And what exactly is the point of this site?

This site has had several identity crises during its relatively short life. More accurately, I’ve had several identity crises relating to this site during its relatively short life. I have scribbled countless redesigns and overhauls on napkins in bars and restaurants all around New Jersey, yet I rarely bother to follow through. But this time I have some real plans that matter – and some of them are simple enough to be done immediately.

This begins with the links you may (or may not) notice to your right. Last week I removed a few outdated links to friends – primarily those who had completely abandoned their Diaryland accounts for the safety of LJ.

At this point let me encourage any of my friends to stay away from these services. There is nothing terrible about them, but places like LiveJournal encourage you to interact only with other LiveJournal users. Anyone looking for a free place to start blogging can send me an e-mail as I’d be more than willing to set you up on WordPress here on thebox. I’ll still visit LJ sites for friends, but there is so much more available via software blogging tools, rather than completely proprietary services. Now back to the post…

I then turned my attention to the “blogs” section which includes sites I began reading for one reason or another even though I don’t know the people. And suddenly a thought sprung into my mind: “Why the hell is Boing Boing there?” I like the site, and try to keep up with it on RSS, but most people already know about it and there’s no reason for me to list it. Now I’m trying to figure out why half of those sites are listed. If I really want a page of all of my bookmarks, I should just create that separately. Today I stumbled across a post on Mindful Musings lashing out at this habit of BlogRolling popular sites. And you know what? He’s absolutely right.

I want to strip down this site and make it simpler, yet add more content from me. A personal blog or journal shouldn’t just be a bunch of links to major sites with no original content. I understand the original concept of a blog being a commentary on the web, but that implies that you’re either commenting on a site you’re linking to, or supplying a link to something new and interesting. The Sports Illustrated site does not qualify! (Note for future generations: I am pointing out flaws in my own site here as, at the time of writing this post, cnnsi.com was listed just to the right.)

Then again, these are personal sites for a reason and we can do whatever we want to. As for the neverhood, I’d definitely like to see some of these things change ASAP.