What to write, what to write? Where to put it? Do I make it publically accessible, viewable only to select individuals, or use obfuscation to make it non-obvious to find, but still possible to get at by anybody who is clever and resourceful enough? Everything has gotten so complicated!

In all honesty, over the years, I think I have put more time and energy into this project than any sane person would, especially when its product typically amounts to little more than passing trivia. Yet even knowing this, I have continued to put effort into it repeatedly and on a recurring basis. So I must be deriving something out of it.

Yep, a massive database containing reams of text with very little organizational structure or logical cohesiveness that now covers the span of nearly 6 years. Lovely.

There's a large part of me that would like to move beyond having nothing but a chronologically ordered jumble of goop, and present the most essential aspects of my message -- whatever that is -- in a way that somebody who just wanders in could access without having to wade through mountains of sludge (which nobody would ever want to do unless I've already gotten their interest, and then only maybe). That's one reason I admire Ran's site. Besides having lots of thought-provoking content, it's organized in such a way that you can easily surf to any number of interesting topical pieces he's written within a couple of clicks. All done with simple static html. Maybe the overly pervasive "blog" style isn't always such a hot idea after all.

Of course, in order for that to work, you need to actually have something of substance to convey. Something besides the ever-pressing matters of opining about today's weather, what last night's supper consisted of, and that fly buzzing around on the wall.

Did I mention that I have an annoying sore throat that seems to have taken a turn for the worse? Or that I made spicy bean dip two days ago, chunky style? Yum.

Anyway...

In other news, getting sick of the site's laggish performance, last night I implemented a hacked up sort of caching system for the front page. The way I have things structured, there are just way too many database queries going on, but there's not much way to get around it as things currently stand. Also, with the joys of cgi, every single request has to start up a new process, open a new database connection, and load up everything all over again. In other words, this site would totally melt if it ever got even a fraction of the slashdot effect. Someday, perhaps I will get my own server and run mod_perl on it. But until then, crudely storing files with html snippets of database-heavy sections will have to do.

Scribble scribble.