Blain Nelson's Abuse Pages
What's New and Different Around Here

The following is what I've done to the site in roughly the order I do it (give or take the time it takes me to get around to putting the information in here).


12 Mar 2006
A new home!

I've gone ahead and moved to blainn.com. The cost will be much less than it has been at blainn.cc, and that's a good thing. I've also updated several of the documents here, pulling out dead links, adding a few new resources. I added an introduction to the document for parents in abusive situations so that it makes a little more sense, and tweaked a sentence in the document for those considering leaving abusive situations that makes a better introduction for those considering returning to situations they've left because of abuse.

And I tweaked the css for the main abuse page so that it will look more coherent than it was before. For some odd reason, the css just seems to work better on my new webhost. I don't know why.


9 Jun 2005
A new resource!

I've had several people email me recently discussing returning to or staying in the relationship with their abuser, and so I put together a basic response that I was cutting and pasting, but decided that it would be a good addition to the website. I also added a link to it from the document about leaving one's abuser.


14 Jan 2005
Time to prettify things some more still

It surprises me how long it's been since I set this up. It doesn't seem like it's been nearly so long as that. The site's been around, in various incarnations, for more than 10 years now. And it continues to reach people around the world -- I continue to get email requests for help, and I continue to answer them.

Anyhow I've been doing a bit of tweaking and fixing lately, including quite a bit of tweaking of the PHP information around here. And other stuff, like:

I'm considering seriously moving the site from blainn.cc to blainn.com. And moving my webhosting to my own local machine, now that I have a high-speed connection and am running Linux (Debian/Sid via Knoppix for the interested). It would save on expenses substantially ($8/year for the domain name versus $60/year now, and $25/year for dyndns service versus $8/month now). The downside would be that I would orphan a bunch of links that currently point to blainn.cc -- there are still documents that point to these pages in their original location at wwu.edu 10 years ago.

I'm currently testing a new html editor called Quanta. It works well in my new Linux life. It's not quite as easy to use as NoteTab Pro, but NTP has a love-hate relationship with Wine -- sometimes it works just ducky, and sometimes it doesn't. Or, perhaps, my Wine setup isn't quite stable enough. Not sure.


21 Jul 2003
Time to prettify things some more

Since I've learned the joys of PHP, I'm making use of it to simplify the repetative stuff around here that's such a pain in the butt. I'm also changing the look, tweaking the CSS, and overall making the site a better place.

I have:

I need to:


2 September 2002
I'm uploading the new versions now.

I have:

I still need to:


24 August 2002
I'm almost done with the main documents in this site.

One update of a previous update: I'm not getting married anytime soon. There is nothing under that link, and there's not going to be for a long time, if at all.

Aside from that, I've gotten through most of the stuff that goes with the main abuse page, as well as fixing some broken markup on the abuse-free site that I'd not noticed, so everything is coming along just swimmingly. It was sad to find how many of the links I've had which are permanently gone -- some good sites have gone away, and some good agencies have shut down. But I've found a boatload of new stuff, and will try to get some new links put on there for the betterment of all.

Updating the abuse-free site has proven useful -- fixing the broken main document may have helped in producing two subcription requests in the two days since I created it. I still haven't found out how to get people to just send me a message telling me why they qualify for the list. Maybe if I made a form that would just ask them the stuff I need to know, that would do. Hmm.

Anyhow, I'm going to get back to work. The next update will probably talk about having this done and updating it. I'll probably talk about how much I really like my new editor (NoteTab Pro), and how cool Cascading Style Sheets and XHTML are. The next version of XHTML is going to be (I'm guessing) pretty close to the last, as we continue the transition to XML. But that might take a couple more years. But just looking at what's been made available since I created this site using plain old HTML 1.0 is pretty amazing. If I had looked then at the way things are now, it would have likely psyched me out of the whole idea.

Anyhow, go about your business, and I'll let you know (here) when I'm done.


20 August 2002
It's been a long time, but things are getting better

I'm working the old site over again, upgrading the markup to XHTML 1.0 and utilizing Cascading Style Sheets to improve the presentation. This rocks. I've also been doing some minor revision and a bit of link updating. I have known about XHTML and CSS for some years now, but have resisted moving into them until now because I didn't see much browser support, and because my old tired macros in WP would need some serious work that I didn't want to get into. So I didn't -- I got a new editor that lets me create new macros quite easily, has HTML Tidy built in to convert to XHTML for me, and just works quite slick at editing web pages.

