This still seems to create the occasional confusion. I suspect the reasons are:

1. Both the The Blog with its Topical Indexes and The Portal with its Topical Indexes, look pretty similar.

2. The Blog and the Oracle contain a lot of links between each other, so users find themselves being jumped around from The Blog to the Oracle quite frequently.

3. Each time a link takes you from The Blog to the CK Oracle and visa versa, it opens a new browser window. This can result in users finding they have several different browser windows open for both the The Blog and the Oracle.

4. Much of the time it looks pretty similar whether you are in The Blog or the Oracle.

So why do we have both? What’s the difference between them?

The Blog is simple. It’s a blog in the traditional sense of the word. Generally CK posts one blog item each day. Readers can access The Blog as a blog, or through the Topical Indexes under The Blog heading in navigation. Each Blog item has a date posted on it which is clearly visible to the users, and you can access them by month using the Chronological index under the hamburger navigation within The Blog heading. Each item in The Blog is approximately a thousand words - or a couple of standard pages if you like. Each item is structured as a Question in its title, and an answer in the text of the item. In this regard it has some mild similarity to a Quora answer. Celestial Koan likes Quora, so this format comes very naturally to his blogging.

Each item in The Blog is open to comments by readers.

All very straightforwards.

The only thing that is confusing about it is that items in The Blog contain links. These links may be to external sites, or to other entries in The Blog, or to other entries in the Oracle. The last is what causes some confusion.

So what’s the Oracle about?

The Oracle is the site’s main repository of wisdom. There’s a lot, and I mean lot, of stuff in our Oracle, but much of it isn’t available yet. That’s a structuring and linking problem.

Basically the Oracle is a lot of text, with some other stuff too, which all needs to be held or accessed by the site somehow. We’re using Squarespace. There’s a lot of good things about Squarespace, but we’re still finding out about what it does well, what it does badly, and what it can do with difficulty if you know how to do clever things with it.

So how do you hold lots and lots of stuff in Squarespace and make it available to people in a sensible way?

Well you can create lots and lots of pages, but then you have to take care of all the indexes and linking yourself. Alternatively you can create a kind of pseudo blog. Squarespace handles blogs and galleries pretty well, and automatically creates indexes and navigation for them. We still have to create lots of links ourselves, but it certainly helps. So, the Oracle in our Squarespace site has some of the appearance of being a blog. It isn’t a blog, but it looks somewhat like The Blog at times because we are using Squarespace’s same blogging features to assist us.

So what’s different about The Blog and our Oracle?

First, there are no comments on the Oracle.

Second, you can’t access our Oracle as a blog. You can only access the Oracle through The Portal.

The Portal gives you some access to the contents of the Oracle through typical blog indexes, but includes another Index which we maintain as well. It’s painful to maintain, but it gives us a wider range of options and tree structures for navigation.

The Oracle actually contains a gallery of pictures, but again we keep the navigation restricted within the Oracle structure.

The items in the Oracle are not typical blog posts (because it isn’t a blog, it’s just using that structure within Squarespace.) They do not have a defined length, format or structure. Many of them are what Wikipedia refers to as stubs. They do not have a heading as a question. And so far as users are concerned, the dates are hidden and irrelevant. To a large degree, as users navigate through the Oracle, they won’t notice the structure of the items because the links hide the navigation tricks.

So why the confusion, and why does it open a new browser window every time you move between the Oracle and The Blog?

The Blog contains wisdom. Not only Celestial Koan’s wisdom, but also all the contributions added by the comments of our users. It’s a vitally important part of our repository of wisdom. And we absolutely want to be able to refer users navigating through our Oracle to the wisdoms found on The Blog. And visa versa.

The problem lies in the way Squarespace handles navigation. There’s no easy way to track where a user came from and take them back there. So when you transfer a user from the Oracle via a link to The Blog, the user can’t navigate back to the Oracle. The Blog navigation is completely seperate. The Blog indexes refer only to the items in The Blog. If someone is ten levels deep into the Oracle, it’s going to take them a long time to retrace their path back to where they were, if that’s what they want to do, and remember where they’ve been.

So instead we open it up as a new browser window. Then all the user needs to do to return to where he was is close the browser window and revert to the one from which he came.

The back button on the browser might work just as well, but back buttons don’t work the same way on all browsers. We preferred this approach to keep it simple.

How do you know whether you are in The Blog or the Oracle? Just look at the heading. The Blog shows a question and a date for the item. The Oracle doesn’t.

So - yes - right now you are in The Blog. But there are several ways you could have gotten here so it’s up to you how you navigate your way from here. It may help to close a browser window.