Most of the interesting information which came into my life used simply to drift out of it again. I wanted a way to be able to access it again, quickly and whenever I wanted to, without cluttering up my life. So the commonplace book acts as a 'memory-bank' for anything I read and want to be able to read again in the future. But it's also turned into a place to start writing about my life, to think out loud about issues which interest me, to store sermons I've written, and to make a record of books I've read, films I've watched, concerts I've been to or places I've visited. No doubt I'll discover other uses for it.
And of course, the net means that you can read it as easily as I can. If you have any comments or questions, do e-mail me. I'd be interested to know how you got here.
New content is listed in the what's new area of the site. It lists new material added every week, sometimes every day. This area acts as an alternative 'map' of the site, listing content in the order it was added.
I hope this will come, but it's some way down my list of priorities. I happen to think that 'search' facilities often encourage website managers to become lazy in how they structure their sites. If I add a search facility, it will only be after I believe the site is already easy to navigate. See the next answer for how to find entries on a particular subject.
The subject guide is designed to list all the main subjects covered in the site, either alphabetically or by subject area. The subject guide forms the backbone of the site, listing not only relevant entries on this site, but also other websites devoted to the same subject.
Every page with content on this site has ‘breadcrumbs’ (from the ‘Hansel & Gretel’ story). They don't show you what path you took to get here, but they do provide various paths back to the Home Page. Click on any reference to a page in the breadcrumbs, and you'll be taken to that page.
Here are some examples of breadcrumbs:
My commonplace book for November 2005 has only one set of breadcrumbs:
whilst my subject guide entry on William Shakespeare has three sets of breadcrumbs:
One of these provides an alphabetical path to the Home Page. The other two reflect the fact that Shakespeare was both a poet and a playwright.
I choose entries just because they interest me. I don't agree with them all. Sometimes I choose an entry precisely because I don't agree with it. I might try to make that more obvious in future by writing parallel entries in my journal.
This might seem rather strange at first, since the entries relating to a particular subject appear to be scattered at random. There are reasons for this. The more I explore some issues, the more complex they will reveal themselves to be, and the structure will need to reflect that. At the same time, I don't want to have to keep shifting content around: once it's written, I want to keep it in the same place. And so what I am continually changing is not the order of the content, but the index pages. The content is stored in an order which is, in relation to the subject mater, almost entirely random. In fact, the content is stored in chronological order, much as the commonplace book and journal entries are. The difference is that there are no chronological indices to the thinking aloud area.
If I want to trace my thoughts on a subject, then, I need to keep returning to the relevant 'thinking aloud' subject index, as the relevant entries are scattered throughout this area of the site, depending on when they were written.
In addition, since my thoughts will presumably be developing, I will want from time to time to revise previous entries or to consolidate them. Again, I will not change entries already created. Instead I'll make new ones, making clear in the relevant index the relationship between them.
Quite a lot of the site still needs to be re-coded in XHTML. These pages do look rather strange. Either they'll have an orange strip across the top, which means I created the page during the first year, when I was still using Microsoft Front Page; or else they'll have a dark blue background and links which change size when you pass the cursor over them. These are the first pages I tried to code myself, using tables to lay out the page. But I soon realised using tables in this way would make the pages almost as difficult to redesign in future as if I used Front Page. All new pages are now in XHTML, and I am gradually converting the old ones. (I should add that they didn't always look this strange: the problem is having old pages in a site using new stylesheets.)
Once I'd discovered how to use XHTML, the priority for me was to get the coding of the site's pages right. Putting energy into site design could wait, one of the major advantages of XHTML being that it's possible to change the design of individual pages at any time, without changing the pages themselves, using style sheets.
So I created the most basic of designs, a design that would simply reflect the structure - or syntax - of the page. And boxes are an easy way of doing that. The boxes won't last forever.
When I get around to putting some time into serious design, then I'll start incorporating pictures. But it could be some time: there's plenty of work to do on the site's text content before then. I also don't think it's a bad idea to make sure the site is rich in text content before adding pictures. It would be very easy for beautiful designs to obscure the fact that the site was rather thin in other content.
One of the great advantages of using XHTML and style sheets is that it's possible for one page to be presented in different ways by different media. I hope to develop stylesheets for handhelds and for printers when I can find the time.