One thing I do is build and maintain websites. I mention this because I spent time today updating two of them. By far the larger is Robert Christgau's. It has over 1000 pages plus a database of 13652 Consumer Guide reviews. The update added the last three Consumer Guide columns, plus dozens of reviews for Rolling Stone, a few links for his NPR appearances, and an unpublished novella by his wife, Carola Dibbell. We've been slowly assembling Carola's work, which is still spottily represented. I really wish we could do something similar for other critics, and for that matter figure out a way to cross-index them. A few years back I conceived of a Writer's Website Toolkit project, which would be the second generation of the Christgau website software. I did some strawman designs for that, but never made much progress. I did, however, get one bite, and wound up building and maintaining a website for Carol Cooper. I added a couple of pieces to that website today.

A few years back I leased a server and put together a handful of websites using two free software toolkits: drupal (a news-oriented content management system) and serendipity (blog software). Meanwhile my own website has continued to mutate and sprawl. I still figure the next step is to build a Christgau-like site for my own music writings -- quantity no longer seems to be a gating problem. But I'm finding it hard both to get traction on that and more generally to cope. I looked for my Recycled Goods column at Static Multimedia today. They have a nice new design, but it looks like they've lost their links to my column. I don't know what this means, but I don't get much out of the association either, and I'd be happy to entertain any other ideas about where such a column (possibly formatted differently; e.g., less-CG-like) might be hosted.