The digital world which I’m responsible for is all becoming a little bit of a mess. I’m largely responsible for mtheory, iancumberland, fog and my own personal website which can be found on dot mac, mtheory and this blog. My personal stuff is getting uncontrollably spread out. Three different locations on dot mac, pre iWeb, iWeb and post iWeb, then mtheory attempts to mirror dot mac but isn’t up to date… and now I’ve this blog. Clearly I need to do some consolidation. The pre iWeb can probably just be killed off.. then I need to do something about the rest. Making decisions about that is hard.Â
To add to my woes, iancumberland needs updating and the easiest thing to do in the long term is make it maintainable by Ian, a rather large chunk of work I fear. Fog is in the best state being the most recently written, though it is hacked together from an older code base and due to limitations in college I don’t have any control on the server side. In fact I’m not even sure what services are available. Clearly in the future this is going to be a bit of a nightmare. However I’ve done a lot to update the code and pull it into the College’s redesign. The problem of what to do next almost certainly won’t be mine. On the upside though the site is cleanly under version control which is nice and all the nasty html hacks have been removed and replaced with much cleaner CSS (bar those in the College’s template system which is a mess and they paid a lot for that).
mtheory on the other hand is the single biggest mess, a hack of php, html and open source tools such as WordPress, Mediawiki, Roundcube, Squirrel Mail to name a few. All disconnected from each other and the odd hangover from the last version which hasn’t been taken care off make it a visual and maintenance nightmare. The to-do list is long and I’ve no time to start it. Plus one or two bits are broken and currently hiding. Add in the fact that I’ve never really got around to doing what I intended to do with mtheory and it can be summed up as a shambles albeit one that at least works for its users.
Finally there was evil elvis which has been parked up for some time now, and a push to get another added to my rotation. The latter is simply an impossibility. The reality is that with my work commitments it takes me 6-9 months to role out any sort of website or major revision. Thus the mess is clearly going to continue unless I get seriously ruthless at some point soon.