Now with Django!

Please let me know if anything on any of my web sites doesn’t work, or looks bad!

It’s likely there will be problems, because I’ve rebuilt all of the sites using a different technology, Django. Mostly this was forced by the technologies I had been using gradually succumbing to bit rot. However, it also enables some improvements that were previously impractical.

In the Cells of the Eggplant, which had been buried in the depths of Meaningness, now has its own site—the one you are reading now! As I wrote last summer, it needs a different web presentation, because it has a different audience and a different conceptual “shape.”

I’ve based the “look and feel” of metarationality.com on the hypertext book Crafting Interpreters, which Brian Slesinsky recommended as a model (thanks!). It’s a good match for the readership, I think?

Crafting Interpreters has features I didn’t copy, but hope to eventually incorporate here. One is sidenotes (rather than footnotes) on wide-enough screens. This is something I’ve wanted for more than a decade. Some of the weirdness of the look & feel of Meaningness is due to my leaving space for sidenotes, which I never quite got working.

It turns out that web tech makes doing sidenotes right extremely difficult. There is no good solution, currently. Gwern Branwen recently wrote an exhaustive survey of available methods and their different drawbacks, which is fascinating if you are a web typography geek. None look adequate to me, which unfortunately means I may have Javascript in my future.

Other sites

I’ve done a major reorganization of my Buddhist sites. Vividness now has a coherent book structure, where previously it had been forced to act as a blog by the tech it ran on. I also merged two other old sites into it. I’ve written about it over there.

Meaningness and Buddhism for Vampires should appear nearly unchanged—although under the hood, they are completely different. Or, the analogy I used in my email newsletter is a reconstruction project on a historic building where the developers carefully preserve the front three inches of the structure while demolishing the rest and rebuilding from scratch.

Plumbing

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