Some things have changed since I posted Part 1 so many months ago.
I wrote:
I’m still not sure if using Paragraphs the way I did is ideal. While it does make metadata Views-friendly, the fact that metadata labels are stored as text fields isn’t as slick as I’d like it to be. That’s also why I haven’t spent too much time refining the display of metadata.
I since then decided that storing image metadata as paragraphs wasn’t cutting it. Paragraphs made filtering and sorting my views too complex, and although the data structure was slicker it wasn’t worth the performance loss. …
After years of planning and development, a working media album that replaces my need for Flickr
About three years ago I had the idea to build a replacement for Flickr. The main reason was that I wanted a place to store videos, mostly (as I was and still am in the process of digitizing old VHS home videos, which of course will never end), from which I could also easily share them. And while I was at it, I might as well just use that place to store my photos too, and consolidate all my sharing needs.
Over a year later, after a couple of failed attempts at using different prepackaged platforms, I started building it as my first real Drupal 8 project. …
Thoughts on the relationship between semiotics and design.
I posted this piece originally on The Pastry Box Project on Sept. 29, 2014. It’s a good time for a rerun.
Recently I was reading someone’s bio on the web, and it said he studied “semiotics” in college. Like that, with scare quotes, as if it weren’t really a thing, followed by an apologetic statement about all the real, productive stuff he’s been doing since.
I would have found it mildly offensive, had it been the first time I noticed something like that. Apologizing and keeping the distance from one’s past as a student or a scholar of semiotics is a recurring theme, particularly in Italy, where the subject has been central in the education of communications majors for the past twenty years, and of film and theater majors for the past forty. …
The pain and pleasure of leaving Facebook
This post appeared on March 31, 2015 on The Pastry Box Project.
A couple of months ago I decided to quit Facebook once and for all, and stop considering it an inevitability of my digital identity. Its business strategy had always creeped me out, even before the advent of frictionless sharing, which is something bad labeled as something good. …
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