It's not only narcissism that brings me to read these pages after I've posted them. Sometimes I want to take a look at how I treated a subject in the past in order to decide whether I want to relate to it differently in a newer column. Sometimes I want to check whether I've related a particular story so that I don't have to repeat myself. Sometimes I want to review what I've written so that I can use part of what's here as the basis of something else that I'm working on. (That's a great place to link to a future column.) Whatever the reason, as I read these pages I inevitably come across spelling errors and other minor mistakes that deserve to be corrected. The correction process isn't particularly difficult, but it demands either correcting my hard disk copy of the page in question and then reloading it, or, if I've found the mistake when I'm not at home, downloading the page from the server, making the correction, and then uploading it again. It would be easier to have an editor who reviews my writing before I post it, but I suppose that it's in the nature of a cottage industry that it works on minimal staff.

Go to: on not uploading a column