nd), Yeats) + (Milton (x2)) + (New York Times Book Review)

3 Dec 2005

added the "Shakespeare" brevity to the search engine page with shorthands for all of his works

7 Dec 2005

crossed the 72,000-elucidation mark
added a dozen shorthands to the "Classics" and "Newspapers" brevities on the search engine page: (Coleridge (x2)) + (Connacht Tribune, Dublin Review, Freeman's Journal, Irish Independent, Irish Statesman, Manchester Guardian, Nation and Athenæum, Outlook, Sporting Times, Sunday Express)

10 Dec 2005

added "The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo: Notebook VI.B.6" to the bibliography page
added the "VI.B.6+49c" shorthand to the "Notebooks" brevity on the search engine page
added half a dozen shorthands to the "Books" brevity on the search engine page: (Collins (2nd), Crépieux-Jamin, Gwynn, Jespersen (3rd), Lamy, Lawless)

17 Dec 2005

added the "Motifs" brevity to the search engine page and added a dozen letter-related shorthands to it

24 Dec 2005

added another dozen letter-related shorthands to the "Motifs" brevity on the search engine page

27 Dec 2005

hopefully finished adding the bulk of the "Variants" elucidations (accessible through the "Variants" shorthand in the "Editorials" brevity on the search engine page), with over 900 textual differences among Finnegans Wake editions listed (more than 20 between the Faber and Viking ones) — anyone wishing to review these and report any mistakes I have introduced would have my heartfelt gratitude
added the "Variants, where the Faber and Viking editions differ" shorthand to the "Editorials" brevity on the search engine page

31 Dec 2005

added Joyce's "Corrections of Misprints in Finnegans Wake" to the bibliography page
added half a dozen shorthands to the "Motifs" brevity on the search engine page: (ALP, HCE, dove/raven, Mick/Nick, Swift/Sterne, tree/stone)
moved the "A/O", "L/R", "P/K" and "P/Q" shorthands from the "Miscellany" brevity to the "Motifs" brevity on the search engine page
removed the need for the unhelpful "Century" shorthand by using longhand forms for centuries within the collection, thereby altogether removing the "Miscellany" brevity from the search engine page

7 Jan 2006

crossed the 73,000-elucidation mark
added half a dozen shorthands to the "Motifs" brevity on the search engine page: (duck/drake, ear/eye, goat/sheep, Jerry/Kevin, left/right, Paul/Peter)

14 Jan 2006

I am scheduled to present the Fweet website at the upcoming Genetic Joyce and Beckett Studies conference in Antwerp (March 16-17), under the title 'Fweets of Fin': Towards a Web-based Finnegans Wake Research Tool
added half a dozen shorthands to the "Motifs" brevity on the search engine page: (Mookse/Gripes, Ondt/Gracehoper, "Ay, ay!", "Ah, ho!", "Adear, adear!", "And so. And all.")
changed all page-dot-line location references appearing on the results page in beautified mode into a rather complex set of four hyperlinks taking the form "–012.34+", so that clicking on the line number yields all the elucidations for that line (as before), clicking on the page number yields all the elucidations for that page, and clicking on the "–" or "+" yields all the elucidations for the preceding line or following line, respectively, of Finnegans Wake

17 Jan 2006

modified the search program to shorten the loading time of result pages by about 25-30 percent

21 Jan 2006

added half a dozen shorthands to the "Joyce" and "Motifs" brevities on the search engine page: (letters, Gorman, Ellmann) + (7 colours of rainbow, 7 items of clothing, 100-letter thunderword)
split the longer shorthands under the "Chapter" brevity on the search engine page (II.2, II.3, III.3) into two or three separate shorthands for easier retrieval
modified the search program to further shorten the loading time of result pages by an additional 15 percent or so

28 Jan 2006

added half a dozen shorthands to the "Books", "Classics" and "Motifs" brevities on the search engine page: (Caufeynon, Haldane, Metchnikoff) + (Gibbon) + (4 elements, 4-stage Viconian cycle)

4 Feb 2006

added a new "Scope Options" feature to the search engine page, namely the ability to order the search engine to perform the search on the Fweet elucidations (as before) or on the text of Finnegans Wake itself (new), or on both, as exemplified towards the end of the tutorial page
added "The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo: Notebook VI.B.1" to the bibliography page
added the "VI.B.1" shorthand to the "Notebooks" brevity on the search engine page
added a small brown-'n'-yellow favicon to all the site's pages (a favicon is a small icon or logo that is displayed in most modern browsers alongside the page's name or address in the browser's address line and/or in its bookmarks/favourites menu or toolbar)

11 Feb 2006

added the "Clusters" brevity to the search engine page and added half a dozen shorthands to it (animals, birds, composers, fish, Irish counties, rabbits)

18 Feb 2006

added half a dozen shorthands to the "Clusters" brevity on the search engine page: (Aristophanes, astronomy, body parts, cards, cricket, poisonous plants)
added a link to the icarustkat blog on the tutorial page

25 Feb 2006

added half a dozen shorthands to the "Clusters" brevity on the search engine page: (ball games, Joyce's addresses in Dublin, legs, lord-lieutenants of Ireland, lord-mayors of Dublin, steaks)
added three early sigla shorthands to the "Sigla" brevity on the search engine page
updated the Fweet Figla font to include the three early sigla; if you have already downloaded the font, you may want to download it again from the fweet figla font page
added extremely arcane examples on how to use regular expressions to wither one's mind away on the user's manual page [P.S. these were removed a couple of months later to protect the innocent]

