Digital Overtone

Not so much like the phoenix rises from its ashes, and more like rescuing something fuzzy and distant from the tight clutches of eternal oblivion, I present to you Digital Overtone v.5. Version 4, which was to spring forth from the home-grown content-management system destined for a certain “graduate student electronic journal”:/articles/publishing-and-technology, stillborn and still bitter, never saw the light of day, and it’s probably best that way. The files are currently cryogenically freezing, tucked away neatly on my hard drive should they ever become useful, or just for the sake of posterity.

The redesign and resurrection is, as usually, at least partly inspired by “Rachel”:http://idlethink.com and her “newest concoction”:http://idlethink.wordpress.com/. I have been wanting to use Digital Overtone as more of an academic scratch pad, a place to record not just personal thoughts and events, but reactions on news, books, movies, and music, in the hopes that these reactions might help me clarify my own thoughts and possibly be useful in the future, for some time. Having only recently given up the idea of writing the backend myself, I though a four-day weekend was a good excuse to start migrating things over from version 3 and playing around with “Textpattern’s”:http://textpattern.com/ intricacies.

The idea here is to focus less on making things work and more on just *writing*. A CMS that isn’t mine, and that appears to be mostly spam free (for now) and highly extensible helps. “Textile”:http://textile.thresholdstate.com/ helps a lot. I can be fairly certain nothing I do will break the system completely. That said, I haven’t completely figured this beast out yet, so some things might be missing for now. Particularly Textpattern’s system of archiving things is quite bizarre, and while different sections (”articles”:/articles/, “doublespeak”:/doublespeak/, “linkspam”:/linkspam/, and “reviews”:/reviews/) will mix and mingle quite happily on the home page and in the feeds, they most certainly will not in the archives. Who knows. If you’re looking for something specific, the site-search seems to be the best way to go for now. Tag searches also seem to work well, though not yet precisely as I’d like them to.

Nearly all previous posts still exist on the site, though some of the earlier, more useless ones have been deleted. Old comments are completely gone for now, though I have saved them all in an SQL(Structured Query Language) file, and may re-add them at some point in the future. New comments will generally be open for a couple of weeks after each post. For the time being, many links in old posts will be broken, as the structure of the archives has changed (and because I took the opportunity to discretely edit out some of my past words). I will get to linking them back up, little by little, when I can. The layout will be mostly unchanging, though certainly I can’t resist a few personalizing tweaks here and there as I become more familiar with The Way Textpattern Does Things™. The RSS links are new: please update those (they can be found in the sidebar). Since I like to keep track of site stats, as soon as I can figure out how I will just be including post excerpts in the feeds.

So, welcome (back) to a new version of an old experiment.

Posted by Kyle / meta