Tag: Site Issues

Status: Shortlinks

My shortlink solution failed, some time ago…by the looks of it.
Reimplemented Jetpacks WP shortlinks for time being.

Meanwhile

My quest of simplifying this site continues.

The short version for you new guys is: this site has seen three major periods: A Soul in Progress, Poemcraft, and finally Franklyn Monk.

In the beginning A Soul in Progress floated through the maelstrom on webbed balloons and imagined a universe into existence.

The universe unfolded as a duality between Poems and Not Poems. Not Poems broke down into 9 categories and Poems fractured into a maze of parallel taxonomies.

ASiP, driven mad at the prospect of loosing the universe, built traps and holds from spider webs and smoke, a nursery in which sparse gasses could condense.

Shortly thereafter matter started to form and collapse and the old structure could not bare the weight, so ASiP grew into the conjurer/builder known as Poemcraft.

Poemcraft built a rickety scaffolding over the web and smoke, seeking to contain the elusive nature of the poem. Eventually that too dispersed and Franklyn Monk reappeared from out of the shadows to reconcile reality with existence.

That’s where we’re at now. I have condensed the categories, and ceased using the alternative taxonomies and custom fields. I’ve removed redundancies and useless bells and whistles. I’m getting closer to having a default site, a simple space to hang my thoughts out to dry.

And it’s working. I’m now able to compose and post and move on. I’m now able to use mobile WordPress apps and be done with it, no longer weighed down with flags and fields.

I’m chagrinned about how complicated it had become, and relieved with the new simplicity.

The Great Collapsing Toward Simplicity

When I first started this site I developed several custom taxonomies and delivered posts to the front page through complicated scripts. It was pretty, and kinda useful, but hard to maintain.

I’ve been moving away from that scheme for quite sometime. I’m simplifying things and will shortly end up with a predictable site more inline with users’ expectations.

After I publish this post I’m going collapse all my non-poem posts into a single blog category. Some time after that I’ll remove the spider web of poetry categories; the old drafts, the multiple versions, and shit. I’ll be moving notes and acknowledgments out of the Post Information subfooter, and eventually remove it altogether.

This will probably have no effect on anyone, as most readers see my stuff through aggregators. But for a bit after this Collapsing links will be broken, styles screwy, and navigation unpredictable. It should settle down after a while.

UPDATE
It’s over. Took me all day. Crashed my database several time, I wasn’t expecting that. Thought I’d lost everything for a while, but I managed to coax it back. I think I’m going to hold off for a while on the rest, it gets a bit tricky, and scary.

So now I have four categories: Poems, Blog, Podcast, and Uncategorized. Which presents some problems, my stories, where they go now? I’ve stuck some of them into Poems, and I’m sure there are some hanging out in Blog. Maybe I should collapse everything further into one category, hell, when you’ve been poet-ing as long as I have, everything is a poem. I’m not sure where the line lies. I suspect there is no line. I suspect every thought and every action is a poem.

I’m logging off now, tired of thinking.