I totally rebuilt my server from scratch. Apparently it works ok if you’re reading this! Got that shiny green lock in the address bar on Chrome that gives you that warm, safe feeling. Anyway, along the way, I was reviewing the recording and release dates of my albums and a pattern emerged that I never noticed before: I tend to record in the spring, and do intensive backend stuff on the site in the fall. It’s happening right now!
The broadcast has been so fucked up so often in the last year, that’s why the rebuild. I’d think that would be a spring activity, wouldn’t you? Y’know, new beginnings, fresh starts? Spring cleaning? And I’d think the sowing of the seeds of new work would be a spring thing, and the reaping those fruits into a cornucopia of recording would be a fall activity.
Well, this is how it seems to go with me, and I get manic in the fall (before I get depressed around Xmas). It’s never just “oh I’ll make sure the microdata and schema and whatnot is good” – it might start that way, but every time it turns into weeks and weeks of work. I see a function that could be more efficient, or I finally can’t take that one slightly misaligned button anymore. Then I need to rethink that whole page.
Then I see the whole site in a bigger way.
Next thing you know I’ve turned an already jury-rigged situation into a full on Rube Goldberg arrangement. “OOO! I could read the rtmp publishing state, pass that to the page dynamically so it reloads the page, and THAT could turn the chat function on…”
I know I’m rambling. It’s how I get when I’m in this zone. Like I’m using so many such distinct parts of my brain at once that my ability to grasp the communicable whole is impaired.
I guess what I really wanted to tell you is that, although I get a rather sick OCD pleasure from this kind of work, I really do it for you. I want you to want to visit the blog here and read my lyrics and tune into the broadcast, and I want you to have the best experience when you do, and I want to include as many people as possible.
So I squeeze a Facebook share button in there and make the live chat easier to find and rework the streaming server logic so the live stream loads faster and the archived video is seekable…
If this work, by some miracle, doesn’t create more work – that is, if I get it RIGHT – I’m gonna conduct an experiment starting with chaining myself to the piano. Whattya think might happen if I forced myself to write and/or record in the fall?