The Path Forward

2026-01-04: A new year almost begs for a new plan for growing and developing the website. Before I prattle on with delusions of grandeur, though, posts from prior years may be found below in the links entitled "2025 Entries" and the like. A fair warning for new arrivals is that only the years 2024 & 2025 have a substantial amount of entries; It wasn't until early-to-mid 2023 where I began to enjoy the sight of my own writings and pretending that others shared the same sentiment.

I always hesitate to write a "State of the Union"-type post because I'm not sure what good that might do except as fodder for my own motivation. Unicursal Maze Research is a hobby, not a job or a chore as I've often written previously. I'm pretty certain that no one is waiting patiently for these posts which traditionally arrive once per week on Sunday. If you do, however, find some slight amusement or education in my stream-of-thought writings about this topic, consider yourself part of a rather exclusive club of followers, 'exclusive' meaning 84 Neocities followers as of this writing.

If anyone had ever mentioned that I would one day have that many followers for a website devoted towards the very not-popular (and continually not-popular) topic of Unicursal Mazes, at the most diplomatic, I would have commented about how very polite that assessment would have been. However, here we are, one year later, having grown from 37 followers to 84. None too shabby for a year as far as I'm concerned. To everyone who is currently a follower or aspires to be a follower: THANK YOU.

What are my plans for this upcoming year? Well, staying alive is always near the top of my list because I have no intention of editing this website via an Ouija board or by way of a seance. Of course, none of us have complete control over that aspect of our condition but avoiding activities such as diving into a swimming pool of rusty, radioactive razor blades or gargling paint thinner should still be able to swing that needle toward a positive direction enough so I don't have to sweat the details too much... I hope.

Barring that aspect of my existence, the next goal might logically be in continuing to add SVG unicursal paths to the "Peer Review" section of the website. While I aspire to catch up to where I am, creating such paths using MS Paint, the reality of the situation sobers even the most optimistic of expectations. I can't make any guarantees that I'll catch up with the SVG unicursal paths to where the MS Paint ones are but I'll certainly give it a try. Anything is possible.

Another plausible goal is to render, on the website, all of the Original Pair maps for the determined fields that I have created thus far, through the 4x10 field. I highly doubt that there are teenagers (or anyone else, for that matter) clicking away on those tables with great eagerness but the whole point is to show your research and that's what those maps represent: Research. Again, with enough time and motivation, creating all of the Original Pair maps by the end of the year is a plausible goal for myself which means that it probably won't be completed.

Rules Maps have fallen back into favor lately, for one reason or another, and it's high time to create a lot more of them even if I can't display them for now. I've written before how, individually, they're quite small in size but, collectively, would take up an entire chunk of my available 1 GB of space here at Neocities. I have a thought or two of how to deal with that but as they say, "the less said, the better," for now.

Moving onto more "pie-in-the-sky" achievements, there are a crowd of possibilities. The website always needs more learning modules. I could upgrade some of the existing graphics. If I want to make myself weep with fear, I'd try and merge the capabilities of "Derivatives" & "Peer Review" into one massive javascript program. If I want to proverbially throw myself out of a window, I'd try to create an SVG equivalent of the Rules Maps or, dare I write it, automate the very creation of unicursal mazes itself.

And what of the 'downtown' sections of the website, such as The Gallery, The Catalog and other sections that don't seem to get their due? Well, I love all of my children equally (who wouldn't?) but there's only so much time and motivation to go around. The pendulum always swings in the darndest directions and at the most unpredictable times at that. Who knows what the future might bring? That's what makes it so appealing.

In conclusion, I'm glad that the website is continuing. I always look forward toward making this website more education, more entertaining & more interactive than it has been the year prior. While I am frustrated that the gulf between my abilities and my imagination is always too wide for my liking in spite of progress to the contrary, it is your continued following that inspires me to "think outside of the box" (or should that be 'the path'?) in conveying my fascination and enjoyment of this subject.

Enough writing; Let's get back to creating Unicursal Mazes...