Sunday 12 March 2006

Pic of the day: In the year 2020, will anyone want to read a text-based site?

My web site

I have been looking at my website recently. It looks rather bare, does it not? More so than the one I left behind. It looks like something barely begun. It belies the fact that behind the simple links are thousands of pages, enough for any normal person to read for a month or more, provided that a normal person wanted to read that much, which is not normal.

So I thought I would decorate it with pictures – not too huge – leading to some obvious sections of the site. Three more or less gave themselves, and I even thought of suitable "icons" for them, made from The Sims. The three would be: "The man", "the message", and "the archive". The first would be a simple biography, giving an overview of my life so far. The second would be dedicated to my philosophy, and in particular the upcoming version 3 of the human soul. Because let's face it, in a few years nobody will play The Sims 2, but we will still need a revolution of the mind, until it happens, or we kill our species and possibly the rest of the planet in the process.

As for the archive, at first just the usual. But I have also been daydreaming about making color archives, where you can get only the gray entries (this is probably the most required), or blue, possibly green although these would be very plentiful. If I get some inspiration to a program that can compile such a list without me doing it manually for weeks, consider it likely. Otherwise... it may take a while. A looong while. Especially if I want to collect all the entries pertaining to, say, Sims 2. Or the world economy. And the website is not much more than google-fodder until then.

Actually I haven't even made a program to go through all those old entries and fix the links. Back when I had my archive on crosswinds.net, I linked there in the year-ago links. Then dreamwater, and online.no. Since everything is now archived on chaosnode.net, you can easily go from the latest entry to each of the years-ago entries. But if you try to navigate from one of then to the next or previous, you are sent off to link-rot-land. Not good. I need a program that can read through thousands of old files and replace all instances of "http://crosswinds.net", "http://dreamwater.org", "/online.no" etc with a simple "..". I could probably program this in one of the old programming languages from when I was young. If I can overcome the inertia in my soul. I mean, it almost works as it is...

I guess I could just bring back the old site – I have it on my disk – but it is just not the same. I have changed. My home on the Net should too.