The Adventures of Joshua Judson Rosen
(action man)

[ sections: VisualIDs | art | movies | everything ]


Thu, 22 May 2008
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21:45: Turing Tar Pits.

I dug up both major incarnations of my web-site from when I was in high school & they're both... much more interesting than what I currently have; & even on an absolute scale, still intriguing.

I had image-galleries with links to source-code for the POV-generated ones, poetry-compilations, extravagant CSS styling everywhere, including on every poem like Blake would have done.

But what blows my mind, now, are the parts that are the same--

  • the menu-system that was manually replicated through every page--no CGI or SSI or anything.

  • the multipage galleries with every page generated by hand. & cross-page consistency checkd by flipping back & forth between buffers in Emacs.

The weblog maintained manually as one big HTML file is particularly interesting--with a comment-form that would e-mail comments to me so that I could moderate & hand-integrate them.

I wouldn't even think of doing that kind of manual labour, these days--which could be good, but /isn't/ when the result is being stuck in the turing tar pit where, if something cant be automated, it sn't worth doing--where the primary task is the automation & the task being automated is of only secondary import.

What am I to do, now?

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