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VFR milestone
The article “What is post-racial America,” posted earlier today, is the 10,000th entry published at VFR since its founding in April 2002. If you go to the article’s full page (known technically as the archive page) and look at the address in the address bar (or, alternatively if you right-click the hyperlinked time stamp below the beginning of the article on the main page below, then choose Copy Shortcut from the context menu and paste into another application), you will see http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/010000.html
It is not correct to say that the entry posted today was the 10,000th VFR entry, since the first online entry posted by Jim Kalb in April 2002 had an entry number of 198. Then, oddly, his next entries jumped back to entry numbers in the 120s. The numbers don’t necessarily go in chronological sequence because their order of online posting may be different from the order in which they were created, and it’s the latter which determines the entry number. I realize this is confusing, and I can’t explain it further. In any case, it would be more accurate to say that VFR today reached the entry number of 10,000, rather than its 10,000th entry. Update Feb.28, 2008: It turns out the number of posted entries is well short of 10,000. I just counted the entries on the Archive page by copying the entire page into Word and then doing a search and replace on the open bracket which precedes each entry, and the number of replaces comes to 8,616. I have no idea why there is such a large difference between the current number of entry numbers, which today stands at 10,020, and the actual number of entriies. A good deal of the difference could be accounted for by entries that were created as drafts (thus being assigned an entry number), but never posted online. And, indeed, that is a major factor. I see from an internal page that there are a total of 9,382 entries, published and unpublished, at VFR, which means that there are over 700 unpublished drafts, which is incredible. That leaves the difference between 9,382 and 10,020, or 637, to be accounted for. The first posted entry at VFR has an entry number of 197. 637 minus 197 leaves 440 posted entries that must have have been deleted, which seems highly unlikely.
Anyway, excuse all the shop talk. Email entry |