Vesterman.Com
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All of the Food Clubs whose price is known now list not only the total price, but also the price per person.

I just happened to discover a review of Howard's, from way back in 2004, that accidentally never made it onto the website!

The Food Club information is now up to date.

My favorite Howard reviews from this latest bunch: The Cheesecake Factory and The Spanish Tavern.

The Food Club stuff has been caught up to the end of 2006. My personal favorites of the new reviews by Howard: The California Pizza Kitchen and J.J. Bitting.

Added a disclaimer about Vesterman.com's slogan, based on user feedback.

Insomnia-related problems killed Vesterman.Com, but it has sprung forth from the grave once again!

The Food Club stuff is not up to date. I will work on that.

With tonight's Food Club, we have now been to Springfield 37 times in recorded history (woohoo!). This required the Food Club map to be updated, since the legend only handled up to 36 times.

While I was doing that, I made a fundamental change to it:

Previously, each color represented an equal range of attendances - for example, red was 1 to 6 attendances, orange 7 to 12, and so on, up to purple, which was 31 to 36.

Due to the distribution of attendances across towns, this led to lots of red and orange, and few others. In fact, in the last version (where each color represented a range of six), there were no blue towns at all for quite a while.

The colors now no longer represent equal attendance ranges, and the map is significantly more colorful as a result.

The Food Club portion of the website has undergone a major renovation. Each individual person, restaurant, town, and location now has its own page, where various related statistics and other information can be found. For example, here's my page, and here's one for the restaurant Jose Tejas.

Additionally, if Howard has reviewed a restaurant, there is now a page listing all of his reviews for that particular restaurant. For example, here are Howard's reviews of the Meyersville Inn.

It's all hyperlinkified, so, for example, if you're looking at a restaurant's page, and it mentions that a particular person has been there, you can click on the person's name to bring you to that page.

Incidentally, check out the maximum number of consecutive Food Clubs that I have attended.

The sole part of this website that I predict will have a lasting and positive effect upon mankind - Howard's Food Club reviews - has been added to the syndication feeds.

With the addition of Basking Ridge to the towns that we have gone to in the recorded history of Food Club, my strange dream to see the Food Club attendance map become a connected graph grows one step closer to fruition!

Basking Ridge is part of Bernards Township, and the addition of Bernards Township bridges the gap between Bernardsville (which is not the same as Bernards Township) and the largest connected body of towns on the map.

Your feed reader should now be able to display the site's bold and italic text appropriately (assuming that it can display bold and italic text in the first place).

HTML character entities are now allowed in posts. For example:

Symbolic example: Typing ℵ makes: ℵ

Decimal numeric example: Typing ϑ makes: ϑ

Hexadecimal numeric example: Typing ¥ makes: ¥

The list of all the possible symbolic (non-numeric) entity references can be found referenced here.

And, now, an RDF syndication feed has been created.

After implementing these three competing formats, I can definitively state my opinion:

Atom is good.

RSS 2.0 is okay.

RDF sucks.

An RSS 2.0 syndication feed has been created.

Vesterman.com now has a syndicated feed. For the moment, only the Atom syndication format is supported, but RSS should be supported soon.

Several pages on Vesterman.com did not have completely valid HTML. They all have been fixed. The majority of these problems were caused by incorrect handling of links with ampersands in their URLs. So, if this "What's New" page remains valid even though I am including such a link in this post, then I have not only fixed the broken pages, but also the problem that was causing them.

If you posted a comment and tried to use italics or bold across paragraphs, it would only get applied to the first paragraph.

Assuming that this paragraph is in italics, I guess I have fixed this bug.

When you add a comment to a link, your name is now a hyperlink that points to your website.

This is, of course, assuming that you entered a website in your account preferences, and that you selected to make it public.

I have a little script that is supposed to run periodically and notify me when a person registers for an account, so I can create the account for them. I just discovered that this script has not actually run in about two years.

In that time, about two hundred people registered, most of whom I do not know. This prompted me to decide that I do not actually want to give accounts to hundreds of people that I do not know (such as one who claimed to be named 'Harold von Anus III').

So, I have changed the registration policy: You now should give me a reason why I should give you an account. This could be as simple as the fact that I know you, or that we have some specific mutual acquantaince. Otherwise, you are welcome to try to convince me that I should give you one, but you are probably going to fail.

Upgrade problems killed Vesterman.Com, but once again, it has returned.

Added a map showing where we've attended (in recorded history).

The Food Club section is now caught up to the present. Lots of great reviews by Howard. My favorites: July 15, 2004 and August 19, 2004.

The Food Club section is now caught up through the end of 2003. Unfortunately there was a period in there with a relative dearth of reviews by Howard, but there are still some good ones. My personal favorite is not really a review - check it out on April 10, 2003.

The Food Club section of the website has been caught up through the end of 2002. There are some sublime reviews by Howard in there; I am particularly fond of the one from July 18th.

Lots of Food Club stuff added (check the Food Club menu on the left). It is only current to 2002 - I will work on getting it more up to date. Statistics are not yet back. And it's not very hyperlinkified yet.

Legal problems killed Vesterman.Com, but it has returned. It cannot be stopped.

Technical problems killed Vesterman.Com, but it has returned.

Fixed an issue where characters with accent marks (and other characters) were displayed as question marks.

Under the Links menu, there's now an option to display a random link.

Upon request (from many months ago), a quote now appears on each page. It's a random quote each time, so you can reload a page to see a new quote if, for some strange reason, you want to.

You can now post comments about the links posted here.

Upon request, added in a page listing all of the restaurants that Food Club has been at since the beginning of recorded Food Club history.

The long-awaited new version of Vesterman.Com has finally been released to the public! Woohoo! Ahem.

This What's New page is new. This What's New entry was made to test out the new What's New page. I will probably retain this entry after testing is done, for nostalgic purposes.