The PIFFLE

In my mind, the PIFFLE, Personal Information File For onLine Examination, or Pretentious Indulgent Fiction For Lifetime Exaggeration, or something like this, is a cross between an academic CV and a blog.  The CV is usually just a basic list of paper and book titles that gives an overall glimpse of a person's contributions.  The blog is a more detailed commentary, but usually on current issues.  The PIFFLE can be summaried as

    CV  +  BLOG  =  PIFFLE

As with blogs, it takes advantage of the fact that bits on the internet are cheap.  Therefore one can summarise a lifetime's work, not limited by cost of publication, and readers (should there be any) can look at as little or as much of this as they wish.

An important aspect of the PIFFLE is the attempt to summarise the work in a readable way.  This is difficult to do in papers, where one is under pressure to eliminate any personal aspect from the writing in order to provide an 'objective' account of the experiments or calculations.  Readability in the PIFFLE takes precedence over exactitude.  Personal opinions are allowed.  One is allowed to use the forbidden word "I", rather than the royal "we" that sounds so out of place in single-authored papers. It also gives one a chance of explaining away the papers one is most embarrassed about.  And regardless of whether there are readers or not, the principal benefit is for the author, in stimulating some thinking about how to summarise the work.

No trees need to be cut down for the writing of a PIFFLE.  And unlike papers written for journals one can make figures and graphs more readable by using colour.

I don't see any reason why one can't write a PIFFLE at any stage of one's career, but it obviously easier to do this when one is no longer employed by an institution.  One has more time, there is less chance of breaking some institutional rule, as well as possibly less chance of offending colleagues