heir to the era, et cetera

Fist-twist the huhhhh? out of your eyes and gaze upon the new empire. The front-end of deepsicks is now powered by WordPress, “semantic personal publishing platform” eXtraordinaire. In less loftiness, I got some new blog software. It’s neat. It’s mighty. It will allow me to do things hitherto impossible or too arcane to figure out and program on my own, like RSS feeds and tag clouds, plus make super-handy tools like categorization and search.

I didn’t plan for this to happen—this massive whoa migration down to the timestamp, the archival hat on should I retain this broken link, keep this mistake, typo judgment turn of phrase I recognize for what it is dull! pretension, abuse of swift language, refrain from refrains and slanted shallow wisdom.

It just happened: about time and a total accident. Tinkering with the Rising to fix the b0rked commenting (it’s fixed!), I stared intently at the interface and imagined what it could do for deepsicks. Mind, this was also after wrestling to no avail with RSS. I knew it’d be a huge undertaking, with free time sans school or not, plus… scary.

This is an old site, creeping up on six years. I can learn new tricks, but can it? Silly or not, there’s pride in 1.0. It’s all math, but it seems more logical (math logic making things happen, not reasoning logic that rightly declaims ridiculous doing things a million times instead CSS mapping them in automagical).

Possibilities are endless with scripts, but probabilities are known with what I know. I’m obviously no Luddite puris—lookee this big thing I did!—but I can’t say there hasn’t been a learning curve. I cannot begin to relay my frustration with the WordPress editor: what you see is not what you get, and that’s fine, that’s what I expect, crazily enough, but when I can’t rely on the coding mode to give me what I want—when it changes what I input—that’s a problem, a big one.

That said, I am learning new things, and that’s always exciting. Though I don’t let on much ’round deepsicks, I have became a fantastic library science nerd. To be fully engaged in my own information production, classification, organization, preservation and dissemination is, well, really freakin cool.

Though not a Luddite purist, I am still a purist, and aimed to keep the look and feel essentially the same, at least and especially for the main page. There may be subtle to radical design modifications in the future, but the main thrust for now is putting everything in place, so I can manipulate it as I please when I please. The content itself has changed little throughout, and I did leave in mistakes and links to four-oh-fours. Why change the past to pretend that the world has not in fact moved on?

Though I’ve long been a fan and still am of some things being difficult to find, I aimed to make the navigation more intuitive and comprehensive. Old pages that do something interesting or require a different format have been redesigned and upgraded; the text-based take-or-leaves were gathered up lovingly and given to WordPress to mind.

I still have some relinking to do with these latter pages, and bear in mind the perpetual browser compatibility battle. As always, deepsicks looks best in Firefox. I did my best for Internet Explorer but after awhile (several hours) you have to bite your thumb instead of your tongue: Micro$oft, die. I will not waste my time.

So what’s with this RSS I keep talking about? Here’s a quick intro and links to get you started, if you don’t know much about it. RSS advocates always emphasize how it’s for people who use the web a lot. Though I guess that’d be me, I don’t use RSS for the sites I visit often and that update constantly, like news sites, but rather for obscure stuff with great-while updates—like deepsicks, and the Fakes and Andy Filers of this mad world. Because the posts are few and far between, I don’t check these sites often, but when they do update, I want to know about it, and immediately. So git yourself a feed, and a reader if you don’t have one, and never be slow-on-the-draw, left-in-the-dark again.

My feed link is posted on the right-hand side as “RSS Uberalles.” You can also get RSS feeds for individual comments. Do note that in feed readers you can often read entire posts without visiting the actual site. I would not recommend this for deepsicks, as some content, like photos and associated text, will not display properly or at all in a reader alone.

Regarding comments, I’ll be experimenting with the moderation levels. Comments are currently held for approval but only to filter out spam (which I’ve already received a great deal of while working behind the scenes). Any legitimate comment will be posted as soon as I receive notification, and after your first approved comment you can do it at will without my checking (I am unsure if this is based on approved IPs or emails… I guess we’ll find out). I apologize for the inconvenience—better than looking at ads, though.

That’s about it! Of what’s unexplained, I’m sure you’ll figure out. I’ll be working on authenticating the links of redesigned pages over the next week, but I don’t anticipate much trouble. Email me or leave comments if you have suggestions, or to point out any tragic flaws. Praise and glory’s also good.

Personally I love how the new features betray and celebrate the depth of the site. The archives, broken down by month, allow for visual digestion of longevity. The tag cloud at a glance reveals the snags and wonders. Oh yes, there are “rants” and “angst.” I’m not proud, but you don’t have to be proud to be honest.

And yet I am proud. I am so proud, I have never been as proud as I am now.

As I trenched through the years gone by, I raided the music folder time capsules, too. System of a Down, Avenged Sevenfold, Tiger Army for crying out loud stomping out shouts, my god all these songs and sounds I hadn’t heard for ages, through my headphones once more through the pixilated memories, connected to the stories at the age of forever was it so short ago? the early aughts of writhing through moshpits, writing up rhythm, just look at the tags. Music. Shows. Dancing.

I am convinced my life could not have turned out differently. I believe it if belief can occur without clinging, without making me fixed instead of fixing the impression I’m time and again spiritually broke and spirit broken and what’s this “turning out” business I’m still burning, I’m still bleeding up. Bent double, but backwards, blown away.

“I didn’t plan for this to happen.” How could I.