Following Jon Mountjoy's lead, I've taken steps to improve thread management. It still needs work, but it's better.
Jon Mountjoy responded to my original essay on threading. He has a lot of interesting things to say about the nature and value of threads.
His ideas inspired me to revisit the threading tools that I implemented yesterday. Threads are now first class objects on the site. And threads, like the one this essay participates in, can point to pages on other sites. Unfortunately, since there's no way for me to communicate the thread logic to another site, a linear thread traversal to another site is a little bit like stepping off a cliff.
That could probably be managed, with a little cooperation and standardization, but not in the few minutes I have this morning to play. It seems like the sort of problem that others must have thought about.