It occurred to me a few days ago that there are a few navigation issues with the site. 

At present, there's no easy way to get an RSS feed of individual users posts. In fact, there's no easy way to get a feed of any user's posts without going through the channel mechanism. It's not an impossible thing to fix, thankfully. My thought is to create overrides for the default user profile pages just as we have for the channels. I've done a little tinkering this evening, but nothing significant.

Pazi brought up a good point earlier this evening. There's actually no way (for a non-admin user) to view a concise list of users and user activity on the site. Again, this isn't a hard thing for Drupal. I can build a page that will give us a few of all users on the site in a variety of forms. The problem is where. 

There are a number of problems like this on deninet. The front page isn't particularly useful as it could be. Channels can often be confusing. The way posts are kept private is entirely unintuitive. 

*sigh*

I could go on, but I'd rather spend my remaining energy this evening trying to think of a solution.

The last few days I've been thinking about my current involvement in the Technology news industry, and I've come to a few conclusions:

1. I'm not a journalist. I know, shocker, huh? The fact is that I've never had any formal training in journalism. The closest I've come was the series of cultural anthropology classes I had taken in college, but it's not the same. I'm not even entirely sure if professional journalism training is required in today's blogosphere-centric world.  Nevertheless I bring my own preconceptions and preferences to the table whenever I write an article or open my mouth in the OSNews podcast. This is a given.
   
   
2. When and how we record the podcast has an effect. As myself and others have stated several times before, we don't have a script when recording the podcast. If I'm particularly lucky, I'll have some lead time as to what we'll be discussing and I will be fortunate enough to have the time and wherewithal to research the topic. Most of the time, however, it's just what recently happens. With a vacuum of knowledge, point 1 comes into play again. I seem to do my best when the topic is purely technical -- which reflects my interests and education.
   
   
3. Comments, read them? Don't? I really don't know what to do with comments. While the conversations on OSnews are certainly above par, the law of averages is still in effect. Many comments are either malicious or in the least, not helpful. Often I find myself stuck on what one or two people had said from behind a username for days or weeks at a time. I had at one point considered quitting the podcast altogether for that reason. A lot of the fallout from that made me realize just how much point 1 and 2 govern my opinions on the podcast. 
   
   
4. Surprise! Being a woman in technology is difficult. While in my professional life I've only run into this problem a handful of times, the podcast does tend to make this all the more apparent. Strong opinions aren't expected from a woman even in 2010. Once given, a woman may be characterized as a "know it all" or in the least "annoying". If you reserve or delicately present your opinions or thoughts, you may be inundated with "help". A good example of this was when I posted about finding the perfect KDE Linux Distro -- in which I was deluged with suggestions several of which I had already dealt with in the post itself.  Many simply assumed I didn't know any better -- despite the fact that I had already tried CentOS, SuSE, Gentoo, Kubuntu, Mandriva, and a dozen others. 

Imagine your a novelist.

You have carried around a story in your head for almost an entire decade, but have been unable to write it. There have been several attempts, rewrites, false starts, and even one successful but aborted attempt. Life interrupts throughout all of this, making any attempt to sit down and get the damn thing onto parchment impossible.

You know the story covers about a year of time, encompassing four seasons in a familiar but alternate landscape. You want to see your story as short series of graphic novels -- four to match the number of seasons. You know that the seasons probably won't divide easily, but that's not your reason for selecting the length: Four books just feels right. 

And then you sit down and start running numbers. The first three books will be some 120 - 150 pages, so you agree on an average of about 137. The last book will be longer, almost 200. You decide to be ambitious and say 199. Okay, so you add it up: 137 * 3 + 199 = 610 pages.

610 pages.

Before you let the implication of that number set in, you decide to subdivide each book. A chapter runs about 23 to 27 pages. 25 on average. Divide. Average. You arrive at an estimate of 24 chapters.

610 pages. 24 chapters. 

24 stories. "Make bigger stories from several smaller ones," you recall from A Drifting Life. Use the smaller stories to resonate or explore the larger arcs. You look are your setting. Your characters. Subdivide. Take those subdivisions and explore them. Follow the characters as you look at that avenue. Is it interesting? How does this reflect on the overall theme?

Stop! Wait! you think, You can't possibly build a story like this! 

Or can you?

The first social network I joined was LiveJournal back in 2001. At the time, I thought of it purely as an online journaling system. I didn't understand how the friending mechanism worked, nor the deceptive name applied to the feature (something that has thankfully been replaced with "following" on other sites). I often wrote entries there expecting no one to ever read them. It often felt like writing letters to no one in particular, then casting them upon the will of the four winds to whomever would find them.

The anonymity emboldened me. I wrote about things that were actually on my mind, instead of bottling them up as I had been raised. Frustration, fear, worry, depression, quixotism, fascination, and humor. Many say that the internet is where people put on masks; to me, it was the first place I was able to take mine off.

Things changed of course. LiveJournal became all the rage, creating a sprawling online community of people. I continued to write, but often with growing apprehension. I slowly began closing the loop and locking things down. No longer was it a wide open vista, but a room. The door was often open and the windows could be easily seen through, but there was a clearer separation between the Internet at large, and my little section.

Events occurred that forced me to close those openings completely. The windows were shuttered, the door was closed and locked. Little did I realize that the supply of fresh air was now also depleting. I ventured out rarely, and often only to lock things down all the more. Bars were installed. Boards nailed to the wall, cartoon-fashion.

Social networking often works the best for outgoing and open individuals that feel they have little to hide, or no one worth hiding from. My pessimism can't help but see that attitude as naive.

Today, the social networking scene has exploded across the entire world. MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Identi.ca, and the new contender, Google Buzz. It's hard not to feel overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of information one is required to read every day in order to say current. And lately, I often feel much like this: