It didn't spring straight out of somebody's forehead, you know!


The first few installments of the Boidem were very traditional in their structure. Yes, there were links, but those links were all external, offering the reader an opportunity to view the page to which the column was referring. Other than those external links, the Boidem was very clearly modeled on a newspaper column, and the first columns were written in a straight-forward, traditional style. Those that followed, through the first ten, followed the footnote model of hypertextual linking. Internal links expanded on, or explained, a concept raised in the body of the text, while external links led to web sites that served as examples, or to articles referred to in the main text. Often, the link led to an onsite example of what I was trying to explain which was little more than an HTML version of an e-letter, prepared precisely in order to allow the reader to see what was being referred to. Including those links as part of the body of the main page would have perhaps made the page seem extensively lengthy, but it wouldn't have created confusion, or a feeling of being disoriented, in the reader.

Though a few previews of coming attractions were already presenting themselves here and there during the first year of the Boidem, in that first year no main column page contained links to more than six onsite pages, and half of those columns contained links to two or less onsite pages. It was only after that first year that the elements that I've identified as distinctive to the Boidem started to truly appear.

Perhaps they showed up first in the date links which became a traditional part of the Boidem, and were, for a certain period of time, my favorite. The date links essentially consisted of two different elements: excuses for why I didn't really upload the column on the given (or planned) date, and links to significant occurrences that took place on that same date. These latter also divided into two: dates with personal significance to me, and dates connected to some sort of unsung or no-longer significant technology. In almost all of these cases the link served as a means of connecting to something that wasn't an integral part of the ideas raised in the column itself (and thus didn't belong in the main body of text).

So in a sense it was the date links that set me down the path of an expanded concept of what a Boidem column, a web essay, could or should contain. And, in a sort of snowballing effect, almost as soon as I accepted the possibility of allowing more playfulness with the hypertextual possibilities of the text, adding more and more links became almost unavoidable. From the 25th column until the 42nd each column contained, on an average, just over ten linked daughter pages, and the vast majority of these, were pages that contained at least a couple of paragraphs of text.

These linked pages were no longer just footnotes or asides. Some of them were extended developments of ideas that sprang up in the main column. Others linked out to relevant or pertinent information. Still others, in a fuller realization of the possibilities of hypertext, contained the central idea of the column. Along with these linked pages were the links that no longer only linked to an example or an to article, but embellished on a phrase, or explained something about a name that was dropped in the text. The column was the backbone that held the other parts together, but there was no longer an identifiable hierarchy, with the main column at the core, and with secondary, less important, ideas added on, connected like appendages, and perhaps tertiary appendages connected to these. The backbone, while undeniably essential to the existence of the column, was now a part of a complete organism, an organism all the other parts of which contributed to its distinct existence.

Although I purposefully tried to experiment with the possibilities of hypertext, I also tried to keep the navigational aspects of the Boidem as unconfusing as possible. Only on rare occasions did links lead to pages that were accessible from more than one Boidem link. (This page, for instance, is accessible from two different pages: extro-continued.html - a page that might be considered the main link, and extro-development.html - a page that leads to the same information, but acknowledges the primacy of the other page in the overall scheme.) I might have preferred to seed a bit more confusion, but I realized that if there are readers who are truly interested in reading what is written in the columns, an overdose of playfulness, rather than contributing to the feel of the Boidem, would only detract from it. I've enjoyed playing around, but I continually remind myself that I want the reader to be able to easily navigate these pages so that he or she can make sense out of what's being presented.


Go to: Trying to make some sense out of all this, or
Go to: An introduction to the extroduction, or
Go to: Web Essays - The evolution of a (personal?) medium