A new year – a new start

By Ashok Argent-Katwala

2006 was a very good year. I finished my thesis, and started on a research project that takes some of those ideas on much further.

On the family side, there have been a lot of good things. Life at home is better than ever; my brother and his wife had a beautiful baby girl in January; and a few other things have gone well.

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This year will be better, I'm sure. Mainly because I'll be trying a number of new things, especially with how I write on the Web.

I've been posting on the Web for a good long while and I've never quite seen the point of the reverse chronological style. I tend to write documents and leave them at the same URL and people bump into them over time. I go back and refine them in all that free time I have, and the document – on a good day – stays as a living document.

Blog posts are inherently quite unlike that. You write them and move on. That makes them a lousy way to write a document, but is a great way for following a thought process and how it developed.

I've a few sites now that are underpinned by wiki software, and it's a lovely way to grind out a free-form site pretty quickly. The lack of a proper data model drives me slightly crazy when I want to extract and reuse the structure in other places. lately, but there are some nice ways to handle that I've tinkering on with a few folk. We also need good social conventions about how to grow the tree of pages to end up with a well-organised, navigable site. I'm quite proud that we've some simple wiki software now that definitely has Cool URIs.

I'll have more navel gazing to come on this site, but I'll try and keep it useful too. Time will tell.