confessions of a project junkie

…in which I admit to beating around the bush.

To the end, I will insist all this hemming and hawing may lead to meaningful accomplishment.

Over the course of two weekends, I’ve managed to hammer the wikiGong site into a slightly more approachable—or at least more familiar?—form. A few things are starting to work as intended. I’ve resisted the urge to reinvent the wheel (in the interest of full understanding) and just re-used some stuff (in the interest of progress) and now stand on the shoulders of giants.

Praise is due:

• Sam Wilson, for the WordPress TwentyTen port to MediaWiki.
• Pavel Soukenik, for the Degradable HTML5 audio and video Plugin.
• Matthias Korn, for the MediaWiki FlashMP3 extension.

  [Archived as of 2023-12-14. Ding, dong, Flash is dead..]

• 1pixelout for the original WordPress audio plug-ins.

  [Link removed. As of 2023-12-14 www.1pixelout.net/ is for sale…]

Deciding to trust—or just co-opt—what’s been done before means moving faster, and hopefully getting closer to the goal: a world-wide web instrument. We’ve now got some capabilities on the site that we envisioned originally but had no clue how to do:

• Uploading audio media (MP3) directly to the wiki pages. We still prefer the ccHost approach for its ease of use and trackback capabilities, but not everyone might….
• Familiar audio player wigets that minimize dependencies on local applications. Take a look at the latest Golden Gate Bridge assay for an example.
• Multiple player instances on a wiki page. It’s now pretty easy to forge an “instrument” from the sound files available on—or off!—the site by re-using the audio player snippets!

In the process of putting this new thing together, I’ve also decided it’s time to revise a few personal editorial policies. I’ll stop using the “Royal We” in posts unless it’s in reference to actual policy. We’ll capitalize headings like normal people do, except maybe in the gongBlog titles where we’d need to edit past entries.

And now that June approaches, it’s time to get back to composing. SoundWalk 2011 is coming up. Time to wrap up the overhaul and shift gears again. The Sounds page will take a while to bring into line, but that’s still where the most dynamic content is so please bear with the occasional stylistic frisson.
[Update 2020-04-23: Link to Sounds has been removed as our ccHost space is being retired.]