I run a small mailing list. That's not exactly right. I'm part of a team of three people that runs a small mailing list on OneList, which is a free mailing list hosting company. They're quite good, managing several hundred lists and hundreds of thousands of e-mails a day. They're constantly upgrading their servers and their web site, with few hiccups.

Still, being the self-sufficient type, I'd rather run it off of Macjordomo on my old PowerMac server. Our mailing list isn't anything big or special so that would work just fine. But since this is a serious list I don't want to have other people depending on my stuff. If it was a mailing I created then that would be ok.

Which brings me to the thought that I should start a mailing list. Unfortunately I don't have any subject in mind. There are plenty of other lists for talking about just about subject. I'd want to do something unique. Something like a list for stuff I write, such as the story I'll write when I run my Star Trek campaign.

Technically I should probably use our Saturday-games list that e-mails all the Saturday gamers in my gaming group. But I don't want to spam everyone, my previous attempts at creative writing receiving mixed results with my friends. So it is a thought and an opportunity to run yet another service on my underworked server.

Anyway, getting back to the mailing list I run. There's the list founder, who (although he wants this to be a democratic triumverate) the other two of us defer to for policy decisions. There's the backup guy in case the founder and I drop off the face of this ball of junk we call home. And then there's me. I'm the operations guy and do just about all of the day to day stuff.

Our list has gone through periods of high activity, flame wars, split ups, and a recent quiet period lasting a few months. It's always been rather informal so we haven't codified any of the list rules and policy. That's one of those things in my to-do list, and it has been there for several months.

Today I took the 3 hours to update a web page I'm supposed to maintain. It hadn't been updated since January so some of the information was quite old. I had to recheck the links, change the information, add information, clean up the format, and rewrite the HTML to my standards. HTML should be readable if you're just looking at it with an ASCII editor, which was one of the objectives when it was first developed and one that's broken by any HTML editor. Hand editing is the way to go, but I digress.

So now that I've finally updated that page I should get around to writing up the list rules. It needs have a short section that clearly summarizes the major rules, another section to fully explain list policy and procedures, and a section on what the role of us list admins is. (I've been working too much on the computer, my arm is cramped).

Knowing me I probably will put it off for another couple of months. And how did I get to the point that I'm writing so much? I've also been working on the architecture document for our software project. For someone who didn't do all that well in English, I sure have to write a lot of semi-official documents.