Sunday, February 7, 2010

Spring Cleaning

Although most other bloggers retain their entire history, my opinion is that it creates a lot of clutter. Links break, comments get dated, posts that are of no interest beyond a few days still manage to look important, important posts look dated, and it's hard to find the good stuff among the clutter. Thus, I intend to clean my blog!

I've always had two main goals with this blog. First is a publication space for articles and essays. Ideally, this should read like a book. Second is a storyline of my forays into naturism. This should be a timeline.

I plan to create an index post with the above mentioned "table of contents", "storyline", and add a few links with my profile and recommendations sort-of like a resume. Posts that apply to either of the two main topics will be kept. Other rants and links (such as most of the Missed News series) will be removed since it's unlikely that anyone cares at this point in time. If any good bits remain, I'll concatenate them into a single post.

One thing that I'd like to fix is dates. All events that I wrote about were posted at least a week after the actual event. I'd like to fix the dates to represent when things actually happened -- including the Australia story that happened over a year before I started the blog. The problem with this is that Blogger uses the date in the link, and therefore it will break all of my links. So, it's probably not a good idea to fix dates! I'll at least have the correct ones in the timeline.

For multi-part stories and posts, I can add "Previous" and "Next" links to the bottom for easy browsing.

Lastly, with the important posts, it would be good to refresh them a bit. Little updates here and there will show that the ideas still apply and are actively maintained.

If anyone would like a snapshot of the blog prior to my cleaning, download an archive from here (~6.5 megs).

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I just read your profile on "Diary of a Nudist." I found it similar to my own experience on how I became a naturist. Thank you for sharing and I hope it inspires others to try nude recreation.

Nudiarist said...

I don't know about this...my personal feeling is for you to leave your blog as it is. The wonderful thing about a blog is that when someone discovers it, they can start from the beginning and take the journey with you. Maybe it's a better idea for you to start a conventional website collecting the best of your writings in a format that's more to your overall vision. A lot of successful bloggers also use their journal writings as a springboard for a book.

The important thing is to keep writing, and write often. The nudist/naturist world needs more voices.

Anonymous said...

What ever you decide to do, Doug, when you're done will you come over and do mine? ;-)

Rick said...

Whatever you do, I'll be fine with it. I think Nudiarist's idea of putting "The Best of Academic Naturist" on a conventional web site is a good idea.

Hank said...

Academicnaturist, I downloaded from somewhere your flv vid of you giving a nice interview about nudism at the eastern nudist convention. Why don't you link it on your blog on the top right side of your home page? Let your readers actually hear a real live naturist for a change. Hearing a nudist is sorta unique.

Academic Naturist said...

@Nudiarist -- I'm still holding true to that concept. This isn't a hack-n-slash fest, it's more of an organizational effort. I'll have an index that lays things out very nicely. Links that have been broken over the years have been addressed. (Some, like "The Nude Life", have been removed completely.) Multi-part posts are easier to navigate. Things I meant to follow up on now are. Comments that are time sensitive have an update on how things have changed. Every post is valuable to read right now.

With a blog like yours, it's good to keep everything. In a sense, you're a reporter and your archive is valuable for historical reasons even as links break. However, I sort-of wish you'd index personal posts... I can't find when you posted your first picture online, but I think I have a link to it in one of my posts which I'll get to eventually.

The website idea is a good one initially, but why should I duplicate stuff? It's all in my blog. Soon, people can actually find it! Instead of making a new site with the good stuff, I'm removing (and archiving) the bad stuff. The end result is roughly the same.

@Hank - I will.