It has been a rough week around here, at Scriabin.com, the Etude Magazine web site, and my other sites at Sorabji.com and other places. A hard drive failure wiped out millions of pages, and recovery has been incredibly tedious. Most content survives but re-assembling a lot of it into web site form has, in some cases, proven too time-consuming for me. I manage and create content for a lot of web sites, all of them run by myself on dedicated web servers, so when a server goes bust it results in a lot of work for me. I am very happy to have restored the Etude Magazine covers gallery, not only recovering the previous content of that site but also adding about 70 new covers from a shipment of about 150 magazines sent to me by a very generous individual who found this site and contacted me a few months ago to see if I was interested in acquiring copies from a collection gifted to him. At the moment I must continue to re-assemble the inner workings of this site and some others before fully getting back to content-production, but I see where this will happen soon.
Recently in Shop Talk Category
I know Movable Type's templating systems better than the spartan appearance of this web site might indicate. As I move forward with the Etude site, though, I find that when I consider customizing the templates and the publishing settings I decide it is more valuable to just post more content. I can re-design and re-arrange later, though the fundamentals of the site structure are fine by me. Still, I spent the morning devising "featured" content modules and highlights to sit atop the top page, and perhaps replace it. The content is posted in more or less random order. I do not specifically choose content starting from the earliest issues and moving on chronologically. Last week, for instance, I got a request from an Australian music scholar for a specific story from an Etude issue that I had not even scanned yet. In the spirit of helping a fellow music scholar I scanned the requested story and posted it with no regard to any sequence of events. One of the early discoveries I made about Movable Type was that it allowed to me to post-date content to its originally published date but also to sort that content by the order in which I posted it. I imagine other CMSes do this as well but I was surprised at how the vBulletin CMS, for instance, would not even allow me to post date content to pre-1900. It allowed me to create categories any which way I wanted, so I could assign stories from the April, 1898, issue to the 1898 > April category, but to me that was not in the spirit of things to turn a publication date into a category. I guess it goes back to my corporate days of setting up directory structures for news sites, structures which virtually always incorporated a date-based structure at some part of the address.
If content posting from The Etude seems to have stagnated here it is not for lack of activity behind the scenes. I have been exploring other Content Management Systems for the Etude project, as alternatives to my tried-and-true Movable Type, but I find the results of these experiments to be inconclusive. I was inspired to explore other solutions after blindly spending a lot of money on vBulletin Gold, which takes the vBulletin Message board and adds CMS and Blogging applications on top. The serviceable-if-benign blogging app is not new to vBulletin but the CMS is new as of late last year. vBulletin's message board is about as good as it gets in modern day commercial products of its kind. Its main competitor is probably Invision Power Board, which has also been around a long time and which I have used in a very limited capacity. On balance I find that the two products' strengths and weaknesses offset each other, and that they are basically equals.
If vBulletin's message board app is a leader in its realm then the Content Management System is not. How this product was released under the name of "Gold" baffles me, and bafflement reflux-redux arises from the fact that the vBulletin CMS was released at all when any number of freeware competitors are far more stable and easily superior to this pre-alpha prototype. The vBulletin CMS suite has every bug in the jungle flying out of it, it ships with essentially zero documentation, and if development continues at the rate it seems to have progressed up until now then the vBulletin CMS will not be competitive with freeware products until at least 2014. 9 months after its release I can find not a single web site on this great Internet that uses the vBulletin CMS in a substantive way, not even vBulletin itself. And yet I find myself attracted to the vBulletin CMS. The heirarchy of sections and categories makes great sense for a magazine project like The Etude in which each issue has content within common categories. I populated sections with year and month and under each monthly issue I filled in content from the various categories common to the magazine: World of Music, Questions and Answers, Interviews, etc. It made sense! This straightforward heirarchy makes more sense to me than Joomla's file-cabinet system which (for now) lacks sub-categories and sub-sections. The beta version of Joomla supports some sort of sub-category arrangement but I doubt it will make sense for this project. Movable Type, for its slow-poke 2002-vintage clumsiness, is on target with allowing the sections and file system to be set up any way you want. My long-time use of and familiarity with Movable Type makes it hard for me not to favor, especially after mastering a heretoforeunimaginable MT>G2 connection!
