After all those weeks working on Trex launch I find myself lifting my head out of the song-after-song-after-song tedium and focusing (or at least trying to focus) on the Big Picture.
What do I want Tripalot to be?
- A technological practice ground?
- A diary (for myself)?
- A self-centered encyclopedia?
- A portfolio?
- A marketing mechanism (for my music and other creations)?
- A place to meet and keep in touch with people?
I really don't know at this point. Right now, it's a little bit of all of the above. It doesn't really do any of those things very well, though. I could go into details (for example, I would want a diary to be chronological) but I won't (or, for example, I'd want a portfolio to present different views to designers, musicians, writers, etc.) because that would bore you (or, for example, a marketing mechanism would have search-engine friendly urls and a much "hipper" design)…
In some ways, I kinda wish Tripalot.com were unified. If I refer to a person, song, or piece of gear on any of my sites, I'd want to be able to easily link to a page which discusses that subject. For example, in my Tripecac site, if I type "<album>Zipit</album>" within some xml, I know that that will turn into a link to the Zipit album page; it doesn't matter which page I am editing at the time. I want that easy linking from any page. Like here in this blog; I want to be able to reference a Tripecac album like this: <album artist="Tripecac">Zipit</album>. Does this mean I need to convert all my sites to xml? I don't know. It's an intriguing idea.
I also wish I could edit my sites from any computer (not just my main computer). However, that means doing one of the following:
- share the sites' master files among all my computers (which requires me to port the publishing tools as well)
- migrate all sites to Web 2.0 technology (which requires tons of work and research and doesn't feel very future-proof)
- connect to pc w/ master files via ssh, edit via vi (which is clunky compared to my favorite text editor)
- connect to pc w/ master files via remote desktop (which is slow)
I also need to figure out how to add user comments to the various pages. That's pretty much a staple nowadays, at least for information-heavy sites like mine. I don't really have a clear picture of how I can add user comments without switching to Web 2.0, though. Sigh.
So I need to do some thinking and visualizing in the next few days (or weeks or months). I need to decide the future of Tripalot. Sounds like a theme from a fantasy book, eh?