Changes
Thursday, March 7, 2013 at 10:29 The sharp-eyed among this site’s readers will have noticed that I’ve taken the opportunity* to make a couple of changes to the website.
First I’ve removed the author’s description and photo. This is part of a move on my part to reduce the “cult of personality”. Of course I’m not going to succeed entirely on a site named “markforster.net”, but it reflects the increasingly small part that time management (as a subject for study) plays in my life now.
Secondly I’ve removed the subscription box for the newsletter. My plans for the newsletter never came to fruition (I just got interested in too many other things), yet it costs me quite a considerable sum of money to maintain a subscription list of this size. If I don’t stop new subscribers I shall soon be into the next price bracket.
* This is actually a good example of rationalization after the event. The truth is that I deleted both by accident (by clicking on “Remove” instead of “Disable”) and can’t be bothered to go through the hassle of reinstating them - besides, I rather like it this way.
Reader Comments (14)
At any rate...all the best to you.
-David
As far as the photo goes, I thought it made the site more interesting, though I liked the photo of you at the computer better.
As for the newsletter, that doesn't seem to be much of a loss, but can you repost the two emails from the archive as articles or blog posts, so that the FV instructions are available for anyone interested in using it?
Still, wouldn't reposting the content allow him to shut down the mailing list entirely and save the money it's evidently costing him now?
<< And I am perplexed by your "SMEMA is only for me and not recommended to others". As I had previously posted on your blog, I have been using it for days now in my complex, busy professional life and it is working quite well. >>
There's nothing to stop you or anyone else using it of course. It's just that it's not recommended by me. I felt that the discussion that the original post caused was far from helpful, and that it would be better to repost it in a more simple and clear-cut way without any of the accompanying baggage.
I have no objection by the way to anyone starting up a discussion of it on the General Forum, but I don't intend to take part in it myself.
All best wishes,
-David
We are your community, we love you, and we enjoy sharing our time with you. And we hope that you will not leave us, and that you will continue enriching our lives and sharing with us your passion for discovery and improving our capacity to get everything done.
Because when we can get everything done, we have more time to spend on the joys of life that matter. And we are sharing that special journey with you.
IMHO, naming your URL after your civil name is just an old internet tradition. Even our names themselves are not something we invent out of "cultish" or marketing reasons, but they are given to us by our parents and by our society. Usually we have no say in that!
When the forerunners of the world wide web matured enough, system administrators would use the civil names of the users, reduce them to a string short enough for the computers of that time to handle and create so-called home directories for each one.
Later files in these directories would become the "homepages" of "netizens". So you got a lot of URLs like ://edu.time-mgmt.everything-online.gov/focus/src/focus/~mforster/.
There are many websites online, that derive their name from such ~tildeplusname directories. Example: zeldman.com used to be blahlhlh/kjkj/~zeldman in the olden days.
So, naming your site after your name is just the traditional concept of a homepage and perfectly fine geek culture and not cultish at all. It is a very egalitarian concept I think. You know, http://America/~democracy and so on.
Having your name on your house is just the generic, modest, identifier. It is nice in the way that it is agnostic in it's formulation in regards to the content behind it. So changing the emphasize of the content never breaks the concept of the name.
I anything, the slogan "get everything done" is resembling those "cult heros" who market their seminars etc pp, because it is a promise and formulated in a catchy way. But I do not think that promise is unwarranted, it is the experience of many people who gave Mark's materials a serious try. It is also an apt pointer to what to expect from this site.
It is also subtly funny, specially when one is acquainted with some of the other brandings in the time management arena. I still giggle from time to time like a Ford Prefect, when I think of how "do it tomorrow" turns into "did" it already, somewhat.
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Cheers,
Corl