Getting Organized (electronically speaking)

In my two-week quest for relevant, helpful organizational tools, I've picked up some books I've not yet read, read some blog entries that have been less than helpful, attempted to wrap my brain around the idea of what I want my organized life to look like, and stumbled across some promising little helpers.

One of the elements that I desperately want is a single space for all of my public online resources, that also allows me to access the private ones -- a personal homepage, if you will, that doesn't require a password to access.  Facebook is useful for people who have accounts, but not everyone does, and the privacy settings are comprehensively adaptable but not overly easy to access or test. The LinkedIn interface is so convoluted and irritating that I still haven't forced myself to use it.  I don't draw many lines between "personal and professional" lives, or between thoughts and ideas for "family" rather than "friends" (apart from my private, snark-filled journal full of sailor-mouthed profanity -- there are some things my mother really doesn't need to read!) -- I'm a whole person and think that the transparency of presenting my life as such gives me more credibility and professionalism rather than less, with the added bonus of making me more fun to be around (or less, depending on your perspective of fun, I suppose) -- so having a single website that I could direct anyone to would be immensely useful. Yes, I know, given my website-creation skills I *could* build one for myself, but it's one of a million things I just haven't gotten around to yet.

Why I didn't think to start with Google to seek such a thing I don't quite understand - there are few ways in which the Almighty Google has ever failed me.*

Anyway, I now have a new homepage, of sorts, which is now the link provided on my email signature and all of my various social-networking info pages, and will be printed on my next batch of MOO minicards.

google.com/profiles/expetesso

Note that if I have your address in my gmail address book and I've designated you as a human being ather than a spambot, you can access my address and cell phone number from the contact tab. No more crying about "I didn't know how to reach you, so I couldn''t call!"

I'm also working on a tagging system for my sparkly new Delicious account. I've always been terrible at labeling things properly, so this is going to take some trial and error, and recalling all of the various places I've scribbled links that I need to keep track of (old blog posts, margins of my hard copy address book, legal pads in my office, etc) so that I can get them listed there. Should be a fun project for the ridiculously stifling days of summer when it's too hot to do anything but laze around the house sipping lemonade - and thus not one I need to think about in the short term.

Yay, solutions. Now to add "reading the book about getting things done" to my to do list. Irony never fails to amuse.

* Just one, actually: an absolute inability to turn up details (or indeed, any mention of) the legend upon which J.K. Rowling based The Veil and the actions of Sirius Black's death in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix; it's neither Greek nor Roman nor Hebrew, and the style is inconsistent with Celtic and Norse mythology, which means (given my education and exposure to details of nonWestern cultures) it's probably Sumerian or Central African in origin (the former more likely than the latter) and I just haven't been able to track it down. My best friend and favorite professor both recall that the veil and the actions are not original, so I know I'm not imagining things, we just none of us can recall the reference. And JKR isn't talking.

First published at NYC to the Nines