I registered Szapp.Com a long time ago, intending to use it for what I have no recollection. It seemed like a snappy URL, and surprisingly available for such a short word. The word Szapp appears to mean something to some people on earth. It is an uncommon surname.
Whatever its meaning I was not using the domain name for anything else, so I decided to set Szapp.Com as the primary domain for an arduously recalcitrant installation of WordPress Multisite (WPMS). The official documentation for WPMS is pell mell at best, with the most current information lurking in the sprawling bowels of disparate comment boards and in this individual’s ability to figure out what well-meaning commenters meant to say, or how their comments should read now since the software under discussion had been updated several times since they posted.
An interesting (and somewhat contemptible) element of that singular use of a search engine to look up a word is that I did not actually access a content web site to get the information. I am certain this happens far more often than people realize. The information I needed was contained in the brief snippets that follow web page titles. That is just one example of how search engines actually take traffic away from content web sites.
Initially I thought I would just leave the Szapp.Com site idle, with a map of the neighborhood where I once lived in upper Manhattan. But in the spirit of Szapp being at the center of WPMS I think I’ll use it for shop talk (Szapp, I hereby decree, is pronounced “shop”.)
If I stubbornly avoided WordPress (and its multisite functionality in particular) then I think it was for good reason. Movable Type (MT), that beleaguered and largely abandoned content management system (CMS) sports a multisite setup that is far more elegant than WP, and which publishes pages as safe and secure flat HTML documents. I also found MT’s templating language and custom fields interface to be head and shoulders superior to WP. Alas, for all its benefits I had to move on, though not without chagrin.
Szapp, then, is my sandbox of sorts. Here is where I play with every gadget in the toolbox, every plugin that fits the socket, and where I muse upon the industry exerted by myself in the process. This may or may not stop me from screaming at the computer as much as I sometimes do. It might even exacerbate that particular character flaw. My expectation is that writing about the ways I waste and do not waste my time at this stuff will cool my mind, and perhaps give me a sense that I actually know what I am doing sometimes. I was not born with a computer at my hip, and I’ve never taken a single course or even a seminar in programming or web development. I was trained as a classical pianist, a fact which I firmly believe explains my ability to pick up computer programming and code with relative ease. Musical notation is a form of code, perhaps the most sophisticated and universal system of code ever developed, and I believe my training in counterpoint and polyphony primed my mental facilities to learn other forms of code. If you can read something like this as if it is English then I think you can learn computer code, and probably a foreign language as well:
Alkan Concerto for Solo Piano
The above photo of a page from Charles Alkan’s “Concerto For Solo Piano” was taken with a Galaxy Note 10.1, then needlessly filtered through Perfect Effects 8 using its “Chrome” filter with all defaults. Photoshop’s Smart Sharpen finished the perfectly gratuitous beautification of an image that needed no such attention. I’ve been re-visiting Alkan’s mighty “Concerto” this week as a morbid curiosity. There is a lot of violence in that music.
Everything here is a work in progress. Essays and comments might change. All posts end with a map of a random location on our earth, using the OpenStreetMap Plugin. This map shows Heard Island and the McDonald Islands.