Thus far, I've got the abuse-free site totally upgraded and ready to go. I found that I had inadvertently overwritten the abuse-free homepage with a copy of my personal homepage, and this annoyed me greatly -- I don't know how long it was like that. But I was able to get a copy of the proper version of that document off my (now) old computer, and now it's ready to go again. I've done most of the setup work to upgrade the rest of the abuse site, and can now upgrade most documents (that don't have badly broken markup in them) in a matter of minutes. It's still probably going to take me some weeks to get the site totally upgraded, and then I'll upload it all at one time. Except I will be uploading this to talk about the changes even though the rest of the site is all the same for the moment. It's strange, but it's my way for right now.


28 December 2000
Another installment on my story!

That's right, the first submission from me about my life in almost five years. Things are changing in my life, and it seemed like it was time. See, I'm planning to get married. There'll be more information about that under this link sooner or later (maybe before I send all this stuff). I'm going to need to change my faq as well, to reflect this fact.

Not bad for one day, huh?


20 May 2000
Not much, but I did it.

I added the first stories submission in over two years -- Elden's Story. It's very powerful.

That'll do for today.


17 April 2000
It's been a long, long time.

Things I did today:

That's about it.

Things that have happened since our last episode:

Things still to do:


August 3, 1998
Wow, can I procrastinate or what?

I'm still in the middle of things, but thus far I've:

I need to still:

Yes, I have decided to put banner ads on the abuse pages. I've been resisting it, but it looks to be a way that I can begin to defray the costs of running the site, and may be able to get enough to buy my own domain name to run the site on without having to move it so much.


June 17, 1997
The guilt has gotten to me.

In looking at this, I haven't done a whole heck of a lot. After revising all the documents to point to my FAQ, I then didn't upload most of them. I will be doing so at the same time I finish this.

Probably the most significant change recently is the change in the page listing abuse resources elsewhere. I finally broke down and sorted the resources by type and put an index on them. I had been resisting this for a long time, but I think it'll make things more useful. I probably ought to go back through those resources and alphabetize them or something like that, since they order they are in is pretty arbitrary. We'll see. Maybe this'll be the way I maintain my little rebellion.

I've changed the buttons pointing to other sites on the main abuse page I removed the one about Point, since they no longer list me, and the one about Dr. John Grohol's best of the web, because I added one to Dr. Grohol's new site that gave me a four-star rating (four being the highest rating available). The site's been added to the Net Rail web-ring also, and so I have a link to that. My guest-book provider and my hit counter have both gone down, so I removed those links also. Finally, I put the links to all of the above (that are still here) along with the link to the Blue Maxwell document in a table so that they appear along side the title graphic, rather than at the bottom. This will be immediately obvious to anybody who has looked at the document, I suppose, but I wanted to list what was different about it. I'm a tiny bit concerned about this step, because it marks something that will likely deteriorate the appearance of the document in the hands of Lynx users. Until I look at it via Lynx, I won't know for sure.

I've been added to a couple other sites that index and want me to add HTML to point back to them. I will do so, but I'm not sure when yet. I'm not ignoring them, exactly.


April 28, 1997
It's been a while again.

Well, this time I've been doing some things on and off without updating this file. First, and most excitingly for me, the new HTML 3.2 final standard has been released. This is very cool, as it allows for the use of tables and other neat things (and I know you've been seeing them around the web for a long time, but that's not the point. They're standard HTML now. I've always tried to keep this whole site firmly in standard HTML, and to discourage the expansion of browser-specific HTML. I've found a movement out there along this lines, and have put small buttons supporting one of those campaigns on the main abuse page.

With the use of tables, I went through and redid the tag info to allow for a more visually pleasing way of handling the award icons that were at the bottom of each document. Having redone that, I decided that I really didn't need to have the award icons at the bottom of each document after all, so I stripped them off.

I also revised the tag info to take my e-mail address off and to point to my nifty new FAQ that I've been working on. The idea is not to avoid getting e-mail, so much as it is to cut back on the time I spend answering standard questions that I get all the time. I've found that writing up a definitive explanation for why something is the way it is that I'm repeatedly asked about, and then putting it on the site linked to the appropriate sections, I quit getting those repetitive e-mails. This will be a place I can handle those questions all at once. I have put my e-mail address in the FAQ in an easy-to-find place, though, so accessing me won't really be difficult.

I've also made some minor changes here and there through the site, including the lists of questions on the main abuse page, my Cycle of Abuse article, the disclaimer (I think), and others (can't remember all of them).

