Journal Update 015

It sometimes happens that after I write a post, I think of ways it could’ve been better. Rarely it happens that I completely change my opinion on something and my past writing no longer reflects what I now believe. But it does happen.

So should I rewrite every entry that isn’t perfect according to my own standards? This journal isn’t a podcast. I could do that, if I wanted to. But I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to be doing loads of work constantly going back to correct what I’ve written. It would destroy my motivation to write this journal and I believe this journal is a positive contribution to society.

I don’t think my readers want me to do that either. When readers share my entries, they expect the entry they shared to be the same entry they read. Unless it’s something trivial like a broken link, subjecting my entries to constant revision seems to be in nobody’s best interest. Even adding correctional notes inside entries could make a mess of my writing.

None of this excuses me from self-correction though. I do want to point out what I got wrong in my previous entries. This journal demands an alternative solution to self-correction.

What’s New

Journal Corrections

As a compromise between journal organization/entry stability and correctness of the information/opinions I publish, I’ve decided to create a new page listing the corrections by entry. This page will serve to correct bad or biased information I’ve published. In order to avoid corrections of corrections, the journal corrections page itself will be subject to change at any time. If I feel the mistake is severe enough, I may decide to add a link at the top of the original entry linking to its corrections.

Journal Updates

Finally, you may be wondering why I keep calling this a “journal” and why the title of this “entry” is “Journal Update” instead of “Site Update” as usual. “site” is short for “website”, which is associated with the world wide web. And “blog” is short for “weblog” (web log) which also isn’t platform agnostic language. Given my writing is available as an onion (Tor), an eepsite (I2P), a freesite (Freenet), a zite (ZeroNet), and a capsule (Gemini), calling it any one of those things is misleading. So I’ve decided to use the word “journal” from now on to refer to what I do here. It’s a descriptive, platform agnostic word. The header and footer text has also been updated.

Future Plans

• Support multithreading in journal generation scripts. This should make generation go faster. This is even more important now that feeds are generated independently of pages. See site update 12 for details.
• Support caching in journal generation scripts. This should make generation go much faster.