This website has four purposes, around three skating topics.

Topics 

• Techniques of skating, with focus on doing it on inline-skates and cross-country skis, but also about ice-skates.
   
• Places to skate, and styles of exploring and traveling. 
   
• Ways to have fun and play games and appreciate the beauty of skating. 

Purposes 

• identify helpful or interesting questions about those topics 

And sometimes identify useful categories of perspectives and goals of skaters asking or bumping into those questions.  

• identify resources publicly available in English on the web that address those questions. 

And to describe those resources in ways that skaters can quickly jump to the kind of information that is more helpful to them and their current perspective and goals. 

Where there are multiple perspectives or conflicting views to a question, provide access to sources that express and debate those different opinions. 

• to fill in gaps in the information publicly available for those topics and questions on the web. 
   
• to provide analysis and raise questions about skating techniques from a perspective of basic physics.  

where "basic physics" here means old-time Newtonian mechanics of force and velocity, not quarks and quantum levels. 

Future 

My perspective is that someday all the information and interesting viewpoints about skating will be richly available on the web. 

Right now we're still a ways from that on some topics, so this website has a role in describing and assessing the current resources, and in trying to fill in some of the gaps.  Search engines provide long lists of matches, but they do not assess the quality of those matches, or which ones are more helpful to a skiing-specific perspective or goal. 

In the future the other existing resources will be expanded and new resources will appear on the web.  In response to that, some of the detailed content on this website will be replaced by links to other websites, together with brief comments describing, interpreting and appreciating those other resources. 

I hope that in some cases, the creators of the new content will have been stimulated by my gap-filling attempts -- with the confidence that even though their work would have flaws, at least it will fix the deficiencies and errors in my attempts, while carrying forward the (few?) good ideas. 

Then for some topics, even the framework of interesting and helpful questions on this website might be replaced by a link to another resource that offered a superior framework.  For others, my framework might outlive that, and continue alongside as helpful for a minority of persons in a minority of situations.