4 Mar 2006

crossed the 74,000-elucidation mark
moved the "Rivers" shorthand from the "Mundanes" brevity to the "Clusters" brevity on the search engine page

11 Mar 2006

added "The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo: Notebook VI.B.16" to the bibliography page
added the "VI.B.16" shorthand to the "Notebooks" brevity on the search engine page
added half a dozen shorthands to the "Books" and "Motifs" brevities on the search engine page: (Commelin, Gallois, Key, Rothschild, Walsh) + (pen/post)

17 Mar 2006

presented the Fweet website at the "Genetic Joyce and Beckett Studies" conference in Antwerp (thank you, Geert and Dirk)

19 Mar 2006

added half a dozen shorthands to the "Clusters" brevity on the search engine page: (chemistry, churches in Dublin, ear, Irish writers, letters, philosophers)

25 Mar 2006

added a new "Also Search Related Shorthands" scope option on the search engine page (on by default), to also search any shorthands related to the given search string (e.g. "Dublin" will also search for books and newspapers with the word "Dublin" in their title, "Jespersen" will also search for books by Jespersen, "Shakespeare" will also search for all of Shakespeare's works, "Italian" will also search for Italian language elucidations, "Sigla" will also search for all the sigla, &c.)
added half a dozen shorthands to the "Clusters" brevity on the search engine page: (7 canonical hours, 7 gifts of the Holy Ghost, 7 levels of ecclesiastical hierarchy, 7 liturgical colours, 7 sacraments, 9 levels of celestial hierarchy)
added a fledgling "Personal Contributions" section to the bibliography page
fixed the highlighting of matches split across two or more lines when searching within the Finnegans Wake text

1 Apr 2006

added half a dozen shorthands to the "Clusters" brevity on the search engine page: (battles, chess, Finno-Ugric languages, grammar, Hamiltons, insects)
added a recommended citation example to the Utilities section of the search engine page for those brave souls wishing to cite this website

8 Apr 2006

added half a dozen shorthands to the "Clusters" and "Motifs" brevities on the search engine page: (districts of Dublin, John McCormack's repertoire, rulers, space, time) + (time/space)

12 Apr 2006

the site is six months old, with over 13,000 searches run
finished compiling the "Synopsis" feature (accessible through the "Synopsis" shorthand in the "Editorials" brevity on the search engine page), giving a bird's-eye view of Finnegans Wake at a ratio of about one line per page of the book — anyone wishing to review this and improve upon my clumsy attempt would have my heartfelt gratitude
added a "Clear String" button to the search engine page, to allow people to clear the "Search String" text-box without affecting the checked options (unlike "Reset All", which restores all defaults)

19 Apr 2006

added Rose & O'Hanlon's "Understanding Finnegans Wake" to the bibliography page
added support for special keywords (AND, OR) to be used within the "Search String" on the search engine page (more details may be found under Keywords, AND, and OR on the user's manual page)
slightly modified the "Line" and "Page" shorthands on the search engine page, to also support very old versions of Internet Explorer (for Windows and Mac), that seem to have a bug that resulted in extra zeroes being improperly prepended to the page and/or line number (this should have no effect on other browsers)

29 Apr 2006

added "The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo: Notebook VI.B.5" to the bibliography page
added the "VI.B.5" shorthand to the "Notebooks" brevity on the search engine page
added THEN to the list of supported keywords (more details may be found under THEN on the user's manual page)

5 May 2006

added volume 28 of the "James Joyce Quarterly" periodical to the bibliography page
added half a dozen shorthands to the "Books" and "Clusters" brevities on the search engine page: (Chateaubriand) + (insurance, logic, musical instruments, popes, prehistory)
added the not-so-useful "Sort Alphabetically" display option to the search engine page, allowing for results to be sorted alphabetically by elucidation text, rather than by the default page-and-line order
added a new advanced "Text Search Distance" option to the search engine page, governing the number of lines (1 to 4) to scan when searching the "Finnegans Wake Text" scope

13 May 2006

I am scheduled to present the Fweet website at the upcoming XXth International James Joyce Symposium in Budapest (June 11-17)
added half a dozen shorthands to the "Clusters" and "Motifs" brevities on the search engine page: (7 Wonders of the Ancient World) + (Caddy/Primas, Shem/Shaun, 4 cardinal points, 4 provinces, 5 senses)
added comments about Internet Explorer 7.0 to the four browsers page

19 May 2006

added half a dozen shorthands to the "Motifs" brevity on the search engine page: (Browne/Nolan, red/violet, "Aujourd'hui comme aux... (Quinet)", "How are you today, my dark/fair sir?", "When is a man not a man... (first riddle of the universe)", "Why do I am alook alike a poss of porterpease?")
added "search duration" and "search and display duration" report strings at the top and bottom of the results page, respectively

26 May 2006

added half a dozen shorthands to the "Motifs" brevity on the search engine page: (-ation, Tingsomingenting/Nixnixundnix, "Dear Dirty Dublin", "How Buckley shot the Russian General", "O felix culpa! (Exsultet)", "Obedientia Civium Urbis Felicitas (Dublin motto)")

