Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Well they're in the QotD queue file mostly for my own benefit when I'm scheduling the quotations, and I don't expect folks to do "view source" just in case there's something buried in there (if I really wanted to make sure folks saw them, they wouldn't be comments),[whoops -- see below] but they should show up in the notification messages for people who have "mail me copies of comments I post" turned on. I don't know a) how many people enable that feature, and b) how many of the people using that feature actually look at the messages it produces (rather than just archiving automatically. So there are usually a few historical dates or a holiday listed in the comments, sometimes indicating why I picked a particular quote for a particular day (if it's one of the days I deliberately lined up like that) -- a potential fringe-benefit/side-effect if anyone but me does notice them, but I've no idea how often that happens.

I was going to say something about how they should be in the source for the entry as posted but a nuisance to find among all the other code LJ wraps around the bit it gets from me, but I just looked and sure enough, the comments are stripped out. This is interesting, as I know LJ stores them -- as mentioned above, they show up in the notification email, and I can also see them on the "edit journal entry" page. So I guess they're being stripped during the prep-for-display phase after the entry text is retrieved from the database. And I guess the only people who can see them at all, other than myself, are folks who make top-level comments to those entries.

Hmm. Now I wonder whether I should work out some clever easter-egg-ish way for people to 'discover' them without having to post a comment (especially if reading about them here makes folks want to peek). I don't think I want to take up screen real-estate including them in the QotD entries in plaintext, and am ambivalent about putting an <lj-cut> into every QotD post ...

Not only do I not know who sees the comments now, I don't know who'd be interested in seeing them here, given that you can get a more complete list of historical "on this date" events from Wikipedia directly (via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_7 for example). The reasons I can see for anyone else wanting my smaller lists are, for the convenience of having it included in something they're already reading, for the convenience of a pre-winnowed list assuming that their idea of which date are interesting corresponds with mine, or to see what I may have had in mind when picking my QotD.

So maybe I'll experiment with some sort of Xkcd (http://xkcd.com/)-ish hack and see whether anybody says they like it. Or maybe I should pretend I never mentioned the comments.

(Gee, can you tell I'm feeling sleep-deprived?)