One of my ongoing projects is a planned restructure of my primary weblog, xmouse. The justification is pretty simple: I don’t write to it any more. I haven’t written a proper essay to the site in a really long time, and that was the initial purpose. And so, here’s the plan.
There will be three sections. I’ll keep the old essays around, they’ll keep their URIs (xmouse.ithium.net/essays/blah), as the structure is date-agnostic (desirable for essays, which shouldn’t IMO be organised chronologically), short and generally works pretty well.
The second section will be the asides. I guess these will vary in length from a single sentence to a few paragraphs. I’ll probably organise them by date, and naturally the URI structure will reflect this (I’m thinking xmouse.ithium.net/[year]/[month]/blah). I’ll probably give each a short title, this will just help when going through archives. I may also explore things like syndicating links from my del.icio.us. In terms of implementing the asides, the general consensus seems to be that a dedicated Asides category is the best way to go. Although this has its ugly sides, I’ll give it a try and see where I get.
Thirdly, my wiki. This will be a catch-all service for my half-baked ideas (explore ways of posting mind-maps/outlines?), formal specifications and documentation for my projects. In the long term, I’d like to move everything off my current solution, Mediawiki, and onto WordPress. This has a few advantages: sexier and unified (with my blog) UI, the WordPress plugins, a single DB. I’d like to write a few plugins to make the WordPress Pages feature more wiki-like: I’m thinking an edit-in-place plugin to make Pages really easy to edit (wikis are meant to be fast), and possibly one to show a message along the lines of ‘A page with this name doesn’t exist yet’ instead of a 404 when a non-existant Page is requested.
Thoughts on that structure?
