There have been some changes, gradual and immediate both, here at Industrie Toulouse. There is a new chain of entries that are more prosaic in nature than the technical and political posts of the past. That's not to say that that the technical/political will stop, but there are better pens and voices than mine and I want neither to just regurgitate links nor to go off on half cocked rants {if for no other reason than that is usually much better to go off whole cocked, according to A Bit Of Fry And Laurie}. Further, while I am having fun at work, there's barely enough time to actual work on the technical bits, let alone write about them.
The graphic design of the site has been updated to reflect this prosaic nature. It also allows individual entries to render nicely as full pages in news readers like NetNewsWire. Fonts are larger and darker. There's a new category dedicated to the new writings. But there's a fairly big part of me wanting more.
I'm very curious about The FTrain SiteKit, an XML and XSLT 2.0 based engine that runs not only the beautiful FTrain.com, but Harpers.org. Paul Ford, who writes the software and works on both sites, has a nice write up about the new site for Harper's Magazine. Ford shows great interest in the so-called semantic web, and admits
Because every boy needs a hobby, I created the Ftrain Sitekit to explore the ways narrative structures and graph data structures overlap. I have an incomplete theoretical understanding of both narrative and graph theory, and the code and prose both show this. I write and program to learn--to do new things with stories, or do old things with stories in interesting ways. As a result of all that, this is not an easy system to work with unless you are willing to spend some time.
Ahh, time. The old culprit. But I, myself, am very interested. The interest is not great enough at this point to set aside time for it, but perhaps when summer lands. Still, the Ftrain Sitekit has some interesting ideas behind it. Importantly, the web sites I've seen made with it so far (all two of them) have been rather beautiful {although I have to admit that sometimes Harpers.org feels a bit cramped}. There is great Wiki-like interlinking (see the pages on John Ashcroft and Andy Warhol for example), without the maddening styles of WiKicAPitaLizaTion or the din of unedited madness. Combined with good editorial control, a strong structure builds itself.
With the completion of two environmental engineering albums, such as Laa 3, Apt., as well as the more engineered bits of the Redbox, I find myself fascinated again by the power of sound, word, etc. To have a place to write it all, trace it all, and follow it all, back to what I started doing back in 1994 and why. The recordings tell their part of the story, and in many ways that should be enough, but the other layers are already getting lost to the land of myth and fable.
As I look towards the future of euc.cx, and even the future of Perfect and Unbelievable Hearsay, I want to keep the Ftrain Sitekit in mind. Euc.cx has been easy enough to maintain statically, for now, but as the Eucci Group grows this year as I expect it will, it may need to step into something larger soon. And I'd prefer to spend more time playing with those ideas than playing with the ideas that may allow those ideas to be played with.