10 years ago when DOOM game out there was talk about the amount of productivity that had been lost to that game throughout the country. Some people joked it could have been as high as 10%. Several companies banned it from work it became such a problem.

I'm wondering if the new productivity sink is blogs and homepages. Looking around the net and seeing so much work being put into it and knowing how much work it is I have to wonder.

Some sights are fairly simple. They put up a simple default blogger page, maybe adjust the colors, put up a picture or two but otherwise pretty much just leave it at that and post an entry or opinion a few times a week.

Other people go from posting hourly to fullblow design, flash, special features, etc. Where do they get the time? I guess I am asked that myself. Adding a blog entry does not take that long although multiply by 4 if I also do the Japanese version in which case 10 minutes becomes 40. But, adding features, desiging, writing articles takes major time. Adding the comment system probably took 20 hours. Adding any article takes 4 to 8 hours.

And there's no end to the stuff I want to add or do all for appearently no reason. I guess it's my hobby. Why do people build model trains or knit pictures? Just because. Things I want to add

• pictures to the comment system. Lots of comment system allow each person to have a picture. I kind of like that. I'm not sure if I'd prefer they have to use pictures I supply or supply their own but it would be fun to do it. Maybe even a *build your face* type of option
  
  
• I want to make my own we::blog. It just seems like it would be fun. There are lots of features I wanted to see added to we::blog but I know Danny is too busy to do it so I've thought about doing it myself. Things like the picutres, e-mail response notification, anon posts working with non-anon posts, skins, etc. Now that I have my own system working it would not be that hard to make except that it would take time. Writing all the docs, desiging the site, making skins etc.
  
  
• I want to make it so the game Q&A area of my site is more automated, almost like the comment system so that basically someone can post a question there and I can answer there instead of e-mail. As it is now I have to manually post them up there.
  
  
• I want to make the restaurant pages be separate articles for each restaurant that are grouped into one page by area. This would allow me to add a new restaurant, have it appear in the headlines like other news but be added to the correct page of restaurants
  
  
• I want to make it so I can have non feature articles. Currently there are two kinds of articles. News and Features. The difference is features appear on the right column and features get added to the sitemap. News does not. I need a new option for news that doesn't get added to the feature list but does get added to the sitemap/topic lists so for example that article about Japanese toilets is added under Japan instead of under News but is not listed as a Feature on the right.
  
  
• I want to optimize my site system. Currently, once each night, practically every single HTML file on my site is read in order to build the sitemap and topic lists. I wouldn't worry about this if I was running my own server but I'm on an ISP and no script is allowed to take more than 60 seconds. I'm sure I'm getting close to that. I could put alot of the info being used into a database and then just check file dates to see if I need to update the datebase and regenerate the topic lists, sitemap and frontpage. The boring thing about that is after spending hours to fix it there will be no visible change to the site
  
  
• I would like to make the cell phone support better meaning I would like to make it page through articles too long to read. Hmmm, maybe I could just re-direct through google.co.jp which does that automatically 😉
  
  
• I would like to merge a bunch of my template files. Currently there are two versions of most template files. English and Japanese. Then there are different template files for front page headlines, front page features, front page blog entries, the frontpage itself vs other pages, etc. I'd like to merge as much of that as possible into as few files as possible because it's getting too hard to update. Again, this one would have no visible result

I'm sure I can think of more but as you can see that's a ton of time to waste, all for no really good reason.