Indexing and Searchability
Mar. 25th, 2019 09:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjEvery time I find myself needing (or wanting) to reference some older journal post, I get tangled up in trying remember unique keywords, general timeframes, possible blog tags, anything to help me dredge it up out of the 14 years worth of posts here (including all the ones migrated over from LJ). And that process inevitably goes down rabbit holes of re-reading entirely unrelated posts that I'd forgotten writing.
I've written a lot of posts. Lots of them are quotidien and forgetable. But a lot of them involve personal history, philosophical explorations, chronicles of my writing process. And I'd like to think that a lot of them have lasting value, such that it would make sense to make them more easily accessible and properly indexed. If for no other reason than because I occasionally want to find and read them again.
But it's a daunting idea. 14 years. Even the plan to eventually migrate all the directly writing-related material over to my Alpennia website is daunting. I have archives of all my LJ material saved off in monthly csv files (which are a bit less useful than one might think for the purpose). But sorting through the material, identifying what I might want to mirror at Alpennia.com, adding indexing information that actually makes the result useful and tells the user why they might want to read further? That would pretty much require going through all 14 years post by post.
I sometimes fantasize about putting together a collection of what I consider some of my best essays. (Other people have suggested that I should turn the entire LHMP series into a stand-alone ebook.) And...yeah, I can see the potential uesfulness in that. (Though I'd see even greater usefulness if I thought more than a dozen people would ever read the result.) But, oh man, the work. Not going to happen any time soon.
(Note to self: the tag "randomness" makes sense when one feels the need to tag every post with something. But Future You will snarl.)
I've written a lot of posts. Lots of them are quotidien and forgetable. But a lot of them involve personal history, philosophical explorations, chronicles of my writing process. And I'd like to think that a lot of them have lasting value, such that it would make sense to make them more easily accessible and properly indexed. If for no other reason than because I occasionally want to find and read them again.
But it's a daunting idea. 14 years. Even the plan to eventually migrate all the directly writing-related material over to my Alpennia website is daunting. I have archives of all my LJ material saved off in monthly csv files (which are a bit less useful than one might think for the purpose). But sorting through the material, identifying what I might want to mirror at Alpennia.com, adding indexing information that actually makes the result useful and tells the user why they might want to read further? That would pretty much require going through all 14 years post by post.
I sometimes fantasize about putting together a collection of what I consider some of my best essays. (Other people have suggested that I should turn the entire LHMP series into a stand-alone ebook.) And...yeah, I can see the potential uesfulness in that. (Though I'd see even greater usefulness if I thought more than a dozen people would ever read the result.) But, oh man, the work. Not going to happen any time soon.
(Note to self: the tag "randomness" makes sense when one feels the need to tag every post with something. But Future You will snarl.)
