MAJOR CHANGES: Refactoring of the Books' section
I have just finalised the refactoring of the books’ section. Overview of the changes:
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There is a new feed available at https://protesilaos.com/books.xml. In the past I would post in the News section (i.e. here and eventually on the
news.xmlfeed) about any new publication. That will no longer happen. Follow the newbooks.xml. If you need any help about web feeds, read my RSS feed info page or contact me. -
All old links/URLs have been instructed to redirect to new ones. No further action is required of visitors to this website. The old format was both unsustainable and uninformative. For example, my Notes on the Thinkable, from 2013, had a URL that did not contain the date of publication or the placement of the entry inside the domain:
https://protesilaos.com/notes-on-the-thinkable-2-0. That was a historical accident from the time I was using a Wordpress blog and knew next to nothing about computers in general. Now all URLs include the date of publication and thebooksspecifier, like this: http://protesilaos.com/books/2013-11-27-notes-on-the-thinkable/. -
All old books, like the Little Guide to the European Union (2016) and Structured Text on Sovereignty, Nationhood, Statehood (2018) have been consolidated into single files. In the past, I would keep every chapter as a distinct file, each with its own metadata, which I thought was a neat idea. But to make the book work like an index of standalone items, I had to manually create the “mini website” of each publication. It involved several ad-hoc administrative tasks that I will not bother you with. The gist is that now the act of publishing a book is as simple as publishing any entry: just a single file. My only hope is that the consolidation went well and no data was lost in the transition (though I will conduct a review in the near future and I do have access to the version history).
Apart from subscribing to a new web feed, there is nothing you need to do. All those hours of work were necessary to fix problems that accumulated over time; problems that were caused by my lack of knowledge of how websites are pieced together.
While I did not bother to read everything again, I did study a few passages. Much of what I wrote is relevant today, though I do not care about longer term consistency. It is in the nature of the critical thinker to be at odds with their previous self and to alienate former sympathisers in the process.