Being home for the summer leaves me a lot of time for thinking, and for starting random projects.

One thing that is often on my mind is this website here. I worry about it falling stagnate, that I’m not really creating the awesome that it could be. Poor Josh bears the brunt of it, as I’m often emailing him with ideas, bombarding him in im’s with random webpages that illustrate what I am dreaming of.

Last week I came up with a fantastic idea for my links page: instead of the prerequisite blog roll page with links to all of my online friends and being afraid that I’d missed someone, what if it was a link page to all of the different profile pages of me online. Pretty much, links to where else you could potentially find me in the internets.

However, it is never as easy as that. I opened up Numbers, and made a pretty basic spreadsheet, with the site, the profile address, my login name and password. I came up with fifteen sites off the top of my head. But I knew there were more. This is web 2.0, after all. Every site you visit seems to want you to sign up and be social these days.

And so I thought, to the gmail archive! I had archived every single email I had ever received since I opened the account, and thus would have the emails for every web service I had signed up for since March of 2006.

However, never content with the easy way of doing things, I added more work. I realized that I had stopped labeling my emails when I had gotten my macbook and started using desktop mail again. Instead, everything just got shoved into the archive and forgotten about. It was a mess. And to make matters worse, none of the labels made any sense. So I thought, if I was going to go through the emails anyways to find my web profiles, I might as well label and weed as I went.

I started with 5742 emails in my archive. And deleted all except three labels and started again. It took me about five days, doing it for as long as I could stand each day. I ended up with 1974 emails and 18 labels. And I switched from POP to IMAP—which is definitely taking some getting used to—so that I could label emails as I remove them from my in box.

So, in going through these emails, how many web services am I signed up for? 45. Forty-five sites that, if I was a good little web drone, would check into every day.

The oddest thing, though, are the repeats. Not multiple sign-ups for the same site, but the sign-ups for similar services that do the same thing. Del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia. YouTube and Viddler. LibraryThing and GoodReads. Myspace and Facebook and Virb and Ziki.

I am apparently not monogamous with my online apps, and can come up with justifications for why each one is necessary. Or, for some, that I wanted to be sure to get my username before someone else, just in case a service hit big and all of my friends began to use it.

I was overwhelmed when I was done creating the list. It’s so long that I have to scroll it all. So varied that I had to add a column to mark what the service is used for. Looking at the list makes me wonder why I thought I needed all of these services to live my life, when I check only a handful of them daily.

Part of me wants to go and delete the accounts that I don’t use. But then I look at the list, and think, will I never use that again? And the answer is rarely yes. I did remove some forums from the list, because they’ve either moved systems and I’m no longer there (so long K2 Forums, it was nice while it lasted), or they were support forums for something that I no longer need support for (good bye Podpress Forums).

You might think that if I’m writing about it that the link page is done. But you’d be wrong, as nothing has happened on that front. Josh and I are still trying to work out how to display all of the links on the link page without it being a gigantic information overload. That might take another five days of thinking about the problem randomly throughout the day as I create other random projects to fill my time with.

I’m open to any suggestions, as the design part of my mind apparently went on vacation while I’m on vacation, and I can’t being to picture anything other than the blank white page that is already there.