As you may have noticed, things have gotten a bit quiet on the livingwithmusic.com front lately. Besides the technical issues I've been experiencing with my current web host, issues which have temporarily been fixed, the reason for the silence is quite simple: I'm not satisfied with my site anymore, at all. What it really boils down to is that - although that is hard to admit - I did everything wrong with this site that could possibly have been done wrong.
In the past, I was always good on the upswing whenever I was dissatisfied, but these days I definitely lack the technical expertise to transform my vision into something feasible.
But I'm working on it.
Hard.
Let me go into a bit more detail.
I've always stated that I don't really care about how many people read this site and how they get here, and that certainly still holds true. It has always been my conviction that what many other people care about does not really concern me. I'm not interested in making money, I'm not interested in continuously expanding my readership and I'm certainly not at all interested in rankings, Google page rank and top rankings in search result lists.
What I'm interested in is a quality product and from that concern stems my dissatisfaction. I know that many of you like what I'm putting out there - my statistics show that you do - but I myself am not satisfied anymore with the presentation and accessibility of the material.
I have started redesigning the site completely, and I've progressed quite a bit, but catching up on technological and programming advances of the past decade, after having pretty much ignored them for that amount of time, is, to say the least, a seemingly insurmountable obstacle.
Secondly, my real life keeps getting in the way. I had to fight hard to get ahead in my real-world job and I've had to continuously balance the demands of my job with the energy needed to quench my health issues. These issues have mostly been resolved, even faster than I though they might be, but that has also led to the point at which I need to face the one problem in the virtual part of my life that has been sitting naggingly in the back of my mind for months now: I've always had a vision for this site lingering in the background that kept on telling me that the more I posted here, the more I would have to redo in the (near) future.
See, I know what this site has to look like and how it has to function and what I'm currently doing (wrong) is leading me further down the path to tons of work, realigning not only the look of the site but also the structure and layout of the content. In effect, every time I type up a long-ass post, I add to the mountain of reformatting work looming ahead.
The equation is very simple: Every minute I spend on updating this site is taken away from realigning and redesigning it and every minute I spend on either job is subtracted from the time I also need to spend on my real-life job.
Catch-22, and all of that.
If you are now expecting a statement as to the closing-down of this site, you could not be further from the truth. This site - plus other online ventures I've either kept from the public eye or which have pretty much sunk into relative obscurity - help me keep a balance in my life and I'll be damned if I let them go. Actually, quite the contrary is true: I'd like to intensify work on them, especially on livingwithmusic.com ... but so far, I've lacked the expertise to do so.
Let me explain: Instead of updating this site regularly, I've spent my time perusing one single book that has managed to light that fire again, the passion to just jump out there and get it done. That book is "Transcending CSS - The Fine Art of Web Design", written by the insanely talented Andy Clark. I haven't felt as incited to finally get my shit together as I did when I read David Siegel's "Killer Websites" tome that is today often cited for having ruined the Web.
But, until I manmaged to get to that book, I spent hours, days and weeks of my spare time reading a ton of others that all taught me this or that but did not manage to implant themsleves as much as this one did.
To cut matters short, this is what I have been doing, am doing or am about to do - just so you get an idea:
a) I've read 13 books on CSS and standards-compliant web design, trying to find a way of turning my (very simple) ideas into something tangible. At least 80% of that time was wasted reading books that did not jell with me. Call me a difficult reader if you like.
b) I've gone through at least 3 major design revisions which all failed on the grounds of me being unable to turn them into live sites.
c) I've reached a point at which I've come up with a design, reworking the new livingwithmusic.com from the inside out (from the single post page outwards towards the homepage and other main pages), that is feasible and that I now need to turn into a compatible page across a multitude of available browsers.
d) In short, I'm at the moment learning at a painstakingly slow pace to turn what I have (Photoshop files plus additional ideas in my head) into an online site.
It is frustrating because I know that at the time I push the new site out there, most other people will have again advanced their own sites beyond what I can deliver and, in comparison, mine will be a minor one, and it is even more frustrating because I know that when I'm done, I will again have basic planning errors that will force me to fine-tune the whole shebang.
In summation, web design is a pain in the ass.
There's. No. End. To. It.
OK, let me tell you where I'm at.
I'm currently designing each and every page from scratch, main post page, front page, search page, side-notes and whatever. So far, I've gotten the design elements down that repeat across the site, I've gotten the site structure nailed and I know what has to go in there. I'm not kidding when I say that just that took me several weeks if not months of thinking, rethinking and redesigning.
I've basically vowed to myself that I will NOT go ahead until every design element is in place, every fold has been ironed out and every - even the minutest - detail is in place.
Right now, I have the sum total of one completed page ... from which I can derive pretty much all the other pages.
The problems? I have only a slight idea of how to compatibly program and place this mass of details technically and I have to redo and reformat each and every post to get to where I want to go. The only way of achieving it all is to keep on designing until July and then go into hibernation (write: overdrive) for a week or two to program and proof it all.
Why July? Until July I have a load of work to do and then I get to go on summer vacation for six weeks. Two of those are set aside for the new version of the site.
I have no idea if these rambling thoughts gave you an idea of what I'm doing here, but I hope you can understand the slowing-down of the site: It is simply not a good idea to throw tons of posts out there if I then need to spend endless hours redoing them two months down the line.
So, what will be new? Each post will not be accompanied by the three images anymore but by one single big one plus a series of images in a yet-to-setup gallery. Each post's text will need to be basically reformatted to for once and for all remove the basic formatting errors (technically) that are in there. While doing that, outdated links and some noise needs to be removed from said posts. New pages need to be created to house a new site which will somewhat broaden the scope and streamline the content. Search and archive pages need to be set up which connect separate blogs the new site will be based on. Different layouts will have to be found for the relatively new "Millennium Project", the presently available content and a bunch of new things that will be added. All of this has to be done from scratch, trying to learn how to this without resorting to outside help. Secondly, the time to accomplish all of that in is limited. Last, but not least, past experience tells me that I need to do everything two or three times until it actually runs somewhat seamlessly on all modern browsers.
As if this wasn't enough, all of it has to be done with a program whose possibilities I haven't even begun to grasp or use.
At the end, currently I suck at what I want to do and only time will tell if I can succeed.
I'm determined to get it right, but you need to bear with me and leave me some breathing space to get it right, meaning that things will stay somewhat slow around here until I get the back-end worked out.
So, I know that I'm whining into thin air, but believe me, I'm busy ... although you will not be able to see it until the new version actually hits your shore(s). Until then, you'll just have to believe me that the new livingwithmusic.com is going to be better, at least in my eyes. It will definitely not be a groundbreaking site, it won't push the boundaries of anything and it most certainly won't be listed on any of those sites displaying state-of-the-art web design and programming techniques.
It will just be - once again - my small corner of that virtual universe I spent quite a bit of time on and it will hopefully better serve you, the readers. That's really all I'm aiming for.
Let's get to it then.
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