Expanding scope
Bringing more data and functionality into the mix
In my previous post, I mentioned Tinnitus Tracker, my standalone concert diary site which can be browsed by genre, artist, venue, city, state, and year. I had been planning to continue updating that site concurrently with V7, but it recently occurred to me that it makes a lot more sense to just consolidate the two sites, which in hindsight seems incredibly obvious.
For one thing, I’ve never been satisfied with the Tinnitus Tracker design, and redesigning one site is a lot less work than redesigning two.
But even better, bringing Tinnitus Tracker’s rich metadata and browsing functionality over to V7 opens up a delicious taxonomical can of worms. Once I started thinking about being able to browse V7 by a huge list of musicians, I realized I can expand that list to include artists, filmmakers, authors, speakers, and others whose work I’ve encountered. And before I knew it, a number of data sources I hadn’t even considered before were suddenly making their way into the V7 pipeline:
- Letterboxd: Putting my film diary on V7 has always been part of the plan, but adding directors to those entries adds a whole new dimension.
- Air guitar: My alter ego has participated in dozens of air guitar competitions with hundreds of other air guitarists.
- Conferences: My archived Lanyrd profile and the Wayback Machine have helped me reconstruct most of the the details—dates, locations, speakers—of most of the conferences I’ve attended since 2005.
- Film festivals: I’ve been going to an animation festival on and off since the late ’90s, and since I started documenting it extensively in 2017, I’ve reviewed the work of hundreds of animators.
- Goodreads: I’m not as avid a reader as I’d like to be, and I never used Goodreads religiously, but I’ve logged and rated a few dozen books there, so why not bring them home?
- iTunes: I want to get back in the habit of using my site to note new additions to my music library, and I was positively giddy when I realized it could also be done retroactively, since my iTunes metadata includes timestamps for all additions going back nearly 20 years.
So yeah, this site is turning into an even bigger monster, but I’m feeling good about it, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that I might never have gone quite so overboard if the brilliant Phil Gyford hadn’t done it first.