A man is not dead while his name is still spoken.
~ Terry Pratchett
One of my favorite authors passed away recently, Sir Terry Pratchett.
In his Discworld, people communicated across long distances via "Clacks Towers" - tall wooden towers built within line-of-sight of each other, that passed messages via a type of semaphore.
When the son of the inventor of the Clacks Towers died, the operators began sending his name from tower to tower, with the preface GNU -
G for send the message on
N for do not log the message
U for turn the message around at the end of the line and send it back again
In this way, his son's name was perpetually being passed on the Clacks, always being "spoken" and hence, his son never truly died...
Well, Sir Pratchett had a large community of fans, and some of them got the idea to honor him and keep him alive by having his name always being passed along the internet. You can read more about it here:
The Guardian article
In his Discworld, people communicated across long distances via "Clacks Towers" - tall wooden towers built within line-of-sight of each other, that passed messages via a type of semaphore.
When the son of the inventor of the Clacks Towers died, the operators began sending his name from tower to tower, with the preface GNU -
G for send the message on
N for do not log the message
U for turn the message around at the end of the line and send it back again
In this way, his son's name was perpetually being passed on the Clacks, always being "spoken" and hence, his son never truly died...
Well, Sir Pratchett had a large community of fans, and some of them got the idea to honor him and keep him alive by having his name always being passed along the internet. You can read more about it here:
The Guardian article
I wanted to be part of this - and so I started Googling and reading and Googling and reading - and I found a way to make this work for my blog in Blogger!
Yes, that's right - when you opened my blog today and started reading this post, Terry Pratchett's name was passed, in the background, to your web browser. :)
And if you'd like to add his name to your (blogger-hosted) blog, here is how to do it:
Go to your Blogger dashboard (where you write new posts).
Blogger --> Template --> Edit HTML
Don't worry if you don't understand HTML - I don't either!
Basically, you need to add one sentence near the very beginning. Here is where I put it in my template (there was some guessing and finger crossing involved...) - and it worked! ;)
Yes, that's right - when you opened my blog today and started reading this post, Terry Pratchett's name was passed, in the background, to your web browser. :)
And if you'd like to add his name to your (blogger-hosted) blog, here is how to do it:
Go to your Blogger dashboard (where you write new posts).
Blogger --> Template --> Edit HTML
Don't worry if you don't understand HTML - I don't either!
Basically, you need to add one sentence near the very beginning. Here is where I put it in my template (there was some guessing and finger crossing involved...) - and it worked! ;)
Note that this is the very first few lines of HTML code in my Blogger template.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html b:version='2' class='v2' expr:dir='data:blog.languageDirection' xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' xmlns:b='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/b' xmlns:data='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/data' xmlns:expr='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/expr'>
<head>
<meta content='GNU Terry Pratchett' http-equiv='X-Clacks-Overhead'/>
<meta expr:content='data:blog.isMobile ? "width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0" : "width=1100"' name='viewport'/>
<b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Your template HTML won't look exactly like mine, obviously. Just look for the <head> statement and (hopefully) another <meta > statement. And squeeze it in around there somewhere...
I found this information (how to put this in a Blogger web site) here:
I found this information (how to put this in a Blogger web site) here:
You can find ways to embed his name in other types of websites here:
Also, there are two free extensions to Google Chrome (the web browser) that will alert you if you have opened a web page that is sending Sir Pratchett's name across the clacks - ooops, I mean the internet...
I will mention that these don't fully work on my computer - the little icons don't show up, although they are there, because I get the text boxes when I hover my cursor over the place where the icons are supposed to be... ;)
GNU Terry Pratchett - May you live forever!
