When I come up with something to think about or a problem I feel needs a solution my brain does strange things. I tend to think about whatever it may be obsessively. Often I will come up with some kind of solution that I like only to then fall in to this spiral of digression about minute details. The net result is the overcomplication of whatever solution I come up with. In fact, it's typically so bad that when I finally get the point of implementation the project has gotten so tremendously huge that I no longer have any desire to begin.

That, in fact, is precisely what's happened with the headspace. What you read now was meant to be only the tip of the iceberg. My grand vision was that everyone would be able to have their own areas in which to post and receive comments... all via a friendly and intuitive interface. I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out an elegant way to achieve that goal and I've come up with a lot of solutions... but none that I feel are elegant or simple.

After some discussion with friends and some handwringing I've settled on something else entirely. I think that I'm going to change the scripts to allow any registered user to create and edit pages... including mine. The only things you won't have access to edit are others' comments.

This is going to happen in phases the first of which will be restructuring the CGIs so the entire site is static HTML that gets selectively rebuilt every time an entry gets added or changed. While this may not seem like much it does provide one important feature: the site will actually be indexable by search engines. Hopefully this will bring some new eyes, fingers, and ideas.

The second phase will be the opening of the editorial process. For me this will mean restructuring the programs to reflect my new attitudes about the content. For you it means some clutter and a (hopefully) shallow learning curve. Every page will have a couple of links: Edit, Create, and Comment. Each will have the appropriate behavior. Editiing will be simply getting a page with a textarea that has the content of the page to be editted. Creating will get you a form that asks you what you want to call the new page. Comments will work more or less as they do now.

The third phase is of little consequence to anyone but me. I will be adding things like versioning so that no content is ever lost even in the face of possibly malicious editors (a potential implication of phase 1).

This is, I think, the simplest and cleanest solution that I can come up with. It, of course, has some perhaps broad implications. I trust you all. Any comments? Would this be interesting for you? I'm torn.

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In other news I have a family reunion this weekend. This is my family on my maternal grandmother's side. Despite the somewhat appalling choice of Branson MO for the location I am very much looking forward to it. I'm privileged to have a fun an interesting family. It'll be neat to see everyone. I hope there's a reasonable turnout.