2 Jun 2006

crossed the 75,000-elucidation mark
thanks to K. Bartnicki, added half a dozen Polish diacritics to the collection and the "Diacritics" brevity on the search engine page: (ą, ć, ł, ń, ś, ż)

9 Jun 2006

added half a dozen shorthands to the "Books", "Clusters" and "Motifs" brevities on the search engine page: (Fleming (x2)) + (asses) + (4 evangelists (Mamalujo), heliotrope, hesitency)

15 Jun 2006

presented the Fweet website at the XXth International James Joyce Symposium in Budapest

24 Jun 2006

added NEXT to the list of supported keywords (more details may be found under NEXT on the user's manual page)
rewrote some of the text on the home page, failing yet again to make it worth a read
changed the default value of the "Ignore Accent" option on the search engine page from 'on' to 'off', as it needlessly slowed down many searches

1 Jul 2006

added a thinkamalinks page to list websites that have been kind enough to link to the Fweet website, accessible from the search engine page
added a preliminary "Portions of Books" section to the bibliography page
moved the "Pidgin" shorthand from the "Languages" brevity to the "Registers" brevity on the search engine page

7 Jul 2006

added half a dozen shorthands to the "Books" brevity on the search engine page: (Bury, Czarnowski, Langdon, Martin, Perry, Riguet)
added checking for the presence of JavaScript support in the search engine page (completely irrelevant for the vast majority of users, who already have such support)
moved the "Swiss (German)" shorthand from the "Languages" brevity to the "Registers" brevity on the search engine page

14 Jul 2006

added "The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo: Notebook VI.B.14" to the bibliography page
added the "VI.B.14" shorthand to the "Notebooks" brevity on the search engine page
added a potentially-helpful hint on some empty result pages, intended for people who may be searching for a word or phrase from the text of Finnegans Wake itself without having enabled the 'Search in Finnegans Wake Text' option (which is intentionally off by default)

21 Jul 2006

added NEAR to the list of supported keywords (more details may be found under NEAR on the user's manual page)
added a new advanced "NEAR Merge Distance" option to the search engine page, governing the number of lines (1 to 4) to use when merging a search involving the NEAR keyword
added a potentially-helpful hint on some empty result pages, intended for people who may be searching for elucidations for page 1 of Finnegans Wake, whereas Finnegans Wake actually starts on page 3

28 Jul 2006

added volume 29 of the "James Joyce Quarterly" periodical to the bibliography page
improved the algorithm for highlighting of matches split across two or more lines when searching within the Finnegans Wake text
added a "country" field to the comment on me page

4 Aug 2006

the site is having some intermittent technical problems beyond my control, whereby searches may be extremely slow (and may even crash) during North-American daytime peak hours; I am trying to resolve the problem, either through my current hosting service or by moving to another hosting service, a move that may take quite a while; meanwhile, if your search results in a blank page, try rerunning it; I truly apologise for the inconvenience
added the "Save Default" button to the search engine page, to allow people to have their own persistent default for the search engine's options, rather than being chained to the site's own default (e.g. useful for people always forgetting to turn on the "Show FW Text" or "Search in Finnegans Wake Text" options)
added the "Delete Saved Default" button to the search engine page, to allow people to delete a previously-saved default-state

11 Aug 2006

added issue 1 of the "Genetic Joyce Studies" periodical to the bibliography page

18 Aug 2006

added half a dozen shorthands to the "Books", "Clusters" and "Motifs" brevities on the search engine page: (Holland) + (death, eggs, peace) + (111, 1132)

25 Aug 2006

published a written version of my recent presentations at the Antwerp and Budapest conferences in issue 6 (Spring 2006) of "Genetic Joyce Studies", under the title 'Fweets of Fin': Towards a Web-based Finnegans Wake Research Tool
the recent technical problems (see the 4 Aug entry) seem to be resolved to some degree, but search times still leave something to be desired; I am still considering a move to another hosting service
added a potentially-helpful hint on some empty result pages, intended for people who may be unintentionally searching for a a string containing underscores (perhaps remnants from a previous shorthand search)

1 Sep 2006

added volume 30 of the "James Joyce Quarterly" periodical to the bibliography page

10 Sep 2006

added half a dozen shorthands to the "Books", "Classics", "Clusters" and "Motifs" brevities on the search engine page: (Sheed) + (Tennyson (x2)) + (7 kings of Rome, fear) + (mishe/tauf)

15 Sep 2006

added issue 2 of the "Genetic Joyce Studies" periodical to the bibliography page
search times are now stable and have slightly improved, so I will be remaining with my current hosting service (Netfirms) after all

22 Sep 2006

added Schork's "Joyce and the Classical Tradition" to the bibliography page

29 Sep 2006

added half a dozen shorthands to the "Classics" and "Motifs" brevities on the search engine page: (Byron (x2), Carroll (x3)) + (Tip)
added a potentially-helpful hint on some empty result pages, intended for people who may be attempting a search using keywords, but have forgotten to make the keywords all-uppercase

1 Oct 2006

the site is one year old (according to the Jewish calendar)
added half a dozen shorthands to the "Diacritics" brevity on the search engine page: (ō, ř, ½, ∞, ∴, ∵) — the last two are sadly unsupported by Internet Explorer

6 Oct 2006

added volume 31 of the "James Joyce Quarterly" periodical to the bibliography page

