Root Namespace Renamed to NamtiraWeb

The project's root namespace was changed from MillionLittlePieces to NamtiraWeb across all 200+ source files. This makes inline ASPX server expressions like <%= NamtiraWeb.Navigation.GeneratePageBar("...") %> portable to any NamtiraWeb site, not just this one. The .vbproj, Global.asax, Site.Master, all Gateway pages, and all content page code-behind blocks were updated.

Namtira Web Tools VS Extension

A new Visual Studio 2022+ extension was created: Namtira Web Tools. The first command, Convert to PageBar, appears in the right-click context menu when editing ASPX source. Select an <a> tag, click the command, and it replaces the selection with an inline GeneratePageBar call. The extension resolves relative paths to site-relative paths and preserves indentation. Built with the Community Visual Studio Toolkit and direct OLE command wiring for HTML Source Editor compatibility.

Read Aloud Button

A Read Aloud button was added to the options bar alongside the Share button, using the browser's Web Speech API. The initial implementation fed the entire article as a single utterance, which caused Chrome to pause mid-sentence due to internal buffer timeouts. The fix: inline HTML tags (<a>, <i>, <b>, etc.) are now unwrapped to plain text before extraction, adjacent text nodes are merged with normalize(), and whitespace is collapsed. The text is then split into paragraph-sized chunks, each spoken as its own SpeechSynthesisUtterance and queued sequentially. The button image (Nav-ReadAloud.jpg) was also added to the .vbproj project file so it deploys to the server.

New Essay: The Fisetin Burst

A new essay in the Aging Gratefully series explains the senolytic burst protocol for fisetin: what senescent cells are, how fisetin selectively kills them, the dosing math adjusted for body weight and liposomal bioavailability, what the cleanup response feels like, and a callback to a prescient Star Trek transporter dream from the 1980s.

PageBar: Unpublished Indicator

The GeneratePageBar function now emits an "Unpublished" row (with CSS class Unpublished) when a page's Published property is False. The row does not appear for published pages.

Inline PageBar Support

A string overload of GeneratePageBar was added to Navigation.vb, accepting a site-relative path and returning the rendered PageBar HTML. This enables inline cross-references in ASPX content: <%= NamtiraWeb.Navigation.GeneratePageBar("/Contents/.../"") %>

New Essay: The Case of the Missing Sister

A new essay in the Science section explores why cultures worldwide call the Pleiades the "Seven Sisters" when most people can only see six stars. Covers myths from seven cultures (Greek, Cherokee, Kiowa, Aztec, Japanese, Aboriginal Australian, Berber), stellar proper motion research suggesting the seventh star was visible 100,000 years ago, and an embedded YouTube video. Includes Paul's childhood stargazing memories and a passage from his novel The Lady From Heaven.

Aging Gratefully Section Split

The Aging Gratefully section was split into two. The ~155 autobiographical stories (dog parks, grandkids, surgeries, hikes, birthdays) were moved up one level from About_Me/2020s/2022.Aging_Gratefully/ to About_Me/2020s/. The 30 informative essays on non-personal topics (linguistics, philosophy, science, AI, social commentary) were moved with the Aging Gratefully landing page to a new top-level section at Contents/Aging_Gratefully/. 301 redirects were added for all old URLs—exact matches for the 30 informative essays and a pattern redirect covering the autobiographical essays.

CSS and Styling Fixes

• YouTube iframes: Fixed selector from $= (ends-with) to ^= (starts-with) so YouTube embeds get border-radius and box-shadow. Added aspect-ratio: 16/9 for proper sizing without explicit height attributes.
• Article h3: Added article h3 to the heading color/font rule so h3 headings display with the correct content heading color instead of inheriting white.

Novel Spell Check

The Lady From Heaven was run through a comprehensive spell, grammar, and typo check. 41 issues were identified and 37 corrections applied automatically to a new Book-corrected.docx file, preserving all original formatting via Word COM automation. Two items (an incomplete sentence in Chapter 9 and a dialogue attribution in Chapter 21) were flagged for manual review.