Wednesday, August 27, 2003

as yet untitled

Ahoy! This is the first blog post written from my new abode. I am splicing a telephone connection into the RV from a house near the Long John Silver's south of town. Mmm mmm, can't get enough of that batter dipped fish.

Anyway, a regular reader from Kent, OH writes in to say: "one thing that i suspect goes under-noticed or under-appreciated are the titles that you come up with for your weblogs. how do you come up with the titles?..."

We appreciate the kind comment, but we here at JFW cannot take credit for our titles. Instead, they are generated automagically! All of the blog posts you read are first imported as ASCII data files into Stata 8.0, and then the add-on blogposttitle.ado command is run (with the "hip" and "pithy" options), which uses a complex gematriz-based algorithm and a library of thousands of candidate titles in order to figure out which one is just right given the text of the post and the hip demographic that is at the center of JFW's marketing strategy. Further details on the program can be found in the next issue of the Stata Journal.

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