I apologize for the lack of a dev server.  It makes this a far more annoying task than it should be.

A truly dysfunctional family it is.

And I know you have questions, so I asked them for you:

What The Hell Is this?

Out of an explosive mix of boredom and creativity ooze four district-yet-connected websites to bring you several things Mike:

The Ticker: Rapidly updated on-the-spot undates of things at the top of my mind.  With no structure to speak of, The Ticker is intended to be Twitter-like.

Second Thoughts: Longer, more thoughtful and.or analystic articles about issues and events.  In that sense, Second Thoughts is more of a newsmagazine or a traditional blog with categorizations and menuing.

the gallery: A forum for presenting original, non-written material presented on a Flash XML based site.

The Village: An aggregation of news relevant to the people in my life with feeds funneled into the following pages:

Local News: Feeds for The Ticker ad Second Thoughts
Community: Feeds from my friend’s blogs [a short list]
The World: Feeds of News from the locales where we live with some world headlines
Outer Space: Feeds that don’t fit in the other categories

You’ll also see weather updates, Friendbook Status Updates and other items of interest.

michaeldbarton.com: A landing page with previews of all the sites.

Why a Group of Sites?

It possible that I could have done all this in a single site but as I argued in the past, the idea of a single site solution has led to bloggy behavior on my part and blogginess has led to sites being abandoned.

How Often Should I Check?

You could generally expect the following update schedules for these sites:
The Village: As often as the feeder sites are updated.
The Ticker: Several times daily.
Second Thoughts: One to three times weekly.
the gallery: ad hoc

One benefit of this structure is the aggregation of The Village means that you can get a quick sense of new content without having to visit a multitude of sites whether you want to see content I generated or stories posted by my friends.

Hope to see you around!

Theme Forest and Flash Den are two sites I used to build out my sites and I really like their co-op approach.  I’m looking forward to finding other content on the family of sites.

I’m still trying to get an appropriate Amazon banner and find a couple of other affiliate ads to round things out.

So I’m sucking Satan’s Penis.

Bite me.

Here’s the meeting where we decided to place the ads.

And this is it.  It’s an aggregator of news relevant to me.

Narcissistic?  Perhaps.

But since I feed in news about my friends somehow it doesn’t seem so bad.

What seems a bit worse is the difficulty I am having in getting the rss feeds to do what I want and getting the page to format correctly.  But these are the obstacles I face when I’m willing to pay nothing for web development.

And those wrinkles will be ironed out by the time you first see this page anyhow.

So enjoy.  I hope The village lives up to my expectations for it.

And your expectations, too.