Breadcrumbs . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . and how a new diagram was born.

Ever since abandoning all idea of publication in book form, I’ve been looking for a way to help a reader visiting this site. 325 posts have been reissued after editing & classifying their themes. Expect the same number again trickling through over the next few months.

We like real books, especially hard-backed. They look good on our shelves, we can pick them up anytime and flick through, perhaps years later. E-books are good too. They remember where you left off, no need for a paper bookmark. You can easily annotate them or add highlights and marks. But you can’t lend them. You can do word-searches but you can’t flick through easily looking for a particular description. Non-fiction books benefit from being indexed.

Wayfarer’s Notes is too big to go in a book. It has too many images, some of them copyrighted by others. It is stuffed with copyrighted quotes; some of them might run the gauntlet of “fair use” but others not. It is subject to authorial revision day and night; open to reader comment ditto. It doesn’t belong in a book, which is necessarily static, necessarily copyrighted because it costs time & money to produce. It belongs here, free to whoever arrives with knowledge of the English language and a suitable device to pick up the Internet. Having once beaten a path to its door, readers are free to return any time, to share an odd moment, perhaps add a comment, no matter how long ago the post was written. Time?—not a barrier in this world of literature. Here you’ll find nothing but bite-sized chunks, large breadcrumbs, but there’s no reason for them to go stale. They’re safe from birds & vermin.

In the Pacman game, you try to eat all the breadcrumbs before a ghost eats you. Here you can take all the time you want. “Wayfarer’s Notes” is not going away.

The difficulty has always been to offer a guide for a wayfaring visitor lost in the forest with all its criss-crossing paths. Every tree is different, but how to find one’s way? In the fairy story, Hansel & Gretel rely on a trail of breadcrumbs; but the birds come and eat them, they’re no better off than before. Breadcrumb navigation is now a standard term in Web design: a way to know where you’ve been and how to get back where you started.

This is not a blog in the sense of offering anything topical, in the world’s view or my own. It’s simply a loose collection of essays that gets added to occasionally. Like any reader, I’m interested in what’s new; yet anything from an author I like is new if I haven’t come across it before. “Latest” has no special value; not for me, not for my ideal reader. All the same, it’s interesting to know when something was written; and to see how someone’s ideas and style have evolved over time.

I’ve tried offering elaborate arrays of clickable topics, designed to encourage the wayfarer into the forest labyrinth. Only the breadcrumbs were lacking. There’s a snag in WordPress. It can’t keep track of visited links; or rather, not on my free subscription. I would need to upgrade to a Premium Plan at £7 per month. Stop paying that? Advanced Design Customization lapses. The golden coach reverts to a pumpkin, the white horses to mice, scampering away in all directions.

So we’ve taken a walk on the wild side, leapt not for the first time into Vincent’s own webspace. I pay a modest subscription, but could migrate to GoogleDrive; which I imagine will remain until Kingdom Come and Cyber-Apocalypse.

Take a look, hop on the Site Map; hop off at any theme of your choice. SITE MAP
* some of the links are wrong, for example the 2nd link to Cats takes you to Alley Creatures I’ll try and fix these up using JavaScript, when I’ve relearnt to use it

2 thoughts on “Breadcrumbs . . . . . . . .”
Bryan White
Ha! Love the Pac-Man screenshot. Might be your most inspired use of an image to date.
I also like the idea of working the theme of wayfaring into your navigation model of the site itself.
You’re on a roll!
Gentle Eye
The new diagram is brilliant.