I have lurched around numerous other CMSes, but there is no need (save for buzzword compliance) to name them all at this point.
On the other hand I find myself thinking, why don't I just use them all? I could use one CMS to share content from the World of Music sections of The Etude, another to share substantive interviews and musicological content, and another for teaching-related content. When I had this eureka moment I snapped up some surprisingly-available domain names with the intent of housing selected categories of content from these magazines on each site. Of course, this stroke of genius failed to account for the exponential increase in the amount of work involved, with untold expenses of time spent learning the idiosyncracies of these various CMSes.
So, I don't kow where to go next with this, but I might just stick with Movable Type for now while exploring other CMSes and populating them with Etude Magazine content.
For me, at least... Or maybe not at all. The 100th entry posted to The Etude Magazine section just went up: Musical Items from January, 1906. I have an abiding interest in these lists of ephemera from the world of music. I love these lists for their potential to raise obscurities from their shelter. I have cleaned up my scanning and OCR-processing a lot since I started this project, with the biggest leap coming from the purchase of ABBYY's Finereader software. Some of the stories scanned earlier contain obvious errors, but the editing process has been considerably improved since moving to Finereader. If I had any product suggestions for Finereader it would be for a more elegant dual-monitor arrangement. As it is, to take advantage of my 2-monitor setup, I need to spread the aplication across the screens, and this is pretty janky. A split screen or floating screen arrangement, with the scanned pages on the left and the text on the right, might be more usable. As it is, though, I find myself using Word independent of Finereader's text editing screens -- this is because Finereader seems able to use the MS Word custom dictionary but Finereader does not seem to sync with it. Meaning, if I tell Finereader to add a word to the dictionary it does so, but evidently it adds it to a Finereader dictionary? Maybe I am missing something but the words that I "Add to dictionary" in Finereader are still underlined as misspelled in Word. So the use of the MS Word Custom dictionary in Finereader is only partly useful. As for the dual monitor and other vagaries, I, for one, need to increase the page sizes to 500% to make them adequately readable, and this causes troubles in jumping around when I scroll one window. In fact, the mousewheel seems to be a pest to Finereader. In some contexts simply touching it causes the focus to jump from the bottom of a page to the top of the previous page, which can be incredibly aggravating. Maybe the fact that I have the zoom set to 500% is to blame. Whatever the case, I can't complain. Like any piece of software I learn to work with its idiosyncracies. It's all good, though, and the process is not so important as the content, which brings new satisfaction to me with every story posted. I have mixed feelings about leaving typographical errors as they appear in the magazine. I have taken to adding the customary (sic) after an obvious typo, but is not the point of digitizing old text at least partly to make it fluid again, and to take control of it in the digital way? It's as if leaving typos in these old stories is poking fun at the old editors and the old way of copy-editing, where typos were like blemishes. Typos today are easily fixed, and the once expensive infrastructure behind proofreading and editing copy is largely vacated. For now I shall leave the typos, but I might change direction with this later.
After a few false starts I am up and running with a copy of FineReader Pro 10, which I am using to scan full issues of The Etude Music Magazine and convert them to text. FineReader is by far the best OCR software I have yet used, though my experience is relatively limited. Until now I had mostly used the built-in OCR funcitonality of Windows Scanning software, a program of limited functionality which nevertheless fit the bill for my initial plan: to scan an article or two a week and convert them to text. The more I did this, though, the more interesting it became to me, and I realized that if I am going to do this at all I might as well pull out the stops and do it the best I can.
