Point of Re-entry
Sure, taking almost two weeks off from daily blogging seems like a good idea - but the difficulty is all on the back-end, when you realize that, in the interim, you've forgotten how to generate several paragraphs of crap every night. So bear with me for a few days worth of rambling Ramblers as the crew in engineering gets the warp field going and we can get this thing underway.
And in the meantime, expect a few entries about blogging itself; that seems to be how this logjam manifests itself.
I hesitate to write too much about any kind of New Year's resolutions in this space - as in last night's entry, I'm superstitious enough (a sad trait in one who considers himself a stone secularist) to keep my resolutions to myself, lest I fail to follow through with them and look like a fool. Willpower ever being my least reliable trait.
Case in point: the above sentence originally read "keep my resolutions to myself, lest they not come to fruition," the psychology of which is pretty transparent, a window to my personality with a view that isn't very flattering. As if my resolutions were things unto themselves that I held no responsibility for. As if simply deciding a thing were equivalent to acting on it.
Ah. Wouldn't it be nice?
Note, after all, the initial promise of a revised Copper Man site to have debuted... uh, this past Tuesday. Well, Tuesday's come and gone, and where is the site? Good question. Allow me to push the date back (forward?) to February 1st, and try not to judge me too harshly. And the site will go up then, even if it's in an incomplete state of incompleteness.
Part of the delay on the site - indeed, the main issue with my inability to navigate life so well - is that I often lack the ability to impose a form on things. Thus, anything I have to do is seemingly infinite in nature. I haven't yet been able to come up with a practical navigation for the site because I perceive the site as being as near a complete archive of my life's endeavors as I can make it.
Brilliant idea, of course, but even the best organized of us would blanch at the idea of trying to order 37 years worth of content into any kind of sensible order. And I am far from being the best organized. Is the position for 'least organized' open? If so, I nominate me.
Anyway, the obvious way to proceed is to create a framework, post the framework, and then fill in the missing squares as I go. the real trick will be in giving myself enough flexibility at the outset to allow myself to create entire new sections, if need be, without having to go through all the trouble of redoing the home page and navigational structure. To accomplish this, it seems sensible to break the site into a series of mini-sites, only really joined at the top level, but that does go against my web philosophy of minimal work to navigate and maximum interconnectivity.
Plus, the mini-site idea has the potential to break down into complete chaos in a very short while. Let me give a for instance: Let's say that, just off the home page, I have a master section dedicated to my illustration. From there, we would break it down into - oh, I don't know, color and black and white. Seems sensible enough.
But how about navigating by subject? Or time period? Lord knows, I want to include a very sizable selection of juvenilia, but my ego forbids anyone from confusing those pieces with my current ability. Still, the whole point of including the high-school work is to allow people to trace my progress (or lack thereof) as an artist. So, rather than having the same work over and over and over again, it seems more likely that I instead want to create some multidirectional approach to navigation.
Time, subject, media, etc.
Hmmm. And how would that navigation take form? Some kind of rotating compass, indicating the possible directions the viewer can travel? Sounds enticing, but it goes far beyond my abilities to create that automatically, so I would need to create each link manually. The labor involved in that concept is a little cowing.
Thoughts?
D.
And in the meantime, expect a few entries about blogging itself; that seems to be how this logjam manifests itself.
I hesitate to write too much about any kind of New Year's resolutions in this space - as in last night's entry, I'm superstitious enough (a sad trait in one who considers himself a stone secularist) to keep my resolutions to myself, lest I fail to follow through with them and look like a fool. Willpower ever being my least reliable trait.
Case in point: the above sentence originally read "keep my resolutions to myself, lest they not come to fruition," the psychology of which is pretty transparent, a window to my personality with a view that isn't very flattering. As if my resolutions were things unto themselves that I held no responsibility for. As if simply deciding a thing were equivalent to acting on it.
Ah. Wouldn't it be nice?
Note, after all, the initial promise of a revised Copper Man site to have debuted... uh, this past Tuesday. Well, Tuesday's come and gone, and where is the site? Good question. Allow me to push the date back (forward?) to February 1st, and try not to judge me too harshly. And the site will go up then, even if it's in an incomplete state of incompleteness.
Part of the delay on the site - indeed, the main issue with my inability to navigate life so well - is that I often lack the ability to impose a form on things. Thus, anything I have to do is seemingly infinite in nature. I haven't yet been able to come up with a practical navigation for the site because I perceive the site as being as near a complete archive of my life's endeavors as I can make it.
Brilliant idea, of course, but even the best organized of us would blanch at the idea of trying to order 37 years worth of content into any kind of sensible order. And I am far from being the best organized. Is the position for 'least organized' open? If so, I nominate me.
Anyway, the obvious way to proceed is to create a framework, post the framework, and then fill in the missing squares as I go. the real trick will be in giving myself enough flexibility at the outset to allow myself to create entire new sections, if need be, without having to go through all the trouble of redoing the home page and navigational structure. To accomplish this, it seems sensible to break the site into a series of mini-sites, only really joined at the top level, but that does go against my web philosophy of minimal work to navigate and maximum interconnectivity.
Plus, the mini-site idea has the potential to break down into complete chaos in a very short while. Let me give a for instance: Let's say that, just off the home page, I have a master section dedicated to my illustration. From there, we would break it down into - oh, I don't know, color and black and white. Seems sensible enough.
But how about navigating by subject? Or time period? Lord knows, I want to include a very sizable selection of juvenilia, but my ego forbids anyone from confusing those pieces with my current ability. Still, the whole point of including the high-school work is to allow people to trace my progress (or lack thereof) as an artist. So, rather than having the same work over and over and over again, it seems more likely that I instead want to create some multidirectional approach to navigation.
Time, subject, media, etc.
Hmmm. And how would that navigation take form? Some kind of rotating compass, indicating the possible directions the viewer can travel? Sounds enticing, but it goes far beyond my abilities to create that automatically, so I would need to create each link manually. The labor involved in that concept is a little cowing.
Thoughts?
D.
posted by Dave Kopperman | 9:42 PM
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