Given that it’s been months since there was any talk of redesigning this website, I’ve decided to just pick a nicer look template from the Wordpress directory and modify it for my tastes. You’re looking at the results.
Hopefully this will induce me to write more and proofread the enormous amount of notes I already have in draft stage. And hopefully that will lead me to continue writing more diligently in the future given how far I have yet to go in developing a style to call my own.
A thousand thanks go out to the author of the Wordpress Audio Player plugin found at 1 Pixel Out. This plugin is one of the cleanest, best-designed and most useful plugins I’ve ever seen — perhaps even the best one I’ve ever seen.
My thanks given, let’s get onto exploiting this newfound power irresponsibly by letting you all listen to an old electronica song I wrote a few years back and recorded early in 2004 after finally buying a proper synthesizer. The song should be so much better — particularly the various very cool ideas in it should have been worked out further and cleaned up –, but I still enjoy listening to it. I hope you all do as well.
The song is called “Heaven Is The Sound Of Children Laughing” and the name I decided at the time to use for my experimentations with electronic music was Siaynoq — chosen both as a hat-tip to all Dune lovers and as a slight joke about the image of ravers as indulging in some sort of ecstatic orgy.
With all that said, I’ll let the music speak for itself.
As I write this, I’m in the middle of programming a series of improvement for this site. At the moment, you should see some rough drafts of these changes already active: the addition of photogalleries incorporated directly into the site, the addition of footnotes for attributing quotations, general cleanup of the design and a lot of nuance things like insuring that the hierarchy of pages is displayed correctly when it should be displayed at all.
The next steps afterwards will be finishing the photogallery integration, integrating video and music playback directly into the site, adding clickable translations for passages quoted in foreign languages and moving over to a new layout.
Along the way, there’s a lot more content to be added: old entries that I’ve just gotten to revising, very old pieces of writing that I’m sorting through and importing and a few translations from Spanish literature.
The process of adding photos to this site is now underway. I’ve found that the open source photogallery management system Gallery 2 (go here for more information) does nearly all that I need and can be well integrated with Wordpress. There’s theme hacking to be done yet to make everything look nice, but I’ve already gotten a lot of initial work done and, as such, there are now some basic galleries up. If you’re interested, feel free to look through the gallery of photos I took in Rome or a smaller set of pictures I took of the Palacio De Crisal here in Madrid. You’ll find the galleries for Rome and the Palacio De Cristal located here and here respectively.
I’m currently in the process of playing with the theme engine in Wordpress, so the appearance of this site may fluctuate a great deal in the next few days. Currently, I’ve changed the site over to the Wuhan theme and modified the theme a bit to give the site a more distinctive look and a more somber color scheme while Harek and I make plans for a entirely DIY theme.
Comments, suggestions and complaints will be useful during the revisioning and re-envisioning process.
I am currently in the process of adding back the entries from the past to this website — slowly working my way backwards from the present. As such, if you’re interested, feel free to browse previous months as the entries from those months get placed back online. As of this moment, all of the entries from October have now been placed online.
After finishing adding all of the entries from the past variations of this site, I’m planning on going even further backwards and adding entries from my private journal, which has slowly been replaced by this website as this “blog” was its natural successor, being filled with the same sort of things I was writing before there ever was a website — or before there ever were blogs even. As such, expect an enormous and continual increase in the amount of content on this site for the next few coming months as I work my way back to the first journal entries I feel should be made public.
The transition to the new server is now begun as of this very minute of posting. Slowly this server and this new site will replace the old server and the old site across the Internet as www.johnmyleswhite.com beguns to point to this server instead of the old one.
Please feel encouraged to make suggestions as the process of recreating the site begins. I imagine that, in the next few days, various problems with the new system will come to light and your help in pointing them out is very much appreciated. In addition, please keep checking back over the next few days as there are several posts from recent days that I haven’t been able to finish proofreading in time for this transfer and they should appear online sometime soon. And, finally, as a note, this look is only temporary while my friend Harek and I work on creating a new, much nicer and much more distinctive design for the site.
As one final note, I also imagine that a few emails will be lost during the transition between servers. I will do my best to keep track of all emails throughout the change, but it is quite likely that at least some emails will be lost. If you feel any email you send to me has gone too long without a reply, please send it again. You have my thanks in advance and my apologies for the inconvenience.
As a few of you probably know, because of a slightly misdesigned protocol that BlueHost has, my account was suspended yesterday and all of my files deleted with the result that, after restoring my account, the work I did on Sunday and Monday was wiped out along with about two weeks of posts.
Fortunately, my infinitely beloved — and now transfinitely more greatly beloved — Harek had the test website open in his browser from before the deletion, so that we were able to recover the site’s state from the time before the deletion. It seems in all probability that not a single post has been lost. Those of you know me well, though, know that I’ll still wonder if somehow something unremembered has been lost.
Today, this site has been moved over to BlueHost, a hosting service with which I am already much happier than I was with the site’s previous host, Fortune City. My email service should be more reliable from now on, the bandwidth allotted to the site is far greater and, most importantly, the site can now be moved onto Wordpress instead of being written partially by hand and partially using the XSL stylesheets I had written in April.
That said, this site’s move to Wordpress is now begun as of 1:22 AM on Monday, December 4th, 2005. I’ll have to write a script to import all of my old posts and then all of the content that has ever been published on the site should be available with proper permalinks and commenting features. Also, before 2006 arrives, there will be a new, slicker and more professional layout for the site as well as the addition of videos and other types of contents to celebrate the site’s move from experiment to accepted part of the Internet.
As always, my thanks go out to everyone who reads this site even once and even more thanks go out to those who read it regularly. I’ll keep working to make it worth your while.