The Strange Coincidences Archive

March 24th, 2008

After almost 11 months, the moratorium is over. The site is once again open to submissions.

I switched from a PHP based site to a Django based one. It was much more fun than coding PHP.

Changes made to the site:

• The previous incarnation of this site was probably a spammer’s dream come true. It was full of email addresses waiting to be harvested. Now the email addresses are no longer displayed publicly, although people can still contact the submitters via this site.
• I’ve employed an Akismet based spam filter. The reason this site went into limbo was that people kept posting spam via the forms. Now each entry is checked with the filter and silently rejected if deemed to be spam. I sure hope there are few false positives…
• This site now has feed syndication! You can subscribe to the archives via an RSS feed. You can subscribe to the site news feed (link is above the box that contains all this text), but don’t expect much coming from that one!

I had hoped to de-uglify this site (while still maintaining Lynx compatibility), but that will have to wait (a year, two…?).

Welcome back! Already got 3 submissions in less than 24 hours! I’ll just put down here a mental note that I probably should make a dynamic graph that shows the rate of submissions…

I think people did email me some coincidences while the site was closed to them. I was not really careful and may have deleted a bunch – I’ll dig through my email and post them if I find them.

And for the record: Django rocks!

May 8th, 2007

I’ve temporarily killed the submit form as I was getting too much spam. If you want your coincidence up, please send it to me and I’ll add it once I have a solution figured out.

Which could be a while. Don’t expect things to return to normal any time soon. I do hope I’ll have more to promise you once I’ve sorted things out.

February 28th, 2005

Whew! Almost two years since the last update. Time does fly!

OK. Much has changed since the last update:

• I’ve finally made this site dynamic! From now onwards, whenever a story is submitted, it will be updated on the site virtually instantly! No more silly delays!
• The site is now hosted at http://coincidences.nawaz.org. Hopefully, I’ll get the http://go.to/coincidences URL working as soon as I can figure out my password.
• New feature: Now you can click on the Random Coincidence link on the left and immediately get a random coincidence!
• I’ve (temporarily) removed the mailing lists feature. I hope to set something up such that you can sign up for a one-way mailing list where you will be able to receive each new submission as it is entered into the site.
• I have forgotten to update a few of the submissions – hopefully I’ll get that done soon.

Many thanks to all those who have been submitting to the site. And thanks for your patience.

April 3rd, 2003

Added 26 more stories. Sorry for the long wait – I had not idea it had been this long.

On the bright side, we passed the 100 mark!

October 13th, 2002

Added 20 more stories. The site seems to be picking up traffic.

I also added titles to most of the coincidences. I hope they don’t give them away. I didn’t spend too much time coming up with creative titles, so if you feel you have a better one for one of the coincidences, let me know.

July 25th, 2002

Added 13 more stories. Keep ‘em coming.

I know I’m slow at updating, but I think this is probably how it will be, with me only updating about three times a year. I don’t want to try to be very regular and get sick of it and end up abandoning the site altogether.

I do email all the people who sent me their coincidences since the last update and inform them when I’ve finally gotten around to posting their accounts. However, some people don’t leave their addresses. If you want to know when your story comes online, but don’t wish to have your address posted, just indicate so.

March 16th, 2002

I’ve just redesigned the whole site. I was getting sick of the silly messages the old site was giving whenever someone clicked on a link (courtesy of the “free” software I was using to create the site). I finally decided not to rely on free services and created the whole site using HTML only. I admit, it probably doesn’t look as good as the original site, but I think it serves the purpose for now. The benefit is that now I can move the site to any server I want (Yahoo! is acting a little strange now – I want to keep my options open).

I just added 11 more stories. Enjoy.

Many thanks to all of you who have patience with me and continue to send in your stories. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I do.

January 4th, 2002

First of all, many apologies for not updating this site in a very long time. I was quite busy. The bad news is that I’m still quite busy, and so updates will be at quite a low frequency. However, rest assured that any submissions will find their way to this site ultimately.

The good news is that I have received quite a few submissions from you. I will try to put them online ASAP. Many thanks for sending them in.

One final note. Because I hadn’t checked my email for a while, I lost my email account. So if you sent me any emails in the last few months, I apologize for not replying.

Just added seven stories. I still have more which I’ll put up later.

September 17th, 2001

Added 3 more stories.

September 7th, 2001

Added 15 stories.

September 1st, 2001

It’s been a long time since I updated this site. During the summer, I found out that my old host (Homestead) was no longer going to offer their Web hosting services for free.

I had created that site using their own tools, and not by using software or writing HTML code. I decided to move over to Yahoo! Geocities, but I did not want to use their Web building tools – instead, I wanted to create the site using software so that the files would reside on my Hard Disk – in case I wanted to switch at a later date. It would also make it much easier for me to update the site.

However, I don’t like typing HTML, and I couldn’t find any free software that would suit my needs – until I discovered Cool Page yesterday. So far, it has done just about everything I wanted it to – but I have yet to publish this site on the Web too see if everything will be working.

If you do find something that isn’t right, please email me.

Changes to the site: I have removed some sections. Gone are the “Read a Random Coincidence” and the Messageboard sections (because neither were functional anyway).

I hope to have this site up on the net later today. Since I haven’t updated the site for a long time, you can guess correctly that I have received quite a few more coincidences. I hope to put them up in a few days – right now my main concern is getting this site to run.

As always, the URL for the Web site is:

http://go.to/coincidences

March 15th, 2001

Added a cover page. I did this primarily because everytime I used to update the main page, the counter would reset to zero. The funny thing is that it didn’t reset to zero this time – but instead, I lost my message board. Oh well, these things happen.

I also added two more stories.

February 8th, 2001

Added four more stories.

February 2nd, 2001

Fixed wrong link problem in the Archives section (it would take people to the wrong story). Also added a new story.

January 31st, 2001

Added third story.

January 19th, 2001

Second story added.

January 17th, 2001

Added a links section.

January 15th, 2001

Created an almost fully functioning site. The only things missing are the actual archives (which I will make when I actually get some coincidences) and the Random Coincidence page. I’ll probably create a simple Java applet to handle that page – but it may be a while before I have it running.