The Punnery Updated

It's been a busy week. Several months ago I got permission to add posts from the old GEnie TeleJoke category, The Punnery, to my website Have Pun Will Travel. My version of The Punnery started out with just my posts from the old GEnie days of December 1991 to September 1993. Early on, I got permission from Dick Ford to add his posts, and revised the pages I'd already done, and pulled my posts and his for new pages.

I got permission from several other people, Ralph Stipo, Claudia Ballou, Eric Stone, my sister Marilyn and Sue Bell, people who show up now and then for the Punday Night sessions Dick Ford hosts on AIM on Sunday nights. Then I got distracted and perhaps I was a bit intimidated by the size of the project required to add all the "new" posts. I got started, then moved on to other things, mainly creating Squidoo pages.

This week, though, I tackled the update project head on. Just about an hour ago, I got the pages updated and published on the website. One thing I discovered is that I should've done everything in Notepad, then transferred each page to Dreamweaver. Instead, I used Open Office's Writer, which ended up putting in a lot of extra html coding. I had to copy the Writer documents over into Notepad, then put them into Dreamweaver, otherwise, every wrapped line would've been its own paragraph. I'd italicized all the post headers in Writer, so I lost that and had to do it all over again.

Things were still a bit too spaced out in many pages, so I created bulleted lists of short items within posts if there were three items or more. The bullets add a little interest to pages that are all text otherwise.

One of the more popular topics in the GEnie Punnery was Lackluster Video, where we took movie titles, altered them and added a blurb to explain the new title. We also played around with running movie titles together to create new ones. The photo at left illustrates a few titles we came up with. (The drive-in movie marquee generator can be found here.) I'd love to put it on the web page for Lackluster Video.

The Punnery on GEnie was active in the days before the World Wide Web, so everything was done in text. If you wanted to illustrate something you had to resort to crude ASCII graphics. Unfortunately, most of them didn't survive the formatting process. I did put in a couple of illustrations, though, but The Punnery on HPWT probably could use a lot more. It may be a challenge, though. Puns aren't always that easy to illustrate, and I'm not an artist.

For now, though, the main task of getting The Punnery updated is done. The people represented are the only ones I'm still in touch with, and considering the GEnie Punnery closed 15 years ago, that's not bad. I'd say in the last year or so of its existence, we were most of the more active posters there.

(The Boomtown Theater marquee was generated here.)

Oh, btw, if you haven't seen it before, the top photo is my bowed psaltery. Down in the lower right is a battery. So what we've got here is a case of a psaltery and battery.