I stopped writing for my novel. When faced with the pressure of writing 1,667 words per day, I started finding other hobbies to distract myself with. I’ve played the guitar a little, watched a lot of DVD-based media (Battlestar Galactica, Lost, and other Netflix items), and I’ve programmed a little.
Most recently I’ve worked on a Thunderbird extension to re-format e-mail messages. Most people “top-quote” nowadays, which means that their reply is at the top of the message, and all the replied-to messages are below. However, the (informational) RFC 1855 on “Netiquette” says:
- If you are sending a reply to a message or a posting be sure you
summarize the original at the top of the message, or include just
enough text of the original to give a context. This will make
sure readers understand when they start to read your response.
Since NetNews, especially, is proliferated by distributing the
postings from one host to another, it is possible to see a
response to a message before seeing the original. Giving context
helps everyone. But do not include the entire original!
All I’ve found so far is that writing Thunderbird extensions is not exactly easy. I already have the Javascript function to re-quote, I just have to combine this with “XUL overlays” in such a way that the javascript will actually run on the message composition data when the message is clicked.