Yesterday was another anniversary — Daws Butler's birthday — and again, I wrote an article to mark it. Of course, he well deserves to be the star of an article here, unlike the last two yahoos I wrote up on their birthdays, Vince Colletta and Roy Lichtenstein, whom I wrote up mainly so I could say negative things about them. Yesterday would have been the proper time to write a blog entry about that, but by the time I finished posting the article, I was good and ready to knock off and watch the Sunday evening cartoons on Fox.

The first step in writing an article here is to use the search function to determine which articles already mention the subject, then add the necessary links, and check to make sure they work properly.

But do you have any idea how many Toonopedia™ articles mention Daws Butler? I'll tell you — a lot! Enough to overload my HTML editor (which is most comfortable editing about 10 files at a time, tho it can handle hundreds more with some inconvenience) several times over.

Editing and checking that huge mass of verbiage was how I spent yesterday morning. I usually like to have a day's posts done by about 11 AM, so I can spend the afternoon on other work. (I seldom observe weekends and holidays.) But by 11 I hadn't even started writing it, and I get up early.

I'm not claiming my little capsule summaries are even remotely adequate to describe a person's life — but with a giant like Daws Butler, it was a huge job just to be coherent without overloading the time a reader is likely able to devote to a single Web page. A book, like the one whose cover I used to illustrate the article, wouldn't be enough, and I was already pushing the time I had before missing his birthday entirely.

The Sun was getting low in the sky by the time I had something that could barely pass. Then came proofreading, checking the outgoing links, and finally posting.

Posting a whole bunch of articles (the main one, and those I'd revised in making it) used to be a simple matter of highlighting them all, and sending them to the site via a simple FTP program. But the current setup requires each to be uploaded individually, and it takes a minute or two for each one. By the time I'd uploaded the Butler article and the revisions of all the ones linking to it, it was good and dark outside.

Not that I'm complaining! My site is better for the addition of an article on Daws Butler. Even a necessarily inadequate one, and even if it took an entire day's work.

For today's "Today in Toons", my choices included Will Vinton's birthday, the release of All Dogs Go to Heaven, or Alvin Schwartz's birthday, any of which could serve as an excellent reason to write an article. I chose Snuffy Smith's first potshot at Barney Google, because I'm just not up to posting a new article today. There's too much work I didn't get done yesterday.

— DDM