2020
Wednesday 1st January 2020 17.40And…it’s 2020.
Loosely related to that, I’ve got the new site up and…shuffling. It’s not exactly not up; it’s just still got a couple of minor things waiting to be finished.
At the moment, that’s mostly just the column of currently blank placeholder images to the right; eventually, I’ll get them filled in with…something. That’s the trick: I haven’t entirely decided what to put there just yet. Generally, I just allocated the vertical space to, like, Offsite Links when I was mocking the whole thing up in Photoshop the other day.
Which is probably part of the problem. Presuming we’re calling it a problem.
I mentioned this in an index.html back in October, but I’ll go over it again real quick: somewhere over the last…twenty-three years—certainly over the last seventeen or so that this site has been more of a CMS thing than pure hypertext—things got a bit bloaty. And then more bloaty. And then kinda crashy. And, now, the old site barely loads at all. Partly it was just standard bloat—entries and images and whatever translates to several dozen gigabytes of junk—that I’d managed to upload and post since 1997; partly it was a combination of comments and—worse—users clogging up the database: for every approved user, which I’d personally looked at and ascertained had some reason to exist apart from posting links to malware in Central Eurasia, there were roughly a thousand kinda probationary accounts that the system was treating as users and that I was treating as things I’d eventually get around to looking at and ascertaining whether they were invading from Mxyzptlkstan.
So that never fully worked out.
Therefore, now, I’ve got this database on the server—still—that probably wouldn’t be a problem if it were at facebook.com; here, it’s all just one big useless mess that’s slowing down the whole domain: just trying to get the basic index.php to load while it’s looking for inclusions in the database is like pushing a 1959 DeSoto slowly down the street by throwing baseballs at it. Like…if you’ve ever tried that.
And, thus, I’ve pretty much just moved on from that database and the index.php trying to talk to it; now we’ve got a new one in place to fill up.
And, by we, I mean me. There are no comments this time. No users. Partly because they bloat things; partly because it’s a little redundant: if you wanna interact with something here, there are other ways to do it now. Which might be a little ironic: this site was what would later be called Web2.0 from the beginning, in 1997, with various ways to add content as a visitor; now that that’s something of a standard, you can just tweet about it, or respond in the comments at facebook.com, or whatever else.
It’s probably not a perfect solution, since we’re talking about offsiting interactions to various social media sites, current and forthcoming. But it’s a solution that allows the site to load at all; so, it’s better than the alternative, for the moment.
And it’s probably not the end result: I can think toward developing something here on the site with separate databases to offload the strain if and when things get nasty again. It just doesn’t sound like an emergency right now.
So. What else is new….
There’s what’s old, of course: at the moment, the only entry linked through the sidebar on the left is the moderately spoilerific thing I wrote up about the final StarWars film; it should also be linked beneath all this text as—at the moment—the only thing you can click on to see anything else. I had that in place while playtesting things, just copypasting the hypertext out of Notepad++ and throwing it into the backend to see how things looked with some content to fill out the blackspace [whitespace, but on a site that doesn’t murder your eyes in RGB by having a huge glowing background]; and, now that I’m typing in this entry as well, I suppose there’s no critical need to delete an entry from 2019 that wasn’t technically an entry when I wrote it. It’s fine.
And then news: just…I dunno. It’s 2020 now, which of course is dredging up the same old argument we get every ten years these days: happy morons squeeing that 1999 is ending, and we’re moving immediately into a new millennium that won’t actually begin until 2001; probably the same happy morons ten years later, flexing their lateblooming ability to add 2,000 to 1 by ackchyuallying that the Noughts won’t end until 2011; and now we’ve got a few billion dartthrowers going back and forth between two entirely different topics—the beginning of the Twenties and the end of the Second Decade of the Century—because what they lack in intelligence they make up for in morality, and what they lack in morality they make up for in feewings.
The short version is…remember how people used to be morons? They’re still morons; they just used to be, too. Or whatever Hedberg was talking about there….
Outside of this specific site—and therefore probably eventually linked to the right—part of the reason why it took me from October until now to throw together what shouldn’t be that difficult a website to code [where the larger part of the reason involved equal parts Minecraft and apathy] is that I’ve been devoting some time to resurrecting and augmenting the whole thing at CthulhuDagon.com. I’ve still got some more to do there, but it’s working well enough to mention already.
And of course I [and often Hunter] have been doing Let’s Plays of…I’d say various videogames, but it’s mostly been Minecraft. Here’s the playlist to date for the one we’re currently playing through, if you’re looking for whatever background noise on the secondary screen. Or it might even be fun to watch through; I’m the wrong guy to ask.
And…I think that’s most of it for now. Or, if there’s anything else, it’s not pressing enough to come to mind at the moment. But that’s good: it means there’s a chance I’ll actually have a reason to come back tomorrow and write another one of these. At the least, I won’t have the irksome excuse that writing one of these takes an extra hour of trying to get the system to let me into the backend in the first place.
Have a webcomic:
More later….
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