Most personal websites are organised by format. There is a page for posts, a page for projects, a page for links. It is a filing cabinet with a nice typeface. It tells you what kind of files are inside, but nothing about the person who put them there.
I wanted a structure that could hold a perfume review and an essay about attention without making either feel out of place. Format could not do that. A theme might, but themes tend to collapse into tags — a dozen words at the bottom of a card, none of them load-bearing.
The seven worlds are an attempt at something else: an editorial structure that is also a point of view.
The worlds are questions
Each world is built around a question rather than a category.
- Pride asks what I have made of myself.
- Lust asks what I find beautiful, and why.
- Greed asks what is worth building, and at what cost.
- Gluttony asks what is worth consuming, and what it leaves behind.
- Sloth asks what can be removed without losing anything.
- Wrath asks what deserves to be argued with.
- Envy asks whose work makes me want to do better.
A category says this belongs here. A question says this is what I was trying to work out. The second is more useful to a reader, and far more useful to a writer. When I am unsure where a piece belongs, I do not ask which folder it fits. I ask which question it is answering.
One home, many connections
Every piece has one primary world. That keeps the archive legible: there is always a first door to walk through.
But a piece can carry tags from other worlds, and it can be explicitly related to work elsewhere. A technology project can live in Greed and still point at an argument filed under Wrath. A book review can live in Gluttony and connect to a note on style in Lust. The structure is a tree at the top and a graph underneath.
This is more work than a flat tag system. It is also the difference between a site that looks organised and one that is actually edited.
What the structure refuses
The seven worlds refuse two things I dislike about personal sites.
The first is the infinite feed. A feed is ordered by time, which means the newest thing is always the most important thing. That is rarely true. A world page can hold its best work at the top and let the rest settle into an archive.
The second is the performance of completeness. A portfolio wants to look finished. An archive is allowed to be in progress. Some of these worlds will be thin for a while. That is honest. The structure leaves room for them to fill.
A map, not a brand
The names are borrowed from the seven deadly sins, but the site is not a moralising project. I am not assigning a sin to every interest. The words are useful because they are old, sharp, and a little uncomfortable. They resist the blandness of Lifestyle and Culture.
What matters is that the map is mine. It will change. A world may split, or merge, or be renamed. The point is not to defend the taxonomy forever. The point is to have one that makes the work easier to see.