There’s a problem with long-running serial texts: where do you begin when you’re a new reader? If you’re writing comics, self-contained story arcs with constant reference to explain why things as they are might be one way (as well as, of course, introducing characters slowly and having a large cast to choose from but only featuring several at a time).

Peter Lindberg decided the way to do this with his weblog was in a summary page. The interesting (but when you think about it entirely obvious) thing about this is that it’s written entirely by hand; no automatically-generated-by-Moveable-Type here. Lindberg has sat down and gone over his posts and links. It’s in part interesting because of what Lindberg himself seems to be discovering about his writing/thoughtprocesses and the way they emerge over long periods of time (as opposed to the shot space of the individual blog post). It may be a time-consuming process for the weblogger, but it’s the most effective and certainly the most literary way of generating context I can think of for a text-based medium.