In my second post on the site, I thought I might quickly go over some ground rules for the project.
Privacy Policy
I do not intend to collect any data from anyone, ever. There is a chance that some of my installed WordPress plugins might collect some information, for example for security purposes, however I am trying to keep this down to an absolutely necessary minimum, and the overall setup as light as possible. In the future, I might post up a fully-fledged Privacy Policy page, probably based on the standard WordPress template for such things, however no promises, and certainly no definite time frames.
Comment Policy
Simply put – there will be no commenting on this site, ever. My intent is to utilize this weblog as a sort of a publishing platform for my magnificent humble self, and to eventually compile an archive of my written musings, both future and past! What I am not looking for here is to host lively online debates, which I’ve had plenty of in the past couple of decades, and in any case, I could not abide the added duties of moderating and responding to any hypothetical commenters. Easier then to just nix the concept completely right from the start.
References Policy
Generally speaking, I intend to not include any hyperlinks in the body of my posts. I generally find these distracting, as there is ever the temptation to click through and thus tear yourself away from the text you had been reading, even if for a moment, and in any case, the footnotes plugin exists for a reason. As such, to the extent I wish to refer to some outside online source, I will post the hyperlink as well as the relevant citation information in the footnotes1. The one exception, at least for the time being, will be references to any articles published on newspaper and magazine websites, which, as a rule, will be in one of the standard academic citation formats but will not include a hyperlink, lest I run afoul of some past or future EU policy regarding intellectual property.
Editing published posts
As a rule, to the extent I modify an already published post, I intend to add a brief note regarding the changes made before the main body of the text, unless the edits were strictly spelling and grammar corrections or minor rewording. Although one also hopes that I will manage to not have to make these latter types of corrections very often, or even at all!
Back-dated posts
One of my ideas is to gradually populate this weblog not only with brand new material, but with some of my past posts and writings, some dating back years ago. An easy for instance would be movie reviews I wrote for my own benefit when the respective films had come out in theaters; it makes quite a bit more sense to me to put these up on their original when-written date. Though in turn, this could render the chronology of things a little confusing, what with my initial “Hello, world!” launch post coming years after some of the other content. In any event, this is how I am planning to do things for now; to the extent that the approach were to prove problematic, I shall figure out some other way of dealing with back-dated posts.
Copyright
Quite obviously, all material on this weblog unless explicitly stated otherwise is copyright to my magnificent humble self, and I expressly forbid its use for any commercial or AI-training purposes. There is a chance I might post a separate Copyright Policy page to this effect in the future, but for now, this notice should suffice.
A final thought
One possible source of confusion or bewilderment that I foresee is that I have in the past written both privately and publicly on a very, very wide array of subjects, from electric industry deregulation to video game strategies. And I plan on continuing this practice in this very weblog as well. At first I thought that perhaps the best solution would be to start several separate weblogs, devoted to different themes – this one for economic policy, that one for entertainment, the one over here for history, and so forth. However, not only would this multiply the logistical workload on my end, there is something attractive about having a single repository for all of one’s written materials, however wide a range of topics these may span. As such, oh hypothetical nonexistent reader, consider yourself warned, and I encourage you to make liberal use of the “Categories” section on the right-hand side of the page to, perhaps, narrow things down a bit.
Footnotes:- This, ladies, gentlemen, and covert representatives of the New Zealand Cabal of Talking Sheep, is a footnote![↩]