Dear readers!

For me, it's something of an event when I manage to post twice in a month. The two most recent posts have been in various states of preparation for a number of months, and I hustled myself to finally post them and have done.

I think of myself as an essayist whose main medium is the weblog and who likes to use film as a springboard to talk about whatever subject moves me. But I do have a full-time job which pays little, gets less respect, and which I often find mentally and physically taxing. That and my constant diddling and overworking what I write means I don't post very often, though I am always on my own case to do more. I also have a touch of depressive illness or disthymia and that has an effect on my productivity as well.

If some of you have read my stuff here, have liked it and would like to read more, I imagine it can get rather frustrating to deal with months of silence before something comes up on the blog. It frustrates me as well, because it is a melancholy thing to see a seemingly abandoned website, and its air of ambitious ideas gone nowhere.

Now while I don't write for applause, I would like to keep any readers I have managed to get, and strongly urge those of you who don't use an RSS feed aggregator to start using one, so you don't have to constantly click back here, see nothing new, and then give up, thinking that I have stopped posting, because in spite of not posting often, I don't intend to stop posting. For those of you who don't consider yourselves web-savvy computer geeks, a feed aggregator monitors websites with frequently-updated content, letting you know if there is anything new on the websites you follow so you do not have to keep clicking your browser back. It's great to manage all the websites you follow, and for those like mine that tend to be inactive a lot, it also frees you from the frustrating experience of having to click back over and over before finding new content.

RSS feeds are not a new thing by any means, and as said, I was a little intimidated at first by all the talk about feeds and such, but take a little time to Google and learn about it, and I think you'll find that it'll be worth your while. Just to get you started, if you are a Windows user, you might want to try Newzie, a free standalone client (though there are lots of other freeware feedreaders out there), and if you like podcasts, as I do, you might also want to check out Newzie's sister client Ziepod, a client that allows you to manage and download all the podcasts you follow, though, again, there are many podcast aggregators you might want to try out.

This way, if there is something new here at Plastic Exploding, you'll know about it without having to make extra effort. Meanwhile, I'll try my best to post more often. Is it a deal?

For those of you who observe the end-of-year holidays, I hope you have a great holiday season.

Michael S. Hart (1947-2011)

Michael S. Hart, inventor of the electronic text or "etext" and founder of Project Gutenberg, passed away at his home in Urbana, Illinois on September 8 at the age of 64.

As a freshman at the University of Illinois, Hart entered the text of the US Declaration of Independence into the university's mainframe on the night of July 4, 1971, almost literally at a keystroke creating the first electronic text and inaugurating what was to become Project Gutenberg, the mission of which is to make electronic versions of as many literary works as possible available to anyone at no cost. He followed the Declaration of Independence a year later with the first ten amendments to the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights. A year later, a volunteer entered the entire text of the US Constitution.

For the first two decades of Project Gutenberg, Hart and a handful of volunteers worked at entering by hand works such as the King James Bible -- released as an ebook in 1989 -- and the collected works of William Shakespeare -- released in 1994. The development of hypertext and the World Wide Web in 1990, and the availability of the first public web browser, Mosaic, in 1993, facilitated the distribution of ebooks and the recruitment of volunteers, and from 1991 to 1996, the production of new ebooks doubled every year. Distributed digitization and proofreading led to further growth, and in August 1997, Project Gutenberg released its one-thousandth ebook, the original Italian text of Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy. Other milestones in PG's growth included:

• #2000: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote (original Spanish text), May 1999
• #3000: Marcel Proust, Á L'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (original French text), December 2000
• #5000: Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, April 2002
• #10000: The Magna Carta, October 2003
• #20000: Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, December 2006
• #30000: Chester Albert Reed, The Bird Book, October 2009.

By June 2011, the collection listed over 36,000 titles in sixty languages, available in formats capable of being read using computers, PDAs, smartphones and ebook readers, and all freely downloadable and redistributable. Affiliated projects exist in Europe, Australia and Canada, and tens of thousands of titles are downloaded every day from the main sites and from 40 mirror sites worldwide.

I don't know who coined the phrase "information wants to be free," but Michael Hart embodied the spirit of that slogan. For four decades, he worked to make the collected cultural legacy of humankind available to all. Our thoughts are with Hart's family and friends. Project Gutenberg continues, a living monument to one of the digital age's most important yet uncelebrated visionaries.

Please consider giving money or time to keep the project going. Donations are tax-deductible in the US and can be made via PayPal.