Sites And Things

I had another microchat with Dan Connolly about preserving information, media literacy, and the history of newspapers, which also got me thinking as a side effect about some projects that I've been meaning to work on recently.

One thing I'm getting into again recently is Anomalous Luminous Phenomena, though that entails me reading in information from the web and other sources and then spitting it back in the form of a parawikipedia article (in other words, an article which is written in Wikipedia style but about things which go beyond what should appear in Wikipedia itself). I also want to port some of the XHTML Modularisation examples I wrote a while ago to RNC, using James Clark's RNC modules. And I keep telling myself that I should make a grand inventory of all of the CDs that I create, though perhaps that doesn't matter too much.

I also have ambitions for creating a site on yet another rather disparate topic, but one to which I'll draw very little attention. As Morbus says about himself, I have my hands in many pies. The twin problems I face are that of motivation and that of organisation. I need to make sure that I'm spending my time on things which are really worthwhile, but then I also need to be motivated enough to do them, which is a seriously difficult thing when you do research on the level that I do—viz mainly as a hobby. And when I do get very excited about a particular line of research, which is fairly often, I tend not to document it.

I'm also getting rather interested in practical archaeology, but I'm not sure what an armchair enthusiast can really contribute to that. That's a problem with going through so much archival material and so on: the practical side of it is lacking. I do have one or two Shakespearean leads that I want to chase up, but it might be a while before I'm able to do so.

Another thing that I'm attempting to concentrate on is grand projects, the kinds of things that it takes a huge mental leap even to conceive of, yet alone follow through on. I have a list of roughly fifteen of these things that I could work on, though oddly enough a lot of them involve sending snail mail. One involves writing to a Marquess about a certain document no less. I've gotten quite a lot of feedback on What Planet is This? on quite unexpected topics, and that really pleases me. Even though it has a low readership overall, it seems as though it's a very selective readership.

Sadly, my email backlog is mounting to the point where I'm pretty much avoding going through it. I should at least start to reply to all incoming mail from now so that it doesn't mount up, but that means that everybody who sent email before this watershed date would be unfairly discriminated against. Perhaps I could at least balance it out by answering as many past emails as I get new emails? I'm not sure about the whole concept of email anyway—spam is such a nuisance to me since I'm so afraid of false positives and missing important information. Oh well.