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Shakespeare once wrote that parting was such sweet sorrow but there's nothing all that sweet about the way we feel now that Steve's daughter has just headed back to Sydney. She stayed with us for a week and was here right in the middle of all the turmoil I wrote about on the weekend and I seriously think that she kept me sane through that little episode. But she only had a week's holiday and now she's gone back to work.

There's something unique about that young lady and you don't mess with her unless you want to get told in clear terms to stop being a fool and get in touch with reality. I don't think that Steve is actually in awe of her but he certainly does have a lot of respect for her. In some ways it's surprising that she's so down to earth and not geeky at all because she's a Unix engineer and here in Australia there are very few women working in Unix teams because it is such a geek environment.

I know one thing that does really impress Steve about her and that's the fact that she can sit there and work from command line prompts while Steve struggles if he can't point and click. We seriously can't wait for her to come back for another holiday.

If you've got kids treasure them while they're young and prepare them to fly all by themselves when they're older and you will have done a good job as a parent.

Anyway ... enough of this maudlin talk ... in the words of that young lady:

'Suck it down Princess and get on with life!'

So what do I want to talk about today? Well today let's talk about all that information that you're busy accumulating as you learn to become a webmaster or even learn some new aspect of being a webmaster.

Nearly all of us are either in that situation ... or have been in that situation. We want to try something new, something that we really don't know how to handle so we go looking for information on it. And on the Net we're almost guaranteed to find a heap of information that looks both relevant and very very helpful.

So what do we do with that information? Do we bookmark it? Do we print it off to read at our leisure? Do we make copious notes before moving on to another site or do we just plain try to remember everything we read?

When we first joined the adult webmaster ranks we absorbed information like a sponge and printed off everything we thought might be relevant to our goals. These days we still print out a lot of information as we research new services that we want to offer our clients. We file it away in ring-binders and refer to it whenever we need to brush up on something.

If you do the same thing when you're researching a new topic then, like us, you have lots and lots of binders that hold lots and lots of pages of information. You may even reach the stage where you have so much information that you lose track of what information you have and where you have it filed.

Again, if you're like us, you'll find that after a while you have information stored away that you really don't need to keep anymore. When we reach that stage we have a huge clean-up and throw out a lot of the information that we've accumulated.

Yesterday I was reading a suggestion that one search engine optimisation specialist had for those of us who collect information. He suggested developing your own e-book; not one that you will ultimately offer for sale, but one that you can keep on your computer and keep adding to as you find more and more information.

He even suggested keeping it as an ever-expanding PDF that not only contained tutorials and blog posts but even contained forum threads and anything else that you found that might be relevant. Even though we haven't tried that yet it certainly does sound like a great idea and one that we might look and testing.

His next suggestion though was a little horrifying if you're one of those freaky people who actually enjoy collecting information ... like Steve. The suggestion by this search engine optimisation expert was that once a year you delete all the information that you've collected and start again with an empty book.

His reasoning was that much of the information people collected is either out-of-date after a year or was completely worthless to begin with so there is just no point in saving it. At first I was horrified but now the more I think about it the more that does make some sense.

Whether I can bring myself to part with all that valuable information I've collected remains to be seen.