vortex dot net dot en zed

I have a mess of websites, several domains, and content all over the place - Wordpress blogs, a web trail, or using services such as Flickr, Twitter, and Livejournal. The aim is to be as complete as possible in creating a catalogue of experience and thoughts so that at any point in the future I can be accurately referential. Photo albums don’t work for me any more - you can’t search by tag.

However, it’s not just an individual catalogue - it’s also an intersection of experience. Case in point: on the Webstock photo walk, I took a photo of Darren giving the fingers - and someone else took a photo of me taking that photo. They are both on Flickr. There is no single way that I have been able to think of so far that allows me to log my life in the way that I do now across all media - connect with my “community” - AND intersect with the captured artifacts of things that happen to me.

Peter Morville’s workshop at Webstock 08 sparked an idea to simplify down and build up again. Consider the simplification of websites into a list of categories with documents/artifacts displayed singly underneath. There would not be any site as such. What would this mean for linking through and accessing content on other sites - would I need to pull my content off other sites? If I really pull it onto my own site, I lose the ability to use the features of the service-based sites like Flickr that I really enjoy. Or - do I end up scraping my own sites in order to provide a framework for a real timeline of everything that I pull together. Is there much point other than satisfying some deep down librarian tendency?

Even doing something like the above, and having a navigation system to page through manually (CF: Flickr photostream next & previous) would not work without a search / navigation function for people to dive into what they may be looking for - tag cloud and search box? Tag list and different views of categorised content? Categories and breadcrumbs? I wonder how many people would have the same experience of my site(s) if they were unstructured to how they do now?

How far can I extend the idea and completely remove any idea of having a homepage to navigate to, and just allow Google searches to be the only way people can access the content. Without a homepage and relying on Google searches for people to find content would remove the personal aspects of why I write online - people having to do a search for “Amanda Wheeler” to find what I’ve been up to is just stupid (and my ego isn’t big enough to think that anyone even would on a semi-regular basis) - it would however apply to the “real” content I write - if any - and probably prompt me to spend more time providing information rather than just emotion.

In a lot of ways I guess I’m still looking for something to conclusively help me decide how to present and organise my information. I document compulsively, and over the years have spent a lot of time re-organising the way I do this. At the moment it is the fragmentation across sites, domains and services but maybe it is time to iteratively consolidate the data and see where I get to.

It’s been far too long in coming, but I finally wrote & added my iworkontheweb.com profile.

Do yours now - it’s super easy, especially if you already have a Flickr account. Go on.

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(Have you done it yet?)

I’ve explained this to a few people lately and thought I’d post it here in case anyone else is interested in this idea: we plan our menu week to week by using Google Calendar.

How we do it

1. Find recipes we like, either in cookbooks or magazines
2. Create an event in our shared Google Calendar with the name of the recipe. We add the recipe reference & main ingredients into the details of the event.
3. Once the week is planned out, we make a grocery list.
4. We go to the supermarket, but the items, make the food and enjoy!
5. Once we’ve had the meal, it gets rescheduled for 4-6 weeks away (sometimes less, sometimes more depending on how good a meal it is).

Pros/reasons

• If I’m at work and there are fresh items needed for a recipe (especially near the end of the week) we can pick up items on the way home - especially since Darren works in Ellerslie, land of bakeries.
• We waste less food by buying exactly what we need - especially if we can group recipes that use the same kinds of ingredients
• We spend less money than we used to when we didn’t do this.

Cons

• Getting started can be a slow process - especially if you have a lot of recipes.
• When we’re super busy it can fall by the wayside pretty easily.

So, in a nutshell, that is our system - I’m keen to hear from anyone who has other systems for recipes because honestly, they are the bane of my life!