About JayceLand's New Look

Well times change and so do I. In the last few years, I've transitioned further from going out to live music all the time to seeing mostly movies and only a handful of shows a month. So I decided to further pare down the number of events I list on the site.

My standing rule is that this site should be as easy for me as possible. I had toyed with a user-generated site and all kinds of fancy databases (which may still come) but that is most certainly not easy. And then there's the whole fragile way I generate the site each week — pretty much unchanged since 2001 — using FileMaker Pro 5 databases on a Macintosh Classic, exporting the data, and using some Unix scripts to make a HTML file. The workflow is quick (i.e. easy) although it's fairly convoluted.

So I decided the new site would be a weekly blog post with highlights of things-to-do — things I will very likely do (rather than "have a passing interest in doing" as it stands now). If you're only interested in the events lists, you can link straight to the events category and skip all my regular blog posts. The JayceLand home page will now redirect to the normal blog. To keep my sanity, I'm going to stop numbering them — the last numbered update was #705 on July 12, 2012. (And even then: 705 weeks of posting events … enough is enough!)

In addition, I'm dropping most of the internal links. You can Google a band just as well as I can. And I don't think I need to remind everyone the address of the Bug Jar (along with a link to Google Maps.) So it'll all look a lot more vanilla. And be much easier for me which, well, is the whole point.

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Changing to WordPress

I figured I'd try doing some regular blogging instead of the essays I was used to. The idea is to make it easier for me — what usually happens is I get to Wednesday night and start hammering away at trying to write something coherent. I think it might be easier to dump my thoughts into a blog and let the chronology sort it out.

So, at the advice of my friend Mike, I'm trying to use WordPress. Right now I have it set up to just insert blog entries into the old JayceLand page in place of an introductory essay, but I think I'll soon be changing the site over to more of a WordPress-centric design.

The other thing I did was to quit the titles. Now it's just the start-date of the events calendar. When I first started, I was using movie sequel numbers to match the update number, but they petered out around 9 or so. Then there were various common things like 39 being the width of a twin bed in inches. But that soon ran dry as well. Most of the recent titles have been in reference to events that happened that many years ago. But searching for an event, birth, or death that definitively occurred in a particular year before 1550 or so is getting to be a royal pain. So, I figured I'd give up on it.

Basically, this should all be easier for me. For you reading the site, well, I think there may be more blog entries (with categories) and I suppose there's feeds, permalinks, and comments and other such technology. Of course, the titles go the way of the dodo and there will no longer be a proper essay — so no longer neatly joining the events of the past week together.

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