ldhenson

Why do I have the urge to break out every five minutes into full-scale, movie-musical song?





...oh right.


(Custom text rings available at my Etsy shop)

Hitting the "Complete" button over at ff.net last night was a very strange feeling, indeed.

I didn't realize it at the time, but looking back at my old notes it's just about five-days-short-of-four-years to the day I started researching TDD. The first topic I looked up? Historical bridges. Because it's no good trapping your characters on an island with monsters if everybody, you know, just runs away.

Historical footnotes for "The Dusk Descending," Chapters XXV-XL. Divided by chapter.

Please read the story before the footnotes, as there will (naturally) be spoilers.


Footnotes for Chapters XV-XXIV.
Footnotes for Chapters I-XIV.


( Read more... )

Tons of new updates on No. 9 Duane Street in the last three days (I've just uploaded another set), and I'm still not done yet.

Last night I found one of the most interesting things. Ever since I started researching the Brooklyn Newsboys' LH, it's been a mystery to me who their Superintendent was. Supt. Heig at the DSLH got a fair amount of mention in the press, but I couldn't find any significant mention of his counterpart in Brooklyn. I was also hampered by the fact that BCAS named positions a little differently than did the Manhattan CAS, by my own assumptions that a single woman at the time would not have been put in charge of the day-to-day lodging necessities of 100+ street boys, by the fact that several different titles were used for her, and by the fact that she was even referred to by several different names! But last night I finally put all the pieces together, though I haven't yet written it up for the site.

I've just added a new lodging house profile to the No. 9 site:

No. 49 Park Place, the second of the Children's Aid Society's "main" Newsboys' LHs and the immediate predecessor of the Duane Street Lodging House. That brings the total number of LHs profiled on the site to nine. Whew! I didn't think there'd be that many when I started!

The bulk of the data I have for that LH is up. There are a few more associated details I'll be adding later.

I've finally finished coding No. 9 Duane Street yet again. Almost all are behind-the-scenes changes. Even though my last major overhaul converted the entire site to CSS, there was still a lot of inefficient coding, plus the formatting went all wonky in IE at certain resolutions. I wiped about half the code and re-built it from the start.

( Read more... )

The columns are in their proper places now rather than being all bunched up on the left side in IE, and margins have been cleaned up. I altered the color scheme slightly (no more dealing with web-safe colors) and host of little formatting errors--missing or mis-labled headers, that sort of thing--left over from the last update have been fixed.

It probably won't make much visible difference to visitors, but it feels good to have that code all cleaned up.

My eyes started aching after I'd spent all day putting together patterns for my dragons, so I took a break and moved on to something that caused no eyestrain at all.

Oh, I kid! It's eyestrain city all around!

Anyway, following up on my Brooklyn Bridge one, Newsies gets a turn at the snowflakes, and Jack and David manage to sneak their way in.





( Did you spot them? )

I just finished overhauling all the pages on No. 9 Duane Street. It won't look very much different; the most visible changes are the improved page headers, the re-organization of the table of contents, and the fact that the main body of text no longer stretches across the entire page and is now easier to read.

The bulk of the changes are under the surface, where I've converted all the old formatting from HTML to CSS. It's cleaner and more consistent now, and though it was a lot of work, it'll make all future content updates go much smoother.

I cannot believe I'm thirty-six chapters into this monster. Chapter XXXVI was a tough one to write, but it's one of my favorite chapters yet.

I've updated No. 9 Duane Street at last!

I've been neglecting the site for far too long; my schedule kept getting in the way. Still, I was sitting on some very interesting bits of research and finally decided to knuckle down and get them posted.

In particular, Sampler's gone through and compiled some stats from the 1900 federal census (I've put up the data on nationalities, but still need to process the occupation and age info).

Also, whatever became of the Elizabeth Home for Girls (the girls' lodging house) has long been a mystery for me...I had some guesses from tiny clues sprinkled here and there in news articles and the like, but no real confirmation. But now it's official: not only is the building still standing, it's recently been declared a landmark! That makes three of the circa-1899 LHs that still exist, two of which are landmarks to boot.