Want to test how well you know this site? How many of the inventions in this list have I posted here in the past?

Updates to the site will be probably be sporadic or entirely absent until I get up and running again next week.

Oh, and I thought you all would think this email I got yesterday was pretty funny all things considered:

Hi Charlie:

I’m an editor at PopSci and got your e-mail from my colleague [redacted to protect the innocent]. I’m looking to use a couple of images from old issues of the magazine in an upcoming issue, and he mentioned that you might have high-res files you could send. (All our archives are on Google Books now, but I don’t think the files are high-res enough.) These are the two: …

This is really great, but it does mean that I have a lot of magazines it would be pointless to scan. It also means that I need to decide what direction to take the site.

What do you guys think I should do? Stick with more obscure magazines? They don’t seem to have Modern Mechanix or Mechanix Illustrated… yet. Or link to articles in their archive?

They did a pretty amazing job with this and I’m really curious to find out how they actually scanned those mags. The old PS and PM issues have really thick spines that are very hard to keep open and photograph. I wonder if they cut the pages out or something.

Well, someone actually built one and it’s for sale at the St. Louis Car Museum

via Hemmings Auto Blog

Oh yeah, I forgot about it, but on Oct 15th the site entered it’s fourth year. A few approximate stats:

• 5000 posts
• 8,500,000 page views in the last year.
• 19,000,000 total page views.
• 13,000 comments
• 2.8 million spam comments (seriously)

Update: For some reason the you tube player was crashing PC IE. I have no idea what I could have done to cause that, but I’ve taken it out. If you want to see the movie, click here.

I’m going to try to post a few recipes later this week.

Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin

If you’ve ever clicked on the links at the bottom of the sidebar on the left, you’ve probably realized that a) my last name is Shopsin, and b) my family owns a restaurant in New York City called, you guessed it, Shopsin’s. The restaurant has been a fixture in my life since the day I was born. Literally. I’ve lived in a number of apartments and houses, but the restaurant (now in it’s third location) has always been the place I called home.

Our restaurant is very hard to explain, though that doesn’t keep people from trying. Google it and I’m sure you’ll find a ton of people that love it, hate it, are disgusted by it, are shocked and awed by it, or just plain like eating there. One thing I think people will agree on is that the menu is huge, incredibly varied and incredibly weird. The two things I’ve seen people ordering the most of lately are Macaroni and Cheese Pancakes, which sound weird, but are truly awesome, and the Gallant sandwich (warm turkey, bacon, avocado, cranberry mayo, ciabatta) which almost sounds normal and again, is quite delicious.

You can look at the full menu here (pdf). A warning: When I was still living at home, before going off to college and my stay on the west coast, I used to design the menu for my dad. My designs were not particularly inspired, but they were relatively readable and consistent. When I left for college I gave my dad a copy of Quark Express and a brief tutorial on how to use it. And use it he did. I haven’t studied Claude Shannon’s work on information theory as much as I’d have liked, but I’m pretty sure his menu design is approaching some sort of maximal information density limit.

Anyway, the reason for this post is that my father recently released a cookbook/philosophical tract/memoir called “Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin”. I’m obviously quite biased, but I think it is the most entertaining cookbook I’ve ever read. It’s a combination cook book and memoir, with about 100 recipes and a bunch of essays detailing my father’s approach to food, cooking, family, the restaurant business, and much more. Not to mention a picture of me bathing in a sink. You can read it like a cookbook, just going to the recipes that interest you, but I think most people will just end up reading it cover to cover like a normal book.

The book is designed by my sister Tamara and the photographs were taken by her husband Jason.

Once my scanner gets here and I get everything set up I’m going to post a couple of excerpts on the site, but really, why wait? You should just buy a copy

Amazon Page for Eat Me
Publisher’s Page for Eat Me
Shopsin’s Website
Shopsin’s Menu
Amazon Page for I Like Killing Flies , a 2002 documentary about the restaurant.

The only immediate change you should see is that the blog has now been moved to Eastern Standard Time. I think you’ll all manage to cope. In the future we should have some great new stuff coming. I’ll be bringing in some help to add some more editorial and narrative commentary to the site. Plus, the move forced me to actually go through all of the magazines I have and in the process I discovered a bunch of really great stuff I’d forgotten I had, so look out for some new content from magazines you’ve never heard of.

I actually had expected to post before now, but I’ve been ridiculously busy apartment hunting, and hanging out with my family. Plus the AT&T 3g wireless card I got to give me connectivity has really, really, truly sucked. Basically useless. I blame all the iPhone 3g users (myself included) for saturating the local network. Interesting fact: my iPhone downloads content five times faster in San Diego than New York. (average of 2-300 kbps down in NYC, 1200-1500 kbps in SD). Damn hipsters.

Thanks for all the tips and responses to my previous post, and I’m sorry I haven’t gotten a chance to respond to any of you. I will try to do so over the next few days.

Here’s some stuff from a really great new issue of MM I just finished editing. Be sure to click on the cover and check it out, it’s awesome. Definitely one of the oddest juxtapositions I’ve seen on a MM cover.

If anybody is interested in doing some guest posts while I’m out of town,  send me an email. I’d love to see other people get more involved in the site.

