Archival URL?

[nrnrnr]

I'd like to cite your work in a book I'm writing. But personal URLs are notoriously short-lived. Would you be willing to upload PDF to arxiv.org, or some similar location?

(I saw the open PDF issue #3. If it would help to have somebody try the build on Linux, I'm happy to try.)

[greghendershott]

First, thank you, I'm flattered that you want to cite this in your book about novices who write tutorials while they struggle to learn something. 😁

I plan to maintain the greghendershott.com domain name indefinitely, and the web server is GitHub Pages. But yes I've heard something about how people make plans, and other entities laugh.

The thing is, Fear of Macros is hard (for me) to categorize. It's more than a blog post, but it's less than a long article. Mainly I think of it as a work-in-progress tutorial project, with open source code.

Although I haven't updated it much, lately, that's more due to me being busy than it not needing updating. And so, making a snapshot for arXiv feels weird, to me.

Assuming that the least-worst description of it is, "a live project", then maybe the URI for the official repo -- https://github.com/greghendershott/fear-of-macros/ -- would be the least-worst thing to use?

But if I'm misunderstanding please let me know.

[nrnrnr]

I'm not worried about categorization. I think we're both calling it a "tutorial." Besides, my readers are mostly people who are just learning Scheme, and who maybe want to learn about macros. So your work is a good fit.

When it comes to citations, however, I've been trained to think like a librarian. That means finding a way to keep the work accessible forever, and not just hoping that a snapshot shows up on the Internet Wayback Machine. If your work were licensed Creative Commons, I'd just take a snapshot myself and dump the problem on my publisher. (They've been around for 480 years, so presumably they can figure this stuff out.) But since your work is copyrighted, I'm asking you to think about it.

FYI, arXiv does provide for documents that evolve. Policy says,

We encourage authors to update and to make corrections in their articles. DO NOT make a new submission for a corrected article or for an erratum. Rather replace the original submission.

I don't plan to submit my manuscript until August, so there's no particular rush.