Archives > Information Technology: March 2008
Paste #41 arrived at the house yesterday with more than a few surprises, all of them pleasant.
Of course the signature Paste Sampler is still there, this time with an apparently durable envelope, but what's more impressive is the expanded review section, without any ratings. At first I was disappointed, because I've spent the last two years learning how to read the Paste ratings --- I knew what a three-star rating meant and when I could dismiss it --- but almost immediately I got a smile on my face, because now the reviews actually advance an argument to tell you how to think about whether or not you might like the album, rather than simply caption the rating.
But the real sign that this change is systemic --- the first ever Paste poetry review! The book is Beth Ann Fennelly's forthcoming, the reviewer the versatile David Kirby.... Was this predictable given William Gay's recent contributions, perhaps a sign that the editors at Paste are reading good books?
All in all Paste has brought itself back from the brink of irrelevance. Almost a year ago, I was just tired of the magazine, the formula, that old-glue taste in your mouth. I had given up. I let it lapse. And only the Radiohead-inspired name-your-own-price gambit brought me back, and now I am glad of it.
Get Paste. Get stuck. This is going to be good.
If you're an even semi-frequent visitor to this site, you'll see a redesign's in progress. I'm trying to put it all together at last, all my Movable Type, CSS, &c., and all the information I need to keep straight, integrated in one system. Scheduled readings are now listed under the "On the Schedule" heading and are programmed to disappear from the list while the reading is in progress, to reappear later as an archived entry, ideally with some pictures from the reading and even audio, from time to time. And I've got this "Fresh Ink" box where I can post my most-recent publications and interviews (motivated in part by the encouragement of the editors at Southern Spaces). A bibliography of a sort appears at the bottom of the site's root page, and slowly I will be integrating that into the Movable Type system, for more flexibility. The goal is to make this a good-looking site, an informative site that will respond to requests I can't anticipate right now, and to make this a completely database-driven site.
If you're a more frequent visitor, you may be saying "Not again." But I guess you won't be surprised.
I've been tinkering with the blog design and relocating it around my site and even going back and forth between Movable Type and WordPress for over a year now, maybe more. Something wasn't right. Some things....
I used to really enjoy Movable Type because it allowed me to automate some hard-coding I found boring, especially in a non-blog web-publishing environment: I was using Movable Type on my long-defunct denverpoetry.org site in order to host and maintain a community calendar of literary events, and more recently, I used it to restructure storySouth, with the idea of actually extending the system. I'd learned to hack the system modules and the database structure in order to manage information suited more to literary publishing, to a journal, rather than to a blog, to a journal. But, it seemed, as soon as I got my mind around something, either Movable Type would change radically or I'd get pummeled by spam or the amount of information I wanted to handle got too big --- as with denverpoetry.org. And even at one time it seemed like Movable Type was on the way out, down...
... which was when I started tinkering with WordPress. Maybe I was just too slow to learn it.... I couldn't figure out how to add in a non-category-based tag system or to customize more fully the new fields I wanted. WordPress, though fairly flexible and though having a ton of cool plugins, came to me to seem more and more like a blog system, and I wanted something more flexible, more robust, more caffeinated, or caffeinatable...
... which was about the time Movable Type reappeared, with better programming and with a business model that looked more and more like WordPress's...
... which was about the time, as well, that I started thinking about integrating the information on all the pages of this site a little more effectively. The last site design was very basic, very lean --- I wanted something that would work well with the iPhone and something as well that would allow me to lean very heavily on photographs for the look of the site, but I think I let the old blog-style header trap me into hanging the information off the photograph in ribbons or columns, rather than building the site around the information, which is what I'm trying to do now, while still keeping (or making) a place for photographs. I hope this will put me back into blogging and maybe even back into photographing.
Stay tuned, good friends. I've got a few more weeks before I have the right design, something durable, that should last me a year or two, and that will give me the frame I need.