If you live in the New York area and happen to know of any good apartments that are available , or just want to meet up for a drink or something, please drop me a line.

Now all I have to do is figure out the best way to pack and move a few thousand magazines without totally destroying both the magazines them selves and the considerable effort I’ve put into organizing them.

After a few false starts I tracked it down to a plugin that just doesn’t seem like the new WP version. It’s alright, I don’t use that plugin for much anyway.

The feed is now working again. However, the items in the feed do not currently have the date appended to the end of the title. e.g.: (Mar, 1922). This is because I accomplished that in my template by just adding the code to print the date right after the title in the template. Of course, taking this approach means I also had to add it to all of the pages that generate feeds (rss, rdf, atom, rss2). This means I also have to update those pages every time I upgrade wordpress. This time I forgot. I’m going to try to find a better way to hook the tile and append the date before the page gets rendered. So, hopefully, the dates on rss feeds should be back in the next day or so.

If any of our readers know a good way to modify the title of a post right before it’s rendered and wants to spare me a few hours of wading through the codex, I’d appreciate it. I don’t want to append the date to the post title then save it to the database. The date is contained in a custom field and I’d like to keep the two separate.

Did you have to fight the urge to cry, throw up or punch something? Do you feel sullied? If so you’re just the person I’m looking for. While I can be completely OCD about scanning, straightening, OCRing images and whatnot, css just drives me mad. I’m awful at it and it makes my brain hurt. The template of this site is basically a mashup of an older template and a newer design, retrofitted to work on the YUI-Grid framework and hacked on by your’s truly until it seemed to look decent for most of the people, most of the time. It looks alright, but under the covers it’s a complete mess.

Lately this has become a problem because I’ve been wanting to add some new features to the site via some wordpress plugins. However, they all seem to expect some sort of rational styles, and thus look completely messed up when I try them out.

I’m looking for someone to help me clean up and recode the css and some of the html on the site. You don’t need to redesign anything, though if you want to, I’d certainly be open to it.

I’ll be happy to give you a big plug, and permanent credit on the site, which actually has a surprisingly decent amount of traffic. I can even pay you in either a moderate amount of cold, hard cash, or a large quantity of old magazines (I have lots of duplicates), or some mix of the two.

If you’re interested, please email me, or leave a comment on this post.

By the way, if anyone is interested in the features I’m planning on adding, here’s my list, everyone please let me know which of these you’d like most, and any others you think I should add:

• Better comments system possibly coComment, or Intense Debate but at least something that allows users to edit their comments, use gravatars, have profiles and has better threading and spam control.
• Post view counts, ratings, favorites, etc so you can get lists of the most popular posts
• Forums, for discussions that don’t regard a specific post
• User contributed content, either through custom software, image galleries, or the forums. Not sure which.
• Better ways to navigate and explore the content on this site. This one is all me, but it would be a lot easier with a decent template to work with. I want to add browsing by year, topic, article length, etc.
• User tagging. I’ve started tagging some posts as you’ve probably noticed, but there are another three or four thousand that are untagged and that I’ll never get the time to do myself. It would be nice if users could help contribute to this process. Actually, this I could probably do now, so if any of my regular readers would like to help, drop me a line.

If any of you are going to be at the faire and would like to meet up, just drop me an email, or comment on this post.

-Charlie

So how about it, anyone out there who would be willing and able to help me get it set up?

The changes are not just cosmetic though. I’ve added a few new features to the site. First off, for our regular commenters, there is now a comments RSS feed. Actually the site always had one, but it was pretty well hidden. You can also now subscribe to get email notifications when anybody replies to one of your comments so you don’t have to keep checking all the posts for new responses.

You can now browse the archives by magazine and issue. Just click on the cover gallery link to start. You can also click on the magazine name in any post to see a listing of all of the issues (eg: Modern Mechanix), or if you want to see other articles posted from the same issue, you can click on the issue date (eg: 11-1932).

I’m in the process of moving the categories into a hierarchy, so for example, the Transportation category will now contain the Automotive, Aviation, and Nautical categories. This will let me add a bunch of new, more specific categories without taking up the whole left side of the screen.

I also added a little Amazon store where you can subscribe to science magazines as well as see (or if you’re so inclined, buy) books that I like. Tamara and I are also working on designs for some nifty new Modern Mechanix gear which I think you’ll all really like. If you haven’t been to her store yet, check it out, she makes great stuff.

From a tech perspective, I redid the entire site HTML and CSS using Yahoo’s awesome UI framework, if you do much web design I highly recommend it. This should fix most of the problems people were having with the site looking screwed up at smaller resolutions, particularly in IE.

That’s all for now, but in the coming weeks and months you can expect a bunch of new stuff. Now that I’ve got the back end cleaned up it’s a lot easer for me to make changes and implement features.

Please let me know what you think of the new design and tell me if anything isn’t working right for you. Also, I’d like to know what new features you’d like from the site. I’m sure you all have a lot of great ideas.

I would like to give a big shout out to my co-conspirator, Simone, for all of her hard work on the site. I couldn’t do it without her.

Lastly, I want to thank all of our commenters. This site would be no fun without you.