When I started this blog four years ago, I never thought it would be seen by more than a few dozen people, so I never planned any sort of information architecture to it. 500 posts (300,000 words!) and several hundred thousand readers later, it is unwieldy to get to the good stuff unless you have been following along for the last couple of years, or have a week free. To make this a little less annoying, with the help of an assistant from Hacker News I found the best 72 articles I’ve written, grouped them by category, and for ones which are logically related explained what the connections are (in particular, for the “experiment” / “results” pairs).
I hope you find it useful. If I let out anything or if there is a category you know I publish on but did not include in the list, please let me know in the comments.
I’ve been waiting for this very post, awesome stuff and congrats Patrick.
Have you thought of writing a book? Actually, two books – you could easily do a first book that’s a “best of” with just some more editing. These books don’t sell crazy amounts of copies, but tend to get published easily and then you’re a “published author” – think Paul Graham’s “Hackers and Painters” – a collection of his essays. It’s good because it lets people give you money that like you, let people who enjoy Kindle or dead trees instead of blogs get your ideas, gives you an additional credential (“published author” is actually a big deal in some circle still). A second book on a theme would take a lot longer, but I’d buy both ;)
Anyway, probably a good play. People would buy to support you, it wouldn’t take too long to compile and edit, and maybe write 1-2 new pieces for, and it’d be a good thing all the way around. I just got an contacted by an editor at Penguin asking me about getting signed, email me if you want me to forward his details to you, and thanks again for all the amazing writing.
I just realized that clicked links don’t look different from non-clicked links on your blog.
It’s probably done that way on purpose: in the leviathan stylesheet, you specify the a.link and a.visited color as #4b6e85, then override it with #container a { color: #01527a; }.
But why? It made my user experience just now, when I wanted to reread some of your articles from your greatest hits, less pleasant that it is on other sites.
(I think I’ve already read every single blog post of yours over the years but memory fades and it’s been somewhat difficult to find specific ones again to show to other people, so thank you for doing this!)
Got this error while posting (but it got through anyway):
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 27605 bytes) in /var/www/kalzumeus.com/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1007
…whereupon I got this one:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 27758 bytes) in /var/www/kalzumeus.com/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1007
The book idea was the first thought I had when I saw this post, too. Do it! :)
Do you plan on keeping this updated?
Yes on the updates, probable no on the book, fie upon PHP on the bugs.
If you say no to the book then maybe a teaching career. A dynamic way of sharing what you know to college students, or people in training. Lectures and stuff.