New Content

A useful and well-known first step in this direction is to provide information about when the site was last updated, so that even if you don't know in advance when new content will appear, you can recognize it easily when it does. Since this information needs to be easily accessible, I have put it on the root page.

Another useful and well-known technique is to maintain a list of changes, so that once you know the site has new content, you have some efficient way of finding it all. I will be doing this; the lists will be filed under History.

Neither of these techniques really addresses the original question of how to know when there will be new content. Eventually I may create a notification mailing list—this would be the perfect solution. For now, I can say that I intend to release a new batch every month or so.

Speaking of batches, there's a point to them that I don't think I've documented anywhere else. It would be consistent with all of the above if every time I changed a single word in a single essay, I changed the information about when the site was last updated, added a history page, and sent out a notification email. This is obviously not desirable. Releasing in batches helps guarantee that whenever new content appears, there will be a sufficient amount of it to be worth looking at.

With all that said, I hope you will find it worthwhile to come back to this site even when there's no new content, either because it has enough depth that you couldn't read it all at once or because it has some use as a reference.