(Part 01 – there is a character limit for a single message, so I am breaking it up into two parts)

Harlan,

No problem on this. While I have not quite been in your situation, I have been in some pretty weird ones including a few years of homelessness and actually spending about 2 years at a homeless shelter that was actually an old prison. Weird. Anyway, I understand the way our society has marginalized people of all sorts and as a country there is this attitude of perpetual punishment for even the smallest infractions. And when people can’t find something to punish people for, they make stuff up. It drives me crazy. Just this morning I read an article about outlawing text messaging while riding a bike. Ok yeah, it is a stupid thing to do, but to make it criminal? Please. Classic example of a legislator using their bully pulpit to shill for votes and disregarding what really needs attention and displaying a complete lack of common sense.

Even though I am living on the outside, I am just a guy in a little studio apartment in Illinois. No kids or any of that. I just happen to have a knack for computing crap and make a small living at it. I don’t even know how I came across the BTB site, but after reading some of the entries, I thought I could help out. I do exactly this type of thing for a job and have quite a few tricks to make the job far easier than one might expect. I work from home and get jobs from all over via the internet. People send me their old documents (usually scans) that they have lost the original for and I have a variety of software that reads it and converts it back to regular text. For this website, it is a perfect skill to use and I don’t mind at all doing it.

For now, I am concentrating on persons who have typewritten entries as they are far easier to convert. Once I work through all those, I will start in on the handwritten ones. (continued)

(continued)

Anyway, as far as your entries go, I chose your entries for a couple of reasons. First it was just because they were typed as opposed to handwritten. After reading through your entries I also came to agree with much of what you talk about. It is nice to see that you have a vision of the world outside the walls. All too often it is easy to get caught up in just what is going on inside (even though that is quite a lot) as the expense of a larger world view. While I know it is difficult to see beyond the walls sometimes as it can get into the “what does it matter if I am stuck here?” world, but it is important to keep a perspective of what is happening in life. I don’t know what you are allowed to receive where you are, but if I can assist with getting you various news materials just let me know.

As far as your “reach” into search engines, yes, you are correct about your text being searchable. Some of it depends on whether this website allows “indexing” via Google, but I am sure it does. The fact that you are writing about current events really helps as well as most people will be searching for items that are similar to what you write about. But you never know what people are going to search for and what result will be returned. While some people may talk about putting “keywords” in your writings to increase the hit count, I would suggest sticking with what you are doing. I think your subject matter is hitting the right points and it is honest, relevant, timely and current. When one starts trying to manipulate the search engines to pick up their pages by adding keywords for just that reason, it lessens the honesty factor as you are writing for web page hits, and not subject matter. While they may not be looking for the word “Harlan”, they might by searching for items about the current political world, they may also see your entries as they come up as a search result. That is basically how it works for now. If enough people start looking for you specifically, then the search engine results will reflect that.

So that is about it for now. Stay well and keep the letters coming. I will get them up as soon as possible. As of this writing, I have converted about a third of them so far and will get on the rest soon. What I hope is this weekend (or past weekend by the time you get this) I can do a marathon session and get all your entries up to date. I think there are about 50 of them which I have converted about a quarter of them.

Stay well.

Joe R