Where I've been...

Well, with the move to ProHosting came the opportunity to totally overhaul the web site. But as you've probably noticed, the web site isn't changed much at all!

Here's the scoop: I wanted to overhaul the web site drastically. I wanted to make it easy to add new news items without having to edit three different files and upload the whole news directory (due to new left margin notes). I wanted to make it possible to have a deeper tree structure so that in, say, the "Songs" section, I could have two sub-sections, one for "Dead Children and Other Stories" and one for "White Trash Blues". I wanted to add the ability to attach messages to my editorials so that people could comment publically on some of my more provocative articles.

So I got to creating php3 code, re-organizing the HTML, and otherwise ripping the guts out of things, and ended up like Larry Wall with 'bnews'... once I had the guts ripped out, another project came along, or I'd have to work 12 hour days at work, or etc.

So finally I scaled back. Rather than a radical new architecture, I simply modified m4web to recurse a directory tree and install files in a directory tree, and put an "UP" in the left margin to take us upwards in the tree. This was something like a 5 line change in m4web script itself, and about 20 lines of changes in the actual M4 macros. So now we're live again. Maybe.

In other news: Last month I bought a bunch of recording equipment -- a mixer, microphones, a new computer (a $379 refurb eMachine, but hey, it works well enough for the moment), and a high end sound card. So I'm currently re-recording most of "Dead Children and Other Stories", and I've already recorded a couple of songs for "White Trash Blues". Soon I'm going to start moving these here, at which point the Songs section is going to fork the way I mentioned earlier.

And hopefully now that I have the technology back together, I can update the web site more often :-).

-Eric