Within these pages, the ‘Map Resource‘ is one of most people’s favourite stopping-off points. It’s far from perfect of-course, but I cannot for a moment complain of the munificence of Kobrand for supplying me with their maps, and since way-back in 2004 too.

Those maps clearly needed a little work to be of publication quality, but c’est la vie… Clearly there were a number of gaps too, Fixin, Premeaux-Prissey, Volnay etc., but – tada! – a kind reader who wishes to remain anonymous (probably so their employer remains oblivious 😉 ) has donated a map in the same style that covers Volnay.

A big ‘thanks‘ to them – and from all of us I suspect!

A couple of thousand people on this site’s mailing-list got this today. Only one of the replies called me a lazy toad! 😉

Dear Friends,

A quick email to say that there will be no ‘Autumn Burgundy Report’ for you this week – no I haven’t given up – not yet anyway!

One missed appointment and one cancelled trip, maybe due to flu, has left me with something that I would be embarassed to call a report.

However, early next week I should meet with Aubert, Maurice and Philippe and they will make the difference, and I suppose that it’s still Autumn if the report is published before the 21st of December!

In the meantime, as many have already asked me, please find below a link to my annual ‘Vintage Viewpoint’. Just a little something to keep you going another two weeks…

A Vintage Viewpoint

Thanks & cheers
Bill

Part of the long-term updating of the site is to bring more and more of the content under the site (content) management tool. As per my previous note, the transfer of the ‘reports’ keeps moving at its snail pace of progress. Today 2003, much of 2004 plus 2007/8/9 reports are now ‘migrated’ (done!).

Yesterday I made a similar move with the ‘reference’ section that’s titled ‘discovering burgundy’ – it’s now here. I filled in a couple of the holes, but the content is largely as before – so what benefits? Well the benefits are all mine – if I add a new page in a particular section, all the others are updated automatically – I don’t need to adjust 25 pages to reflect the addition. I think they call it progress!

The (possibly) long process of updating the site with the 20th century in mind has started. 😉
The Spring 2003 Burgundy Report has now been brought from it’s discrete collection of little files, under the wing of ‘the publishing system’. I find it interesting to look back at those ‘pokey’ images – they couldn’t have been much bigger as 800 pixel screen widths was the norm!
It will take (perhaps) one week per issue to finally take control of those 2003-2006 issues and their jumble of files – without resizing the images – so should be completed by Christmas!

Some changes may be obvious, others less-so. I’ve updated the database for the NoteFinder, so 2,800+ notes are now available; of which over 600 are from the 2007/2006 vintages. Performance should have improved too – it was more than a bit flaky of recent – but it turned out to be because of so many ‘concurrent users’ soaking up the available RAM – or some such. Anyway, apparently I have more rams now!

More obvious is the new design – looks not perfect in IExplorer 6, but the 12% of visitors will have to suffer for a better view for the 88%. As previously mentioned, unlike me, it is much cleverer under the skin than before. Currently it mostly works too! I shall be ironing out the odd hiccup over the next days.

The Summer 2009 Burgundy Report is now available.
Enjoy and have a nice weekend…

The occasional thing may seem a bit ‘flakey’ around here and maybe for the next few days as I (piece-by-piece) update the site’s structure.

A slightly different design which currently looks okay in internet explorer (7) but is less than perfect in Firefox, I expect it will be about 2 weeks before everything is bedded in. Unlike me, this is much cleverer under the surface! Hopefully it doesn’t break too often!

PS – did I mention the Summer Burgundy Report will go live sometime this evening…(?)

I was recently searching for something-or-other and came across a very different Big Red Diary. Clearly it is run, since 2005, by a red-headed lady – I’ll make no other assumptions in respect of the word ‘big’ – anyway, zero complaints from me! But that got me wondering how many other ‘BRDs’ there could be “out there…”

Not many it seems – though ‘Red Diary’ is more common – I did, however, find one interesting piece of social history; an old publication of that name designed by one David Wild in 1973 for Pluto Press, a publisher of radical political pamphlets and books – who still seem to be going strong. According to the official Pluto Press web-page:

“Pluto Press has always had a radical political agenda. Founded in 1969 as a publishing arm of International Socialism, the forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party in the UK, in 1979 we broke with this political affiliation and became truly independent. Today, we represent authors from a wide range of progressive political viewpoints. With over 550 titles in print, Pluto Press is one of the world’s leading radical book publishers. We publish more than 70 new titles each year.”

I didn’t know the history when I appropriated the ‘Big Red Diary’ name, and it seems that ‘red’ mainly stood for something else in the 1970s – though depending on where you live, times have mainly moved on! I found a few old cover-pages of the ‘original’ Red Diary that you might be interested to see. If there are any staunch socialists out there with a penchant for burgundy, then please do send me some scans from any ‘missing’ years that you may still have…
EDIT 21-Aug-2009 – four more covers including the classic “better active today than radioactive tomorrow”! Courtesy the publisher – Pluto. The last issue was 1987.

EDIT 13-May-2013 – A kind reader delivers the cover for 1983! Many thanks…