The website is revised

All right. Enough of this trivia nonsense. Back to business.

I have, for all practical purposes, finished the update of my jimmenick.com website. It doesn’t look all that different from the previous incarnation, but it is better organized. I played around with the design tools provided by my site host, but didn’t really like any of the templates, plus I found them more trouble to adjust than it was worth. I did like the way Squarespace.com allowed me to build the NYSDCA site last year, but I was not interested in porting everything over to them, again in deference to the concept of more trouble than it was worth. So the site is still living inside a very static CSS template I picked up somewhere, using very boring old html that never goes very far beyond a "TD" command. So, it won’t win the beauty prize for site of the year any time soon. But it is, as I say, better organized, and there’s nothing wrong with that. At some point the content of the site is more important than the look of it.

I’ve updated a bunch of things on the forensics page. I find it heartening that most things hold true even as the years seem to change them, and that the underlying philosophies of debate remain the same even as the structures rumble and tumble. I did have to edit a few things here and there to make them viable in 2013, but not as much as you would think. I feel that I can honestly present what is there to anyone putting together a team or to my own students or any other learners and feel confident that they will not be misled. Even some of the occasional stuff like the Geopolitics lecture held up, with a bit of fine tuning to remove it from the immediate resolution that sparked it. There’s a lot of good material at this site.

Now if I could only get the Sailors to take advantage of it…

The newest addition is the writing page, where I’ve tried to isolate things that aren’t strictly debate materials. Granted that a lot of it is debate-based, e.g., Nostrum, but it is nevertheless writing qua writing. It allows me now to push Lingo a little bit, and provides a launching pad for the new book coming out shortly. (I’m self-publishing that one, and I’ll detail its journey here. needless to say.)

I can’t say that I’ve gone and listened to everything on my audio page to clean that one up, but I have, again, organized it better. Needless to say, there’s a lot of overlap on all these pages, and that’s been the hardest thing to keep straight. But I think I’ve done it well enough. In any case, this weekend I took the big old tabbing printer out of the car and put it into the basement, thinking to myself that it is now six months until my next tournament. Holy cow! That’s a lot of time to spend doing something other than tabbing, especially if it’s going to be winter from now until then, as it would appear to be if today’s forecast is any indication. Oh, well. I do have a tendency to keep myself busy enough. And when I fall off the busy wagon, Tik pronounced teek is there to nap along with me. Life goes on.