Update for 3/13/2016, part 1

I’m trying something new. Each week I’ll post an update on my projects, the site, or my life, whichever one or more of those I have something to say about. It’s mainly meant for progress reports, since I probably won’t have project contents to post every week. These updates will probably have really boring titles, like today’s. When I post a major update, I’ll call it something more interesting.

This update idea came from a couple of sources. First, I wanted to post more often without distracting myself too much from my main projects. I don’t like to keep people hanging about things I’ve said I’m working on, and I don’t like posting nothing as if I’ve forgotten about the site. But writing a coherent post about a new topic can take a lot of time, which delays my projects. And then I end up with a blog full of posts about side issues while my main concerns hide in the wings. I’ll still post about random things if they occur to me, just not as a strategy for posting more often.

Second, I wanted to follow David Allen’s advice to do a weekly review of my projects to keep my priorities in mind. I’m way too easily distracted by new ideas and events in my life. Sometimes they do need to take precedence over what I was working on before, but I need to be purposeful about those shifts. Posting my reviews will help keep me accountable.

I’ll try to post these on Sundays, but for this first one I have more to talk about than usual and not enough time to think through it all today, so I’ll post it over the next couple of days. Today I’ll post the site updates.

Site updates

• Wiki comments – I’m adding the ability to comment on articles in the wiki. I’m aiming to use the PageDisqus extension, but I want it to add a comment section only on pages I tell it to rather than everywhere except the pages I exclude. To do that I’ll incorporate some code from AvbDisqus.
• Topic tour – I’d started to write some short starter articles for the wiki I was calling seeds, but I decided a single overview of everything would be better. I’ll still write the seeds, but the overview feels more important. It’s helpful to me to step back and look at the big picture, and in this case it’ll be helpful to remind myself of the sources that deal with these topics; this tour will partly be an annotated bibliography. It’ll probably be a long time before I post it. I want to think through it carefully and get it mostly right before posting, and I’ll largely work on it alongside other projects rather than taking a long stretch of time to focus on it.

There will probably be two more parts to this update, one for projects and one for life.