Completed the article archive – well sort of

Over the last few days I finally completed what turned out to be the mammoth task of moving my old article archive on the Struggle site onto this new site.  This has taken a crazy amount of time, I first created this site about 18 months ago, I’m not sure why it took so long to move 220 articles over but anyway that stage is now complete.  There are some articles I’ve published which are not yet online I’ll be adding soon and I’m only starting to move over translations of articles into other languages.

Over the last few days I finally completed what turned out to be the mammoth task of moving my old article archive on the Struggle site onto this new site.  This has taken a crazy amount of time, I first created this site about 18 months ago, I’m not sure why it took so long to move 220 articles over but anyway that stage is now complete.  There are some articles I’ve published which are not yet online I’ll be adding soon and I’m only starting to move over translations of articles into other languages.

The last stuff I moved was actually the text of a number of talks I’d given over the years, many of these from the early 1990’s.  As I’ve moved them I edited the publication date to push them back into the archive so if you’ve noticed stuff appearing on the front page and then vanishing that is what has been going on.  In terms of the content here already I want to do some more work along the lines of tidying up the html and adding graphics but otherwise the major stage is over.

The big advantage of this site over the old one is that the category labels mean that it is much easier to find articles on a particular topic.  The old site was a manual list roughly divided by topic which was constently getting our of date and jumbled.

The whole process has been a little strange, its a bit like digging out a diary from 20 years back (or I’d imagine so, I’ve never realy managed to keep a diary for more than a couple of enteries).  I have a suspicion that it hasn’t just been practical but that I’ve also been trying to put my life in order as a point in both age and circumstances where this seemed essential.  I’ve had a pretty chaotic and for long periods dark couple of years and it’s probably more than a coincidence that I seem to have finished the archive at the point where I feel I’m escaping that period and moving on.

Of course there are never such simple end points.  I have some material I’ve published that has not yet got online and I’ve some other stuff which has been sitting around 90% finished for a while that I should now return to.  I also suspect there may be a few pieces missing from the old struggle page which I might manage to locate through a bit of googling.

Part of the reason for the delay is that I’ve also been adding to the functionality of the site from time to time.  In the last couple of days I’ve added ‘some word cloud’ index’s to the bottom of each page to encourage people to browse the articles on the site (both mine and those of other writers here) by topic.  Yesterday I added a ‘translations’ page so that translations of articles into other languages could be added without being that distracting in most views of the site.  As of now these are just accessible via another word cloud at the bottom of the right hand column and I’ve only started to add translations to the site so there is not much there yet.

While I’ve never managed to keep a diary the more or less spontaneous decision to create blog to report on the progress of my North American speaking tour has worked for me.  At the time this was mostly to avoid having to answer a dozen emails at every stop from friends and family asking me how it was going.  This entry is around the 100th entry, the first entry Stone Soup at the Worcester meeting was posted 21 Feb 2008 so that is an average of over an entry a week (somewhat artifical as the speaking tour generated a lot of entries as I criss crossed the US from February to May 2008 – still its a good target).  There seem to be a reasonable number of people following these rambles, most entries get over 100 readers in the first week and some have climbed over 1500.

My entries have been mostly political rather than personal although there is a scattering of personal information across them.  I’m using the blog to try and make myself write faster and avoid procrastination by not allowing myself much editing or reflection time before publication.  They are also quite useful for filling those gaps where I lose focus and would probably otherwise aimlessly surf the web.  It’s an exercise I’d recommend to others ..

Opening the site up to other anarchist writers has also worked pretty well although apart from anarcho (110 articles) some of you are a bit slow in terms of republishing articles here (hint!).  We have collectively climbed over 220 blog enteries though so keep them coming.  Any other anarchists interested in getting an account here to blog (or just comment on blogs) email me at andrewnflood AT gmail.com You should very broadly agree with the Anarkismo editorial statement – I’m not really into hosting primmies etc but otherwise give it a shot.