bnewman | What goes where? (Reply)

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.