12 Oct 2006

the site is one year old (according to the Gregorian calendar), with over 33,000 searches run
after a first year, a year in which the site has gained a small band of faithful followers and a larger band of occasional users, a year in which its search capabilities have grown dramatically, a year in which it seems to have become a useful addition to the arsenal of tools at the disposal of any student of Wakese, a year in which it has gained a modicum of maturity and stability, a year in which the collection has grown by almost 5,000 elucidations, a year of daily work and weekly updates, I have decided to slow down a bit; the next year will see more work being done behind the scenes, on the collection itself, adding, deleting and modifying elucidations, rather than on the website proper; updates will continue, but will be more irregular, every few weeks, as time allows; do not fear, the website will remain alive and growing, but I will allow myself a life as well, following other avenues, populated by other interests, alongside Finnegans Wake
accordingly, in the spirit of improving the contents of the collection, I have completely rewritten the volunteering your help page, in order to advertise for proof-readers to read portions of the collection and check them against source material (if you are interested, more details can be found on that page)

20 Oct 2006

crossed the 76,000-elucidation mark
the site was mentioned in the "Current JJ Checklist (96)" (James Joyce Quarterly, volume 41, number 4, page 812; this issue was published a couple of months ago but bears a Summer 2004 date)
added two shorthands to the "Books" and "Diacritics" brevities on the search engine page: (Hardiman) + (ā)

28 Oct 2006

added one shorthand to the "Books" brevity on the search engine page: (Hine)
removed the "Finnegans Wake" shorthand, which seemed to confuse some users (who apparently thought these few elucidations to represent all the notes about Finnegans Wake), from the "Joyce" brevity, by using longhand forms ("Finnegans Wake") within the collection
hopefully somewhat improved the hint system, whereby some not uncommon user mistakes are identified and possibly helpful hints are offered when searches result in zero elucidations

3 Nov 2006

added a few more links to the thinkamalinks page
added a few more hints to the hint system

10 Nov 2006

added two shorthands to the "Clusters" and "Diacritics" brevities on the search engine page: (Dublin Architects and Sculptors) + (¼)
slightly changed the behaviour of the search engine script to discard all but one of multiple consecutive spaces between words typed in the search string (to help those of you with a "sticky" space bar)
added Macintosh font installation instructions to the Fweet Figla font page (contributed by Joel Reisman)

17 Nov 2006

added one shorthand to the "Books" brevity on the search engine page: (Booth)

24 Nov 2006

added three shorthands to the "Books" and "Classics" brevities on the search engine page: (Ferguson) + (Irving (x2))

2 Dec 2006

added "The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo: Notebook VI.B.29" to the bibliography page
added the "VI.B.29" shorthand to the "Notebooks" brevity on the search engine page

8 Dec 2006

added the special JJA issue of the "Genetic Joyce Studies" periodical to the bibliography page
added suggestions to the user's manual page about ways to handle the very rare case where a complex search "crashes"

16 Dec 2006

added issue 3 of the "Genetic Joyce Studies" periodical to the bibliography page
simplified the contributing elucidations page
somewhat improved the hint system by allowing more than one hint for the same search

22 Dec 2006

added two shorthands to the "Classics" brevity on the search engine page: (Goldsmith (x2))

29 Dec 2006

added a page entitled The Analyst, that lists the contents of all the issues of the now-almost-forgotten Joycean periodical bearing the same name, accessible from the search engine page

5 Jan 2007

the site was mentioned on Simon Loekle's "Year Out Wake" radio program on WBAI; an MP3 recording is available on the thinkamalinks page

12 Jan 2007

added volume 32 of the "James Joyce Quarterly" periodical to the bibliography page

19 Jan 2007

added Van Hulle's "Joyce & Beckett Discovering Dante" to the bibliography page
changed occurrences of the theoretically-confusing 'St' abbreviation within the collection into either 'Saint' or 'Street'

26 Jan 2007

added issue 4 of the "Genetic Joyce Studies" periodical to the bibliography page
added two shorthands to the "Diacritics" brevity on the search engine page: (Ā, Ó)

2 Feb 2007

added five shorthands to the "Books" and "Diacritics" brevities on the search engine page: ("Scottish Clans", Ellis, Jabotinsky, Paget) + (Ă)

9 Feb 2007

added "The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo: Notebook VI.B.32" to the bibliography page
added the "VI.B.32" shorthand to the "Notebooks" brevity on the search engine page

16 Feb 2007

added the not-so-useful "Get Following" option to the search engine page, through which one may ask the search engine to retrieve, for each elucidation found, the following elucidation within the collection (more details may be found under Get Following on the user's manual page)
moved the "Sort Alphabetically" option to a different row of options on the search engine page
redid the shorthands of the "Chapter" brevity on the search engine page to offer the expected number of 17 shorthands as well as to work somewhat faster

23 Feb 2007

completely redesigned the algorithms behind the "Ignore Accent" option on the search engine page, so that when it is on it now runs virtually as fast as when it is not; therefore, it is now on by default
added labels to the shorthands of the "Diacritics" brevity on the search engine page
after sixteen months of slow ascent, Fweet made it, quite possibly temporarily, to the bottom of the first page of Google when searching for Finnegans Wake; as of February 17, when one performs a search for Finnegans Wake on different search engines, Fweet is located at #7 on Google, #8 on Netscape, #9 on AOL, #10 on Altavista, #11 on Yahoo, #15 on Dogpile, #32 on Ask, #36 on MSN, and #37 on A9 — the next milestone, probably not achievable in the upcoming year, is to be #4 on www.google.com, just above the three-entry "advertisement" for a similarly-named Philadelphia pub

