Tag: site news (page 2 of 3)

Clearing out the linkrot

It stands to reason that a medium as subject to change as the Internet will, over time, exhibit signs of decay.

In the case of a website that amalgamates posts from at least five other sites, and which has been online in one form or another since 2001, this decay manifests itself via linkrot, defined as ‘the process by which hyperlinks on individual websites or the Internet in general tend to point to web pages, servers or other resources that have become permanently unavailable.’

In other words, I’ve spent the past day or three checking, repairing and/or deleting broken links on this site.

The whole exercise makes me feel cleansed, as if I’ve dropped an HTML bath bomb into a gigantic pool of code.

Let’s see how long that feeling lasts.

New site theme: Editor

No-one can read this post, or indeed the rest of this website, at the moment, but that’s because I’ve done some rearranging of the site and its contents.

First off, I’ve disabled WordPress Multisite (which had allowed me to host three blogs on the current domain) and merged and reposted most of the content which was replicated across the main, DDN Books and DNRC Records sites.

I’ve also, therefore, republished virtually everything that was previously in draft form. There’s obviously much more work to be done cleaning up old posts (as ever) but posting everything makes it much easier to spot the posts that still contain old shortcodes or HTML formatting.

Second, I’ve installed MediaWiki and have managed to get the [d/dn] wiki up and running. Much more on this exciting development shortly.

Third, to celebrate, I’ve switched over to the wonderful Editor WordPress theme … now, to write a new post or two.

Tabula rasa

Hello, world—it’s Davey here.

It’s been a while. In fact, it’s been a very long time, indeed. But, you know how it goes: things got boring; I changed; you changed; we moved apart. Maybe we were missing that frisson that made this whole caper so untold to start with. Well, it’s time to end all that.

A screenshot of the DDN website as it looked on 14 August 2014.

Time for a fresh start. After 12 years, 1200 blog posts, countless bios and ‘about’ pages, hundreds of thousands of words, scores of categories, 850 real comments and billions of spam comments, and hundreds of images, links and in-jokes, this site has become not so much a yoke around my neck as a huge albatross dragging me further and further into the realms of dark space.

So that’s why I’ve decided to unpublish all of my posts, and start again. This doesn’t mean that the posts have actually been ‘disappeared’ but that, for the moment, they’ve been carted off to another dimension, awaiting further instructions. I’ve got big plans for these posts—more on that soon, hopefully. For now, it’s time to revel in the mystical ‘hello, world!’ moment that comes with one’s (new) first post.

Tabula rasa.

Update (31 August 2014): Yeah, well … that seemed like a good idea at the time. All systems back to normal.