What goes where?

[bnewman]

My infospace is in shambles.

Okay, a few weeks ago I made serious inroads against a number of primary nexi of infoclutter, and my email is basically under control. However, infosanity has suffered some serious setbacks lately:

• Swarthmore College just shut down its NNTP server. This means there is now no practical way for me to read usenet in the same logical frame in which I read my regular email. I'm not cut off from usenet, but I'm going to have to change my routine, and that's not easy for me.


• I'm going to be starting graduate school at a new university. I have a new email account. Should I forward it to the one I'm using now (what I'm currently doing, but of course it's not getting much mail right now)? Vice versa? Something else?


• I've just gotten a livejournal. I don't have to explain why this is potentially a serious setback to my infosanity, do I?

Beyond advice about how to organize the information I receive, I'm also looking for advice on how to organize the information I project — which is where you, O gentle reader-of-information-I-project (and you are, aren't you? — right now, even!) come in.

What would you like to see here in this livejournal? What would you like to see more of on my website?

Right now, the only part of my website that's really alive is my songs page. When I set up my pretty front page, I thought about what information I would like to project, and how I might organize it, and then never got around to creating or posting much of it. Here's a quick guide to the website I thought I would make:

• Life — This was to be a repository for information about me: where I live, people I know, communities I'm a part of. Much of this sort of thing could go here on livejournal. Some less-volatile reference information could still go in this section, but in fact there isn't any non-volatile information of this kind right now.


• Work — This was to be a repository for information about my career: where I'm working, papers I've written (in fact, I have posted several of these here), etc. When next I have shiny new career stuff to post, though, it'll be research, and will go in my webspace at the institution where I'm doing the research.


• Views — This was to be a repository for my views and opinions. I particularly wanted to put up enough information so that people who wish to know who I am in the sense of knowing what I think and believe could do so. The trick has been figuring out how to capture in a smallish set of essays those of my views that change slowly enough to be useful in this capacity. More volatile or topical position pieces could go here on livejournal or in other fora as appropriate.


• Links — This is a page of links to other websites, organized by the same schema as the whole site. I'm still not sure what it's for, though — are these for my reference? For others' edification? Does a link imply endorsement? I haven't updated this page in some time, because I'm not sure in which direction to take it, and it implicates infospace management questions well beyond the matter of what information I personally should project.


• Songs — This page, the one truly living corner of my website, is the repository of songs that I've written. I've been considering adding some explanatory blurbs, and am not sure where to put them — in each song file (I don't like this), in a separate notes file for each song, or on a global notes page with a section for each song? I lean towards the latter, but am concerned about spoilers — not story spoilers, song spoilers! What if you go to look at the notes for one song, and see an adjacent note that spoils the punchline of another song? But I don't want to put in a lot of extraneous whitespace, either.


• Stories — At some point I should do a whole post about my relationship to writing. Suffice it to say that I come up with ideas for prose fiction to write, and write snippets of it (and I like to think that my prose is pretty good), but don't tend to actually finish any of it. Well, if I did, it would go in this section. Actually, I have posted one story, "Shadetree", which you should especially read if you want to understand the song "Pnakapfna".


• Worlds — More than stories themselves, I make up worlds. Of course, these could be used as settings for stories (or, as is actually the case, songs), but I might also create non-narrative reference materials for them, which would go in this section. Right now there's just a capsule description for each of them.


• Visions — Visual art, like prose, is something of which I sometimes wish I produced more. However, there is a fair bit of content in this section even now. I'm working on putting up more of the stuff I've done that's not flat, with the help of eclectic_boy's digital camera. That would put the number of items over the threshold to organize it into subsections. Soon...


• Games — Computer games, board games, role-playing games — you name it, I've thought of designing it but haven't actually. I have a few things I could put here, but many aren't ready. My perl Pong implementation works, but I'd like to redo it with sockets, since Cory Doctorow said (in an elevator at Noreascon) he might blog it on Boing-Boing if it were Internet ready, only I wouldn't want to use a central server architecture, even as a game tracker, for fear of getting Boing-Boinged. "Land of the _____" still needs to decide how many rules to have. My mix-up of Diplomacy and Go hasn't been playtested. Etc.