2 Mar 2007

added three shorthands to the "Books" brevity on the search engine page: (Fay, Harris, Hunt)

7 Mar 2007

added issue 5 of the "Genetic Joyce Studies" periodical to the bibliography page
listed on the The Analyst page a few issues of The Analyst I have for sale
the performance of the search engine has again deteriorated dramatically through no fault of mine; I am therefore working to move the site to another hosting service in the upcoming week — I apologise for any inconvenience this move may cause, but hopefully it may be rewarded by a significantly better long-term performance

14 Mar 2007

after seventeen months in which Fweet had been hosted on the web servers of Netfirms, it has now moved to those of the cuter-named Hostpapa, which promises to offer a significantly faster performance of the search engine, hopefully

17 Mar 2007

added to the results page, when searching for a given page, links to the previous and to the next page, in order to simplify browsing of the elucidations on a page-by-page basis

23 Mar 2007

added volume 33 of the "James Joyce Quarterly" periodical to the bibliography page
added two shorthands to the "Languages" and "Motifs" brevities on the search engine page: (Pular) + (So pass the fish for Christ sake, Amen)
updated the division into subsections of the "Synopsis" feature (accessible through the "Synopsis" shorthand in the "Editorials" brevity on the search engine page) to better match the subdivision presented in Appendix 1 of Crispi and Slote's How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake (still differing for sections II.1.6, II.2.3 to II.2.8, and II.3.6)

30 Mar 2007

expanded the Yahoo Groups section of the thinkamalinks page
removed two shorthands from the "Languages" brevity on the search engine page (Hawaiian, Pular), as no elucidations use them any more

6 Apr 2007

added issues 2, 3 and 4 of volume 1 of "A Finnegans Wake Circular" to the bibliography page
rather active discussion of Fweet has been going on in the "Prankquean" group on Yahoo Groups (accessible through the thinkamalinks page, if one decides to join the group)

13 Apr 2007

changed the behaviour of the search engine when both the "Sort Alphabetically" and "Get Following" options are on, from performing the latter first and the former second, to doing the hopefully-more-useful reverse (if anyone would like to have an option added which allows one to use the old behaviour, please let me know)

19 Apr 2007

added issue 6 of the "Genetic Joyce Studies" periodical to the bibliography page

27 Apr 2007

added volume 34 of the "James Joyce Quarterly" periodical to the bibliography page

3 May 2007

added issues 1-11 of the "The Analyst" periodical to the bibliography page

10 May 2007

crossed the 77,000-elucidation mark

26 May 2007

added one shorthand to the "Motifs" brevity on the search engine page: (Stop, please stop...)

1 Jun 2007

changed the resolution of the reported "search duration" and "search and display duration" on the results page from whole seconds to milliseconds
in a futile attempt to minimise incoming spam mail, I have changed all the email addresses of the Fweet website, invalidating all previous addresses; I can still, of course, be contacted through the "Comment on Me!!" facility

8 Jun 2007

added a preliminary "Articles in Non-Joycean Periodicals" section to the bibliography page (thanks to Harold Ryan)

15 Jun 2007

added one shorthand to the "Classics" brevity on the search engine page: (Dickens)
added a new feature entitled "Tip of the Month" to the monthly messages sent on the Fweet mailing list (if you are not yet subscribed to the mailing list and wish to be, you may subscribe through the comment on me page)

22 Jun 2007

added one shorthand to the "Books" brevity on the search engine page: (Thom's (3rd))

29 Jun 2007

added Boyle's "Fishing in Finnegans Wake" article to the bibliography page

6 Jul 2007

added one shorthand to the "Clusters" brevity on the search engine page: (Bridges in Paris)

9 Jul 2007

as quite a few of you have noticed, Fweet, for the first time since its inception, has been inaccessible for an extensive period of time (almost 24 hours) on Sunday and Monday, 8-9 July; I would like to apologise to all of you who have come to depend on it for their daily dose of wakese; I will try to ensure this does not happen again; it has occurred through what seems to have been an error of judgement on the part of the technical support of Hostpapa (Fweet's current hosting service), who, for reasons which are still not quite clear to me, thought that I may be "running commands I should not be able to run" and unilaterally suspended my account; needless to say, I have done no such thing, but it seems it is more difficult – and time-consuming – to prove one's innocence than to provoke the ire of people with power; I am not sure if I should stay with Hostpapa (forgive and forget) or move to another hosting service, and I will evaluate the options in the near future; again, my apologies

13 Jul 2007

added the displaying of the current saved default, just below the options on the search engine page
added comments about Safari for Windows 3.0 beta and Netscape 9.0 to the four browsers page

20 Jul 2007

added volume 35 of the "James Joyce Quarterly" periodical to the bibliography page
added Reynolds's "Joyce and Dante" to the "Portions of Books" section of the bibliography page (thanks to Michael Farrell)