Oh, and, in the interest of being more browser-friendly, I've been spending an inordinate amount of time today putting height and width information in all of my inline graphics.

There are lots of things left to do, and like updating the tags on the whole rest of the site, and that's going to take a long time, and I've got to stop doing this in the next half- hour or so and get some paying work done.


February 3, 1997
It's been a while, hasn't it?

Once again, I've not done much with most of the time, but I have got some stuff in the works, and some of it's worth getting up there now.

Well, on looking at how long it's been since I did the last update, there's more than I thought -- the biggest being, of course, the release of the revision and the shutting down of the old version. That seems to have gone fairly smoothly, with most of the human maintained sites updating the links (the indexes have not done so yet, including Point, strangely enough. I'm trying to get Point to re-review the site and see if they'll change my ratings a bit).

The biggest thing, other than that, is the addition of the long-awaited On-line Reading Library. I'm very pleased about this -- I've wanted this to be out there for a long long time. I hope I can get some more material to include in there, now.

I've also received another person's story, and that's pretty much marked up and ready to go, I hope to have it finalized and approved this week so I can release it soon. I have inquiries for a couple more submissions (within the past two days) and they may materialize also. I need to look, because I suspect that I've got some more submissions for this section that I was sitting on that I need to get done and out.

I also added a Guest Book, a hit counter, and a small PSA graphic on Missing and Abducted Children. The Guest Book and hit counter are both free, so I'll ask you to go check out their sites to help support them via providing hits for their sponsors to pay them for. Speaking of which, I may be getting a sponsor for the site here to help defray the costs of the site (particularly if I have to pay extra for my use of bandwidth -- I've been averaging about 150 hits/day in the almost week since I put the hit counter on it, and that's without the major search engines being updated). I may be adding some more PSAs on various documents as I see ones that are appropriate for the document. I've wanted to avoid worrying about sponsors, but being broke and being a one-man operation, it looks increasingly like this will be necessary.

I still need to work on presenting the story of a woman I fear dead. That's going to be interesting for me, since I'm not sure how exactly I want to handle it.


January 2, 1997
Since we last spoke:

Well, for most of that time, I did nothing much on the site -- it's been busy personally, and sometimes that comes first. I did, however, get busy today and update the documents on the old site to prepare them to upload to the pacificrim.net server before I make the move there. I've been hesitating to make the jump, but I think there is no reason to hesitate further -- I'll try to get that taken care of in the next week or so. Uploading the site is the easy part -- getting the press releases out and getting all the links all over the net updated is going to be ugly.

I'm also toying with making this site, under construction, available to folks who read the existing site. This will put the new good information out for public consumption, without losing the opportunity to do a grand opening with a press release and the whole nine yards. Please do not circulate the url for the revision until I have completed it.

After that, I got in and fixed the tag information (the link to the Crisis Centers Directory in it was bad, so I found the new one) and updated all the documents in the root abuse directory. I also changed the formatting of links in the abuser document to the format of the links documents -- I like it better. In the process, I also updated some of the dead links in that document and added the one to the program in Homer, Alaska -- great program, at least on paper!

On looking back, I also found that I did get some macro work done, including a new and improved paragraphing macro and another one that is going to make marking up submissions that I get in ascii (or WP) a whole bunch easier. I guess I wasn't quite so lazy as I thought I was.

That's it. I still need to:


November 11, 1996
Since we last spoke:

Well, we had election, and I got to meet Khan Klatt (we've chatted electronically for a couple years, but this was the first time we'd met in person. He's very tall. Very big, actually) while he stood in line to vote (I was a poll worker).

And I got a copy of WordPerfect 7.0 to do my editing with. It was supposed to make things better, but it lied, and I'm very disappointed with it. The good news is that my HTML macros still work, as does my old copy of WP 6.1.

As if you care, I know, but it matters.

Anyhow, I did squat until today, when I sat down and got busy working on stuff. I:

Pretty good day, huh?

I still need to:


November 2, 1996
Since our last episode:

Things I still need to do:


October 29, 1996
Since my last update:

Things I still need to do:


October 19, 1996
As of now, lots of things are new and different around here I have:

Last revised 16:37:50 EDT, 29 Apr 2009

If you have any questions about anything in this page (including requests for permission to use the material on this or any other page on this site), or wish to contact me, please check my FAQ. If you need help immediately, please call your local Crisis Services.

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