So, what would you like to see? What do you think belongs in a livejournal versus going on a website?

Comments

[rebeccapaul.livejournal.com]

As for e-mail: I like to use my Swarthmore e-mail for personal e-mail and my new school e-mail for school-related stuff. It helps partition my life. (Of course, sometimes I get lazy and the personal stuff creeps onto my school e-mail.)

As for what should go in your LJ versus your webpage: My big request is that when you add something to your webpage, you mention it in your LJ. That way, those of us who very rarely go to people's webpages but always read our LJ's know about it. Beyond that, I'd say longer creations of any kind (songs, worlds, longer stories) probably belong on a webpage, while life updates belong here. But it's your stuff, so you should do what you want to do with it...

Enjoy the many methods of communication!

[reldnahkram.livejournal.com]

Most of the things you've referenced seem fairly stable/static. You may want to mention them on LJ and/or post drafts/working copies here, but the finished products probably want to exist in your webspace where they'll be easier to find.

[rose_garden.livejournal.com]

I would definitely like to hear about your transition to grad school.

I'm having the same thing with transitioning to a new email address. For the most part, I haven't transitioned at all. My new addresses are forwarding to my sccs address. It means that all time stamps are three hours off, but otherwise it's fine.

Viva

[rose_garden.livejournal.com]

By the way, you might like to use tags to organize your livejournal infospace.

[(Anonymous)]

I plan to, when I have a better idea of what I'm going to be posting, and before I have too many entries to go back and add tags to all of them. The addition of tags to the interface was, in fact, a major factor in my deciding to get a livejournal now.

[irilyth]

An LJ seems to me to share a key feature with e-mail: When you post something there, people will see it in the course of their normal routine. This is not, generally, true of a web site, unless it happens to be a web site that people check frequently; but e.g. my home page, or one of its sub-pages, is surely not such a place.

My web page is different from LJ in one key respect: I have total control of how it's organized, whereas LJ is organized chronologically. (By and large.) I post stuff there when I care about what it looks like, and how it's connected to other things I post there.

[mneme]

Email: Get a permenant email address and keep it. Chaning email addresses is a pain in two halfs, so IMO, it's often worth getting your own domain just to have an email address you -know- you own.

That said, I'm still using my io address more than my labcats.org address, several years after it was no longer cool (ie, owned by SJG, or even by Steve Jackson's brother). Why? The same reason -- it's a pain to switch over, so I've never bothered (plus, having a shell account I don't have to run is ultra-convenient, and this one is about as cheap as any other).

I'd say that works in progress should generally go on your journal. However, a journal is a horrible place to organize things, if an excellent log site, so I'd take anything you wanted to put into permanant storage of some sort and give it space on your website. (that said, my songs never go on my journal -- instead, they start on my handheld, and move from there to my io website).

That's my take on this kind of thing, anyway.

[wayman.livejournal.com]

Email ... I don't know, really. I used to think having everything go to one place was best, and for ease of checking it's definitely true. I'm no longer sure that applies to situations like what you describe, though I'm not sure what the best solution is.

Life ... The advantage to posting about life on LJ, like SWAPA, is that you can control who reads various posts through judicious use of friends-locking. I'd like to hear about how things are going with you, grad-school-wise and life-wise.

Views ... When I started my LJ three years ago, I thought I would post views there in snippets as they occurred to me, and then edit, combine, and condense disparate entries into cohesive essays on my website. That never happened, though.

In general, the "post new content, or drafts, or links to new content on LJ so we know it exists", which others have already said.

[almeda.livejournal.com]

LJ is very, very good for getting input and kicking around drafts. Better than anything else I've ever seen (I got over a hundred comments in ONE HOUR once).

Webpages are very good for being able to link to something and have it still be there four years later (assuming stable hosting). LJ, not so much good for being able to find things later.

I don't know if any of this helps. :->

In re worlds and writing, I was just reading over on copperbadge's LJ that he's good at prose but can't seem to do new worlds, and since nobody pays for fanfic he can't make a living writing; you might consider, whether with him or someone else, doing collaborations?

[orawnzva.livejournal.com]

Where in copperbadge's journal?

[almeda.livejournal.com]

Sorry, should linked. This post is one place, esp. in comment threads.