trisweb.com

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about — or even thought about — finishing this web site, but I figured I’d set the path straight; if not for those others interested, then at least for myself. So, read on for a list, in order of importance and probable time of completion, of changes to be made to trisweb.com in the near future.

1. A “listening to” module thingie on the sidebar, like Jon Hicks and Ryan Simms have. I figure this would be really easy, with the help of the nifty BlogAmp plugin for Winamp. And I know I keep talking about all this great music I’m listening to, so It’d be cool to keep the current playlist here.
2. Upgrade to Gallery 2 Alpha. It looks to be coming along nicely, and it’s all standards compliant and cool looking. And I don’t mind testing it out for them; I don’t really care much if it fails miserably. The other option is photostack, but its photo manager won’t work on these servers because they don’t have ftp support (only secure ftp). I’ve also started my own filesystem-based online album manager which I call zenphoto, which might go somewhere, or might not. In any case, there will always be photos at the photo link.
3. Finish the pages with the big links on the right. This should be first on my list, but if you haven’t noticed, I don’t care much about them. The problem is that it’s a bit of a job to integrate an interface with Wordpress to maintain the content in them. I actually think I’m going to use Wordpress posts for the reviews section (that way they’ll even show up on the blog, which they do anyway). Links are of course already maintained by WP, but I need to expand on them. My bookmarks are extensive and interesting, and only about 10% are represented here. Literally speaking will be my poetry, which hasn’t been displayed publicly for over a year. I’ll make that database integrated somehow; they’ll probably just end up being WP posts again, but not displayed on the front page, and formatted much differently. As for technicallyspeaking and musicallyinclined, those should just be static pages about nerdy and musical stuff, respectively. Not too hard.
4. Update the colophon, and the about me page. This should probably be higher on the list…
5. Make a subpage of literallyspeaking to be a “favorites” section, with typographically correct versions of some of my favorite poems from other authors. I think it’s horrible to have to read Frost in 10pt Arial on a blue background. Here’s an example of the right way to do it.
6. Move to a new server. Notice how this one’s dead slow most of the time? Well, it is. It’s a shared server with an insane number of sites hosted on it, and it’s only a Sun UltraSPARC 2×400MHz. Not the worst (and it’s free!) but I could definately do better.
7. And at the bottom of every list like this should be “redesign.” But mine is different. I’m going to call my next redesign “paradigm shift” and try to blow the web away with something completely different. To let you in on a little secret, I already know what that something is and how to do it. It’s a new way of looking at weblogs and how people interact with them. I’m afraid if I say more someone with more time will take my idea and run with it, so I’m gonna stay quiet for now. Stay tuned for updates.