August 2003

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Congratulations to me on taking a long-needed step away from some crazy. I posted the following note to the links group that I've written of several times, with this being the first mention of the craziness.

Hi, group!

Work at my "day job" has taken a turn for the busy, and my time to deal with web issues has had to be reduced. Based on this, I've had to make the hard decision to discontinue updating the (group name) links on my site. In an effort to streamline things, I'm going to remove the vast majority of the links currently there.

Please feel free to remove mine from your pages, or to leave it up, as you see fit. I don't anticipate changing its information. If you have it, it's to rebeccaworks.com and begins, "Rebecca of Many Trades..."

I will continue to check in here from time to time, as I'm sure there is a great deal yet to learn.

Best wishes to all of you.

I don't know exactly what made me do this early this morning. There was no last straw about it in the August batch of group mail I was reading. I just realized that I had not wanted to do the updates (and indeed had not since the ones in May, since it was no longer a requirement to add the new members' links), and that I was horrendously tired of all the folderol the group members wanted included in their links.

I've long had the feeling that the way many of the group members wanted their links text written was not the One True and Right Way. Oh---one person last month wanted her whole paragraph of text to be the link...which to my way of thinking would be tacky at best. (I decided a month ago that wasn't going to happen, by the way.)

If you aren't quite sure what I mean by the whole text being the link, imagine if I started this paragraph as a link to something, then didn't close the link tag until after the last word. Depending on your browser and your preferences, the whole paragraph would be a different color, and possibly underlined. You'd probably think I had made a mistake and not closed a tag when I should have. You would probably find it annoying. I would definitely find it annoying, which was why I decided against honoring that request.

I started reading through the August requests, and was planning to actually post them and the ones I had saved from June and July. The feeling that I really didn't want to participate in this craziness any more kept getting stronger, and I decided I really should follow my instinct on this. So I wrote the note, posted it, and am now sitting here telling you about it.

Though I'm now going to be marching to Becky's drumbeat instead of the group cadence, I don't dislike the group itself. I didn't slam doors on my way out on purpose. I have learned a few useful things, will be keeping some of the current links, and may well want to add some of the new members to my list as time goes on. For the record, what I said in the note about being busy was true. Of course, I left out that the time I have for web issues will be spent reading new "issues" (entries, of course) of favorite journals...

Moving away from that patch of crazy is one of the more liberating things I've done. I'm actually quite proud of myself for doing the deed. And that sigh you're hearing? Not to worry: it's pure, utter relief.

Text � copyright 2000-2003 Becky