27 Jul 2007

added one shorthand to the "Books" brevity on the search engine page: (Blavatsky)
by popular request, changed the "Anglo-Irish" shorthand in the "Registers" brevity on the search engine page to "Anglo-Irish/Hiberno-English"

3 Aug 2007

added Lernout's "James Joyce, Reader" to the bibliography page
added at the very bottom of the results page a direct link to the "Search Engine" page, to allow you to get back to that page without the need to go through a potentially-long succession of clicks on the "Back" button; note, however, that if you use this link instead of the "Back" button you will reach a brand new instance of the "Search Engine" page, rather than the one you had last used (i.e. default options, empty search string), which might lead to some confusion

10 Aug 2007

added a tips page to hold the "Tips of the Month" published in the monthly email newsletter, accessible from the search engine page

17 Aug 2007

added volume 36 of the "James Joyce Quarterly" periodical to the bibliography page
added details of a forgotten issue (number XXVI) to the The Analyst page, as kindly reported by Edward Burns

24 Aug 2007

with Fweet now having three very dedicated contributors (Clifford Marcus, Harold Ryan and Michael Farrell), who are quite active reading books and articles about Finnegans Wake and proofreading existing elucidations, I spent most of the week incorporating their suggestions into the collection

31 Aug 2007

added Harrington's "James Joyce: Suburban Tenor" to the bibliography page

6 Sep 2007

reprogrammed some portions of the hint system to produce slightly more correct and slightly more helpful hints when a search results in zero elucidations

16 Sep 2007

added volume 37 of the "James Joyce Quarterly" periodical to the bibliography page
added a tip for September to the tips page

21 Sep 2007

the site is two years old (according to the Jewish calendar)
added one shorthand to the "Motifs" brevity on the search engine page: (Tom/Tim)
added Moholy-Nagy's "Vision in Motion" to the "Portions of Books" section of the bibliography page (read by Harold Ryan)

28 Sep 2007

over the past few weeks Clifford Marcus has tirelessly proofread all of Fweet's Italian elucidations (of which there are more than a thousand), offering numerous corrections and improvements, which I was only too glad to accept

5 Oct 2007

added two shorthands to the "Classics" brevity on the search engine page: (Ibsen (x2))
moved one shorthand from the "Books" brevity to the "Classics" brevity on the search engine page: (O. Henry)
added Callaghan's "That Summer in Paris" to the "Portions of Books" section of the bibliography page (read by Harold Ryan)

12 Oct 2007

the site is two years old (according to the Gregorian calendar), with over 63,000 searches run
for its second anniversary, Fweet has received a wonderful birthday gift — on this week, Harold Ryan has finished reading Christiani's "Scandinavian Elements of Finnegans Wake" (added to the bibliography page) and extracting elucidations from it, thus becoming the first person, other than myself, to read an entire book (devoting to it almost four months) into the Fweet collection; thank you!
Fweet's second year has seen some changes — a move to a new and faster hosting service (an average search now takes only 700 milliseconds and many take as little as 350 milliseconds); some decrease in the amount of time I devote to maintaining and updating the site (though not as marked a decrease as I had expected a year ago); a concomitant increase in the involvement of others, both those that occasionally contribute a few new or improved elucidations, and those that are more committed and actually proofread whole sections of the collection, or read books and articles about Finnegans Wake and digest them into elucidation format — alongside a steady rise in the number of website pages, sources, shorthands, elucidations (some 1,800 new ones this year), and visits to the site (about 100-200 visits a day every day – not half-bad for a website about a book nobody reads)
in the spirit of getting even more people involved, I have yet again completely rewritten the volunteering your help page, in order to advertise for proofreaders, readers, scanners and bibliographers (if you are interested, more details can be found on that page)
started adding one-line descriptions under the "Personal Contributions" section of the bibliography page (contributors: if you would like to add your own descriptive one-liner (along the lines already exemplified by a few brave souls) or update an existing one (as many times as you wish), please just send me a comment)
added a tip for October to the tips page

19 Oct 2007

reprogrammed a portion of the search engine so that now beautified shorthands on the results page (i.e. the various italicised languages, books, motifs, clusters, &c.) appear as hypertext links, that, when clicked upon, invoke a new search for that specific shorthand (this new feature covers all types of shorthands, except diacritics, editorials, notebooks and sigla)
added Jolas's "Man from Babel" to the bibliography page (read by Michael Farrell)
a bit of useful trivia about what Fweet is really about, according to Google — if you search for "Finnegans Wake" on Google, Fweet comes up only around number 9; however, if you search for "separation of watery part of milk", Fweet is way up there at number 2

26 Oct 2007

extended last week's new feature (i.e. beautified shorthands being hypertext links) to include notebooks and sigla too
added two shorthands to the "Diacritics" and "Sigla" brevities on the search engine page: (Á) + (all sigla)
split the "VI.B.6+49c" shorthand in the "Notebooks" brevity on the search engine page into two separate shorthands: (VI.B.6, VI.B.49c)
the site was mentioned in Tim Conley's review of the third edition of McHugh's Annotations to "Finnegans Wake" (James Joyce Quarterly, volume 44, number 2, page 365; this issue was just published but bears a Winter 2007 date); after a rather scathing review of McHugh's book, which mentions the need for a new paradigm for annotations, it reads: "Raphael Slepon's website, "Finnegans Wake" Extensible Elucidation Treasury, still in its early stages of development, is a decent if unpolished example of what might be done.⁹ Besides offering the word-search function, which makes concordances seem both a waste of physical space and lexically stodgy (who needs whole words when you can search by patterns of letters?), the site's potential range of annotations is obvious within a few moments' browsing."
this is a good opportunity to remind us all that without McHugh's work, Fweet would not have existed at all, or at least would have been extremely reduced in scope
as for Conley's comment about Fweet being "decent if unpolished", perhaps some of Fweet's users in Poland could help make it a bit more Polish; I am sure I can manage, all by myself, to make it quite indecent, if it is not already so
a bit of useful trivia about what Fweet is really about, according to Google — if you search for "Finnegans Wake" on Google, Fweet comes up only around number 9; however, if you search for "how to pronounce raphael", Fweet is way up there at number 1

