Tagged: site

Okay. A lot has happened since I last posted here. I got a degree in computer science, changed careers, become a full-time hexagonal artist. Society has obviously collapsed into a surreal hellscape that would've struck me as beyond parody nine years ago. So it goes. Suffice to say that although I've continued my hexagonal work, I've also clearly drifted away from the Hexnet brand identity, and for various reasons don't think I really want to use it going forward. I keep this site up because I get a lot of feedback from ppl who say they enjoy it, and because it remains, content-wise, my most substantive web presence. Nonetheless, this site sort of gelled at a point in my life and in my personal hexagonal process that I'm clearly never going back to, and is thus now more of an artifact than a living presence.

Good news everyone. The time has come, I believe, to announce the existence of this new and improved HEXNET site. The site has actually been up for several weeks now, and constitutes the third major iteration of Hexnet.org under the neohexagonal regime that began in 2010, replacing last year's tragically doomed Drupal 7 version.

First and foremost, as promised, I have finally moved OFF DRUPAL. Drupal is dead to me now, and shall forever remain so. Let us never discuss it again. Beyond that, the most obvious change, I think, is that the site now looks completely different. The main point I want to make about this is that the new layout is much closer than its predecessor to what I intended when I first started working on the Drupal 7 version last year. The ultimate result of that earlier redesign should be seen in retrospect as having been a tragic aberration. I became fixated with some very flawed ideas vis-a-vis how the UI should work, and pursued them long after it should have been clear that they weren't viable. Even after some much-needed fixes earlier this year, it remained, for me at least, practically unusable. It was a bad layout, I was wrong to make it, and I apologize for having done so. The new layout, conversely, should provide a pleasant and fully responsive experience on a wide variety of clients. I have tested it to my satisfaction on both iOS and Android browsers, and it is even marginally functional on IE 8 (for fuck's sake please stop using IE 8). There are definitely aspects of the design I consider sort of unfinished, and which I will continue working on in the coming weeks and months, but it meets my baseline requirement of presenting the site's content in a readable, navigable format that—hopefully—does not actively annoy the reader, and for this reason alone represents a vast improvement over its predecessor.

We at HEXNET.ORG have been experiencing a rash of weird, bot-like comments on various and sundry posts over the past several days. We're not sure what caused this evil to be unleashed on us, but it's possible Hexagonbot is at least partly responsible, as it seems to have attracted a lot of bot attention on Twitter. Anyway, our previously airtight CAPTCHA has failed us, so until we resolve this, anonymous comments will be moderated. We hope to return to normal as soon as possible, but we simply do not have time to deal with this crap at present.

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” – Hunter S. Thompson

The last components necessary to make this site passably acceptable to me were completed last evening. Thus, as promised, on time and under budget, I hereby declare this site to exist. Several important facts to keep in mind:

First and foremost, the site is of course not really done. Also it still sort of sucks. But it is functional enough that it stands on its own, does not have any overtly malfunctioning content, and generally seems to work pretty well, so rather than delaying any longer I am just going to put it out there. But I expect to be adding many useful and pertinent features and content items in the coming weeks and months. So check back often or something.

I seem to have taken an unintentional hiatus from putting my ass into this project, due largely to the fact that it has of late been too hot to move, think, or do anything at all really. Come hell or high water though, I will "launch" this site by the first of Sextilis, being actually the fifteenth (13th;) anniversary of the launch of my first Hexnet site, back in 1995. That is probably an unnecessarily dramatic theme to tie in with this whole procedure, but it seems silly to allow such an auspicious date to pass unobserved. Also, I really need to get on with this. I mean, I have numerous medium-term goals to tweak the layout—I want to clean up and expand the links section, among other things—but most of that can wait. I am really just trying to wrap up a bit of library content, actually. Which at this point seems fairly silly, since I long ago gave up on my original idea of having some sort of centralized "Hexagonal Manifesto" or what have you, in favor of a more modular if somewhat disjointed collection of one-off content items and such. Anyway, since 1 August falls lamentably on a Sunday this year, which is a terrible day to do anything PR-wise (as is the entire month of August, really), I expect to do some sort of formal what have you by next week some time. Or you know whenever.

That is all. Thank you for your attention