My plan remains essentially the same: to scan and share content related to piano music, pianists, composers, and the general world of music, including commentary and extra links to try and bring this 100+ year old content up to date. I maintain an abiding interest in the more ephemeral portions of content from these magazines, including the various departments of short items which I group under the "World of Music." I do not expect to make complete issues of The Etude available at this time but nothing should stop me from doing so, and I have changed my mind about this project several times already. I do not expect to make the section of sheet music available at this time. The reason for this is that I simply do not find that material to be very interesting, and I shall save myself the time of scanning it.
This is a personal endeavor I have desired to do for years now, as my large collection of Etude Magazines has moldered away on my shelves. This week I took an additional measure of buying plastic polybags for storage of the magazines, because I find that the more I handle some of these magazines the more rapidly they fall to shreds, and falling-out pages and such make shelving in my available space hazardous to the integrity of the magazines.
Paul Harvey used to have a segment of his radio show called "Shop Talk" in which he talked about the radio and broadcasting business in which he spent most of his life. I am no Paul Harvey but I shall try the Shop Talk thing, since it seems to be on my mind so much while building this new web site.
I use Movable Type for text content, with Gallery2 for photo galleries like the Etude Cover Magazines and Old Advertisements. I've used Gallery2 for years now and will likely skip the impending update to Gallery3, this out of no distaste for the new product (I have not even seen it) but out of a reliance on some features that will be stripped away from Gallery2 in the new release. Specifically, item-level permissions, a feature which has evidently contributed mightily to the complexity of the underlying database structure but which I find very useful. I also have done pretty extensive hack work and code jujitsu with the Gallery2 templating that I would not care to re-create in a new, presumably more simplified environment. I have other reasons too boring to recount for sticking with G2 for now.
For general CMS (Content Management Systems) stuff on Scriabin.com I stick with an old favorite in Movable Type. I know that some regard Wordpress as superior, and I do not deny WP's advantages for straight-up personal writing sites. But the extended templating options in MT remain useful to me for plugging content into other CMSes and softwares. On Sorabji.com I have a section which updates automatically across 3 sites without crons and plugins, I just have a template which generates a Perl library that plugs into my DICT server, and another template which fills in a .mobi version of things. Some of this can be accomplished in WP with .htaccess and httpd configs -- I am well aware of this because I do these tricks myself in other contexts where I use WP -- but for my sensibilities of site management I prefer static files and MT's templating extensibility, as well as MT's relatively infrequent upgrades. I also like MT because my initials are MT. Hah...
An early challenge with this site, then, was to combine content from MT and Gallery2. There is no specific bridge to connect the two (and without comments and logins on the CMS side it seems unnecessary to inject whatever complexities would arise from combining the two). Specifically, when I make certain content from an issue of The Etude available it seemed to make sense to link to that content from the corresponding cover image of that issue (assuming it's available) and vice-versa. With consistent file-naming and such it was easy enough to tell MT to fill in a txt file with a list of stories from the month, name the file in a format that matches the Gallery2 file-naming system, then tell Gallery2 to look for a file that matches the base filename of the cover image. Maybe that sounds simpler to me than to others but it took just a few minutes of re-purposing an MT monthly archive template, generating a set of txt includes, then telling Gallery2 to look for these files in the individual cover pages. So while this page might look natural enough in substance I had some fun making it possible by juggling the templating languages with which I am so familiar to form a pretty stable link between Gallery2 and Movable Type:
January, 1905 Edition of The Etude (Chopin Number)
Going forward my intent is to make the site look less like a turn-key Movable Type design and more like something I would do. I am not a graphic designer by any estimate nor do I have the funds to hire one, but I think I can craft a look that expresses the character of these old magazines and their content. At present the site looks brittle, and while others are prone to complain about the relative dearth of freely available Movable Type templates compared to other free CMS platforms I find that the starter templates are perfectly adequate for letting me focus on content first, and style later.