2 Nov 2007

added two shorthands to the "Books" brevity on the search engine page: (Aston, Evans)
in a futile attempt to minimise incoming spam mail, I have changed all the email addresses of the Fweet website, invalidating all previous addresses; I can still, of course, be contacted through the "Comment on Me!!" facility

9 Nov 2007

added issue 7 of the "Genetic Joyce Studies" periodical to the bibliography page
added a tip for November to the tips page
a bit of useful trivia about what Fweet is really about, according to Google — if you search for "Finnegans Wake" on Google, Fweet comes up only around number 19; however, if you search for "hamlet shorthand", Fweet is way up there at number 1

16 Nov 2007

somewhat changed the "Speaker", "Synopsis" and "Variants" shorthands (under the "Editorials" brevity on the search engine page) to make them slightly more accessible
corrected a bug associated with the "Sort Alphabetically" option which resulted in improper sorting in some cases
updated the comments about Safari for Windows 3.0 in the four browsers page; briefly, version 3.0.4 suffers from a serious bug, rendering the entire shorthand system useless (I do not plan to look for a solution to this problem, unless someone reports that he or she is actually using this browser)

23 Nov 2007

added volume 38 of the "James Joyce Quarterly" periodical to the bibliography page
added one shorthand to the "Clusters" brevity on the search engine page: (Racing and Sport) (thanks to Bud Nathans)
a bit of useful trivia about what Fweet is really about, according to Google — if you search for "Finnegans Wake" on Google, Fweet comes up only around number 19; however, if you search for "john jameson three star whiskey", Fweet is way up there at number 1

30 Nov 2007

added volume 39 of the "James Joyce Quarterly" periodical to the bibliography page
incorporated numerous corrections to the Italian and German elucidations, as kindly supplied by Giovanna Forni (thanks Jo)
a bit of useful trivia about what Fweet is really about, according to Google — if you search for "Finnegans Wake" on Google, Fweet comes up only around number 19; however, if you search for "ezra pound black christ", Fweet is way up there at number 3

7 Dec 2007

added two shorthands to the "Clusters" and "Diacritics" brevities on the search engine page: (Radio) + (ŭ)

13 Dec 2007

added a sources page to collect in one place electronic editions of some (currently, 26) of the source books used by Joyce in Finnegans Wake, accessible from the search engine page
added asterisks to those books under the "Books" brevity on the search engine page that have an electronic edition on the sources page
made some changes to the context-specific help system on the search engine page in order to bypass new bugs in Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2; the most visible change is the location of the help window (if its new location is a problem or you would like to see an option that allows you to choose its location, please let me know)
added a tip for December to the tips page

21 Dec 2007

made some changes to the shorthand system on the search engine page in order to bypass a new bug in Safari for Windows (and probably for Macintosh too) which rendered the shorthand system inoperative (mentioned before, on 16 November)

28 Dec 2007

crossed the 78,000-elucidation mark
somewhat changed many of the shorthands under the "Classics", "Joyce" and "Shakespeare" brevities on the search engine page to make them slightly more accessible

4 Jan 2008

the site was again mentioned on Simon Loekle's "Year Out Wake" radio program on WBAI; an MP3 recording is available on the thinkamalinks page

11 Jan 2008

as quite a few of you have noticed, Fweet, for the second time since its inception, has been inaccessible for an extensive period of time (almost 24 hours) on Saturday and Sunday, 5-6 January; I would like to apologise to all of you who have come to depend on it for their daily dose of wakese; it was the result of a severe server failure at Hostpapa (Fweet's current hosting service), exacerbated by it being the middle of the weekend; hopefully, this will prove to be a singular event
added Ryf's "A New Approach to Joyce" to the "Portions of Books" section of the bibliography page (read by Harold Ryan)
added one electronic book to the sources page: (Hunt: India's Outcastes)
added a tip for January to the tips page

18 Jan 2008

added all 29 volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica in electronic format to the sources page
added notes on multi-volume books to the sources page

25 Jan 2008

added one shorthand to the "Clusters" brevity on the search engine page: (television)
a bit of useful trivia about what Fweet is really about, according to Google — if you search for "Finnegans Wake" on Google, Fweet comes up only around number 19; however, if you search for "can you please elucidate", Fweet is way up there at number 1

1 Feb 2008

added a preliminary checklist page in which to compile a bibliography of Finnegans Wake studies, accessible from the search engine page; the data on that page is entirely the work of Harold Ryan (more people are welcome to join the effort)

