#4 · David Chapman

21 December 2010

I have meant to go systematically through your early writing, but never quite got around to it. So I think this is a great idea.

I’ve organized my sites as “books” rather than blogs, with a table of contents, and an attempt at book-like flow from one section to the next. There are costs to that. For the site to be semi-coherent during the writing process, I can’t publish ideas in the order I come to understand them. I have a lot of material in nearly-finished form that is waiting for other bits to get finished. A great thing about the blog format is that you can write up an idea spontaneously as you think it. Relatedly, I need to work out how an idea fits into the overall structure, which is not always obvious, and put in transition bits so the work flows logically. And, a “book” seems more formal than a blog, so I wind up polishing the language more than perhaps the content deserves.

Of course, this extra effort may pay off in a better experience for readers; I am uncertain. It certainly slows me down a lot.

Since you have a completed body of work, several of these problems would not apply. I gather you recently started using Drupal, which I’ve used for my sites. It’s great for books, and possibly not ideal for blogs. Anyway, I use the Drupal “Book” module for structure, “Taxonomy” for tagging, and the “Advanced Book Block” module provides a nifty dynamic table of contents widget. If you go down a similar path, let me know if I can give any technical help/advice with regards to the sorts of features I’ve used.

To address the time costs of the “book” format, I’ve added “metablogs” to the “Meaningness” and “Buddhism for Vampires” sites. My theory was that these would enable me to write more quickly, as the informal bloggy format would free me from over-thinking and over-polishing. It has only helped a little, I’m afraid!