I already have a number of websites with their own content, including a personal website/blog.
Cathy, I'm torn between asking you to share the link to your blog so I can start reading it and capitulating to the voice inside me crying out for me to stop letting my fear of missing out on good content cause me to "read the internet" to the exclusion of all other life activities.
I sympathize with the posts that periodically pop up questioning whether the commitment some of us have to this forum starts to border on unhealthy addiction (
here's one such thread I started myself, and
here's another in which I ruminated on the very fact that my familiarity with the forum is sufficiently deep to allow me to make these kinds of internal forum cross-citations, and the irony of now citing to that thread is not lost on me).
While I miss seeing some of the old faces around here, I envy the posters who have come and gone, presumably to move on to other chapters of their lives. I want to FIRE in order to start new pursuits that don't involve staring at a screen for extended periods of the day, and I half-seriously worry that my addiction to the forum and other online content will interfere with that goal.
I lament the direction our society is headed in this Smartphone Age and the unhealthy "fear of missing out" it has created in us (a phenomenon which, apparently, has become sufficiently widespread to earn its own acronym:
FoMO).
But that also might just be a reflection of the difficulty of extracting a forum post from its native context and have it still make sense.
This is what I see as the biggest obstacle to implementing the idea (aside from the problem of who's going to do the work, workload-sharing nothwithstanding, though Cathy is an obvious candidate since she clearly has the stamina to do doctorate thesis level research for every minute question that piques her interest
and grandiose plans to compile and refine those posts into a feature-length blog! :-) ).
Removing posts from their native context won't just make it difficult for them to retain their meaning but will also rob them of the back-and-forth banter that made them good in the first place, except in the case of stand-alone essay posts of the type sol likes to pen.
seattlecyclone did recently start the "I'm going to create a blog to use as a FAQ for these damn repeated questions" approach.
This is great! It saddens me to see great contributors like seattlecyclone turned into workhorses charged (by themselves, albeit) with answering the repetitive questions that routinely come our way.
BTW, sorry for my part in making this the most wildly off-topic thread in forum history. I'll probably respond later to skyrefuge's tale of the unfortunate aspiring early retiree (which was terrific and, once again, sobering), but I think I've neglected my real job in favor of the forum enough for one morning--holy shit, it's the afternoon already!