8 Feb 2008

added two shorthands to the "Clusters" brevity on the search engine page: (forget and remember, repeat oneself)
a bit of useful trivia about what Fweet is really about, according to Google — if you search for "Finnegans Wake" on Google, Fweet comes up only around number 18; however, if you search for "dutch bil", Fweet is way up there at number 1

15 Feb 2008

added volume 40 of the "James Joyce Quarterly" periodical to the bibliography page
added a tip for February to the tips page

22 Feb 2008

added volume 41 of the "James Joyce Quarterly" periodical to the bibliography page

29 Feb 2008

added McCarthy's "Joyce, Family, Finnegans Wake" to the bibliography page
made a few minor improvements to the search engine algorithm (hopefully, without breaking anything) to support some non-trivial search strings (e.g. "genesis 4" or "synopsis: II.3") that have been mishandled before
changed the title of the results page to include the search string itself (in addition to the by-now-well-known "Fweets of Fin")

7 Mar 2008

added issues 12-13 of the "The Analyst" periodical to the bibliography page
a bit of useful trivia about what Fweet is really about, according to Google — if you search for "Finnegans Wake" on Google, Fweet comes up only around number 17; however, if you search for "sentences with interminable", Fweet is way up there at number 3

14 Mar 2008

added O'Rourke's "Joyce's Quotations from Aristotle" to the bibliography page
added a tip for March to the tips page

21 Mar 2008

added volumes 42-43 of the "James Joyce Quarterly" periodical to the bibliography page

28 Mar 2008

added issues 14-15 of the "The Analyst" periodical to the bibliography page

4 Apr 2008

added issues 16-18 of the "The Analyst" periodical to the bibliography page
added two shorthands to the "Diacritics" and "Motifs" brevities on the search engine page: (ÿ) + (Pingpong, the bell for Sechseläuten, and concepit de Saint-Esprit)

11 Apr 2008

added four shorthands to the "Motifs" brevity on the search engine page: (dime/cash, new/same, "Flowerpot on a pole", "Teems of times and happy returns, the seim anew, ordovico or viricordo"), the first and third having been suggested by Sandy Tropp
added comments about Flock 1.1 to the four browsers page (briefly, fully functional)
added a tip for April to the tips page

18 Apr 2008

added one shorthand to the "Clusters" brevity on the search engine page: (months)

3 May 2008

added a small feature to the search engine to alert you to the presence of an electronic edition on the sources page, if you have been searching for elucidations related to a book having one

9 May 2008

added issue 19 of the "The Analyst" periodical to the bibliography page
Harold Ryan began work on the list of articles for the checklist page
added a tip for May to the tips page

16 May 2008

Harold Ryan continued work on the list of articles for the checklist page (into the letter B)
split the "Diacritics" brevity into two brevities (Diacritics and Symbols) on the search engine page
added two shorthands to the "Symbols" brevity on the search engine page: (right arrow, any Greek letter)
added the range of contents of each volume of the Encyclopædia Britannica to the sources page
improved the algorithm for searching multi-word strings, resulting in faster searches under default conditions (although it is still somewhat slower than searching for single-word strings)

23 May 2008

in the 31 months since the site opened (on 12 October 2005), more than 100,000 searches have run through the Fweet search engine; Mazel Tov!
Harold Ryan continued work on the list of articles for the checklist page (completed letters A-B)
changed the search algorithm to include caching of common searches (page shorthands, most content shorthands) in order to speed them up considerably

30 May 2008

Harold Ryan continued work on the list of articles for the checklist page (completed letters A-C)
added a "Range" location shorthand to the search engine page, which allows one to search for elucidations for a range of pages and lines of Finnegans Wake (i.e. from a given page-dot-line to a later page-dot-line)

6 Jun 2008

Harold Ryan continued work on the list of articles for the checklist page (completed letters A-F)
optimised the search algorithm for many location shorthands in order to speed them up considerably
added some more searches to the caching mechanism (additional content shorthands, a few commonly-searched freetext strings)

13 Jun 2008

added issue 20 of the "The Analyst" periodical to the bibliography page
added one shorthand to the "Clusters" brevity on the search engine page: (create)
added a tip for June to the tips page

20 Jun 2008

Harold Ryan continued work on the list of articles for the checklist page (completed letters A-G and began H)
added Crispi & Slote's "How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake" to the bibliography page
following on an elucidation contributed by Judd Staley, added one shorthand to the "Motifs" brevity on the search engine page: (And They Put/Piled Him Behind in/on the Fire/Pyre/Oasthouse/Outhouse); anyone who can clarify the "basic" form of this motif, please contact me
added comments about Firefox 3.0 to the four browsers page (briefly, fully functional)

27 Jun 2008

added one shorthand to the "Clusters" brevity on the search engine page: (New Ireland)

4 Jul 2008

Harold Ryan continued work on the list of articles for the checklist page (completed letters A-J)
added one shorthand to the "Classics" brevity on the search engine page: (Father Finn)

11 Jul 2008

Harold Ryan continued work on the list of articles for the checklist page (completed letters A-L)
added one shorthand to the "Clusters" brevity on the search engine page: (reds)
added a tip for July to the tips page

18 Jul 2008

Harold Ryan continued work on the list of articles for the checklist page (completed letters A-N)
added three shorthands to the "Books", "Classics" and "Clusters" brevities on the search engine page: (Connelly) + (Thousand Nights and a Night) + (days)

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