What is the current state of this website?
I am in the middle of a hard content reset across my websites, gearing up for the long haul. This website has been live in some form since my later years of college = since around 2018. I have never been very consistent with it. I had a smattering of content written over the years… of varying quality. Some was quite decent. Some was more like back-of-the-napkin chicken scratch barely fit for my own eyes, much less the eyes of others.
The current plan is as follows:
- Right now, I did the lazy thing and just hid most old content from the sidemenu (excepting some blog posts from my study abroad trip in college that I think are decent, for what they are). Stuff that has currently been hidden from the menu will still get indexed by search engines and such. Call this a soft content reset.
- Once I have completed many pending tasks relating to my Bible study website, I will eventually get back to cleaning up this website more completely.
- At that point, all old content will get moved to an archived folder, and I’ll set up redirects to not lose link traffic (if such ever really existed for content on this site). I’ll basically be starting completely fresh as part of my new content strategy.
What new content strategy?
I will have three websites, each with a specific focus:
- BibleDocs.org - Bible study content.
- Chrya.com - content about optimization and efficiency (in such areas as diet, exercise, task management, finances, metalearning, computer usage, etc.). Efficiency has been an interest of mine ever since ever. I was majoring in Industrial Engineering at Georgia Tech some ten years ago when I first started college (…gah, I’m old) because I was enchanted by the idea of having a day job related to optimizing process efficiency. Somehow at the time I hadn’t put it together that optimizing supply chain efficiency or the like for an employer is… not quite the same as optimizing your own efficiency as an individual. Yeah, dunno why it took so long for that to click for me. But once it did, I realized that the greater part of my interests lie more in the optimization and efficiency of my life as an individual, not so much improving efficiency in an organizational sense. So that is what all the content on this site will be centered around: pursuit of efficiency as an individual, in all areas of life.
- StevenTammen.com - content about everything else. In practice, I think this will mostly end up being things I am interested in that are not directly related to Bible study or efficiency. Random topics in history and philosophy are two things I can think of off the top of my head that are interests of mine that do not generally fit into the content scope of either other site. I think this third site will have by far the least content of the three, since the bulk of my personal interests really are encapsulated by either Bible study or pursuit of efficiency.
What is the status of implementing this new content strategy?
Eh… it’s complicated.
The site that will be dedicated to efficiency hasn’t even launched yet in any regard. And this site is… well, not really going places yet either.
The first and biggest reason why this is the case is because the Bible study stuff is the most important to me, and there have been various matters therein that have been monopolizing my focus for quite some time now. Not least among them the establishment of a weekly in-person Bible study at my house, fully tied into Zoom meetings so that geographically-dispersed people can also participate seamlessly. That has been a goal of mine for years, and it is finally coming to pass. After things get more stable there, I… still will not be able to directly start.
And that brings us to the second big blocker: I have plans to fundamentally improve and restructure my content organization framework. This will be a destructive refactor in terms of URL paths and content organization, and will be a massive undertaking. How I want to do things in the long term has really crystallized in my mind in the last year or so, but now I have to go implement it in my website theme. There is a lot of templating-relating things I need to set up in the theme to get the new structure in place. After I do that, I need to refactor this site and the Bible study site to use the (newly cleaned-up) theme as a proper git submodule, and then do the same with the efficiency-related site as part of launching it for the first time. Only then will I really be ready to start content production in earnest.
What happens in the meantime, until that all gets set up?
If it seems to you like waiting until I get all of that done before allowing myself to write anything at all will be overly limiting… I agree. But I don’t really want to put content up on the sites explaining my progress and how things are going and such only to permanently move those pages once the content restructure actually happens.
For this reason, I am going to write all the updates, but not have them formally put up on the websites until after the structure refactor goes live. In the meantime, I will make them public by just sharing my Dropbox folders for each of the three sites, where I am storing my blog updates in the meantime. It’s a bit jank, but this is the compromise I’ll make do with until I finish the refactor of the website theme that will underpin all three sites. Getting that done will be a primary goal of mine in the coming weeks and months. Until then, here’s those Dropbox folder links, if you are curious about what is happening as I make progress:
- Chrya.com blog posts (updates about my progress on my various projects like the website theme; will be the most useful of these three temp folders in tracking my current implementation progress)
- BibleDocs.org blog posts (updates about how my ministry stuff is going)
- StevenTammen.com blog posts (updates about random research topics I have found interesting and collected links on)