OK, this is no doubt blatant site pimping, but I'm serious about needing some advice on how to proceed with my site. If you have a few moments, I'd greatly appreciate some advice. Here's the link. More below the fold.
This Far and No Further
I've had this site up and running for at least four years now. It's a large -- too large -- attempt to chronicle, in a timeline format, the events that have led us to what I perceive as the imminent takeover and destruction of American democracy by conservative and corporate interests. It's just gotten way out of hand. There's much too much information for one person, who works sometimes 16 hours a day at "real" jobs, to begin to keep up with. Right now the site is mired in August 2004, with some exceptions such as a page on Katrina and a page on the stolen elections of 2004. I've got probably 15,000 Web pages to go through and summarize/process, and I add 20-50 pages a day. It's a Sisyphean task. And don't forget the double dozen books I need to include.
The idea of the site is to be a "one-stop" resource on just about anything you might want to know about, from Whitewater to the Iraq invasion and occupation (the original focus of the site, and the reason for the URL, though it's expanded far beyond that), all the way back to the Spanish-American War and all the way forward to the NSA spying controversy and the planned "phased redeployments." But the site needs to be far more timely. Right now, as it stands, with me plowing doggedly through the almost 500 Web pages left to peruse and process for August 2004 alone, I can't see ever, ever catching up, even if I were to win the lottery and get unlimited free time to do nothing but work on the site. And as it's so behind, it's not being used as the kind of resource I envisioned.
About a year ago I put up a diary asking Kossacks for help in redesigning the format, and I got a terrific response that guided me through the redesign. It's still huge and unwieldy, but a hell of a lot more usable than it was before. So this time, I'm posing the question: what should I do to make this site more timely, considering time and energy restrictions, and the fact that I don't have a staff of hardworking elves to help me catch up?
Some ideas I've had:
-- sort through the Web pages yet to be processed, and include only the most important ones, leaving the other, less important events and issue discussions for later
-- skip straight to June/July 2006 and work backwards, catching the site up to the present and backfilling as time permits
-- somehow transform this site into an adjunct of dKosopedia (?)
-- give up the whole idea of trying to cover so much ground and narrow the focus to a particular issue, say, Iraq or civil liberties or election fraud (I don't like this one)
-- quit trying to do it at all and play with the pooties
No reasonable advice (and offers for assistance) will be disregarded. And thanks much in advance for taking the time to give some input.
