Site/life update: New directions …

The older I get, the more sporadic these site updates become.

My single reader will be relieved to know that this time around I’m not announcing a brand new WordPress theme. Although I admit that I recently began looking at alternatives to WordPress, including GitHub, before concluding that such an exercise would constitute an even bigger time suck than WP is.

What I have done, however, is rejig the front page of this site to more closely resemble an author home page. The only problem being that the last time I actually did anything vaguely author-like was around 10 years ago now.

You’ll also see two new links in the top navigation: the first to a brand new [d/dn] wiki and the second to the new Davey Dreamnation Substack.

So, you see, while I was not lying when I said I’ve added a new theme to this site, I’ve technically created two completely new sites instead.

I actually created the [d/dn] wiki back in 2019, after discovering a way to install wikis via CPanel. However, I had very little idea about how a wiki works and soon lost interest in the whole project (sound familiar?).

About two years later I realised that I’d left unchecked the option for users to create their own accounts, thus ending up with thousands of new users (who then gleefully deleted each others’ spam texts on the wiki main page). Rather than delete all the database rows, I nuked the entire wiki.

This time, I’ve made it impossible for new users to register themselves, and copied over the content from the old wiki, which is basically a new way of telling the Davey Dreamnation origin story.

The advantage of a wiki is that it allows me to quickly crosslink pages related to Davey and his pals, the various DNRC artists and their DNRC Records releases, and more overarching narrative pages. Like anything else I’ve ever done, however, it remains a work in progress but I’m hoping to chip away at it over the coming weeks and months.

As for the Substack site, I’ll have much more to say about that soon.

Until then, as Christy Burr would say, “gourd these moments well”.

David Prater
David Prater

David Prater is an Australian-born writer, editor and parent. His interests include mince pies, ice hockey and Joy Division.

View his full biography.

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