Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Four Foot Eight

A few years ago I started a project to write a rinky-dinky short story for every station on the London Underground, going under the unimaginative name of The Tube. There are 200-something of them, and my original plan was to do one a day (or every few days, or whatever) until the whole lot were done.

This didn't happen for a number of reasons. Most of these reasons were technical - it was fiddly to maintain such a project, and in the end I found myself writing a bunch of parser scripts to take plain text source files and munge them around into a set of web pages. This wasn't a very satisfactory exercise either (the resulting pages were pretty ugly). Sure, some of the content was okay, but the presentation wasn't exactly great. Ultimately I lost interest and took the pages down with about 70 stories completed as most of them are badly in need of a bit of an edit and a rewrite anyway.

I think it's time to have another go, and it struck me that a weblog format is exactly right for the project. In fact, Movable Type could almost have been written with this project in mind. With that in mind, I'd like to announce Four Foot Eight, the revamped and hopefully better written version of The Tube. The plan is to post one story every day or thereabouts (the "almost-daily" updating regime allows for a little slack), starting with those I already have - although some may be rewritten, heavily edited or completely replaced compared to the original - until it's done. It'll begin with the Northern Line - High Barnet and Edgware to Morden and branches.

It can be read by visiting the web page at http://uffish.net/four/, or alternatively there is an RSS feed available, which is probably an easier way if you happen to have an RSS reader or if you're a LiveJournal user. Other options are listed on the index page.

Feedback is always welcome and comments will be open. The first instalment has just appeared. To avoid disrupting the flow I'll be trying to avoid idle chit-chat and nonessential announcements in FF8 itself, so I promise you won't be spammed with my wittering more than necessary.

Posted by mpk at May 13, 2004 10:40 AM | TrackBack