The evolution of this website has been driven by two major goals:

1. To simplify the writing process, making it easier both for me to write and to make that writing available to the small audience interested in it.
2. To organize the accumulation of writing in a useful way.

At first I added static webpages whenever the notion occurred to me. Those pages grew into an ungainly sprawl, each one adding to the overhead of organization. Then I decided I needed a simpler framework for writing -- at least to get rough ideas down before attempting to form them into finished pieces. This led to the "notebook" -- a file that I kept open on my home system, adding dated entries as they occurred to me. The notebook would then be compiled and uploaded, making a delayed appearance on the web. Aside from the delays, one problem with this was that I tended to file things in the notebook just to keep track of them, regardless of possible public interest.

Among those entries were a number of relatively polished political essays -- things that I did want more people to read, as opposed to the bulk of the notebook, which is mostly for me and only occasionally of interest to others. So I created a new website, Notes on Everyday Life, and backported almost four years of such pieces to the blog there. However, that particular software toolset turns out not to work very well as a blog. It's really a news system, with synopses of articles on the front page, rather than letting the entries just spool out. It also has a narrow focus and a rather impersonal design. One sign that neither the notebook nor NOEL were working as a blog is that none of my friends ever bothered linking to either. That's when I came up with the idea of finding a relatively conventional piece of blog software and using it as the homepage for tomhull.com. That's what this is, or soon will be.

My plan here is to write more/less informal public-oriented messages and notices into the blog here, where they will appear immediately. I'll still keep the notebook going, but just for notes. Not sure what the status of NOEL will be, but it could become a more collaborative tool, with others contributing pieces. I also hope to do a major reorganization of the other things on the website, which will be accessible through the links and a sitemap (to be done). So this is the first entry, with more to follow.