I rebuilt the site.

Again.

This is not an April Fools joke. I simply got tired of looking at the old layout, got tired of some of the broken assumptions in the header logic, and got tired of the site feeling more cluttered than the writing on it.

I have a new diagnosis: Congenital Myasthenic Syndrome.

If you've never dealt with a rare disease workup, the basic shape is this:

You do not usually begin with the answer.

You begin with whatever part of the problem is loudest, or most measurable, or most dangerous that year.

Then you accumulate tests, labels, specialists, medications, partial explanations and an increasingly baroque understanding of your own body until eventually some poor doctor or genetic report stumbles into the piece that makes the prior decade read like a coherent paragraph instead of a filing cabinet that was dropped down some stairs.

Mixbus 7 is out and I'll be exploring the new feature(s) in the next 4 posts.

I've heard that Mixbus 7 might have better latency, so let's start it off with the elephant in the room: Mixbus latency.

Other parts in this series:

Time for some site updates!

I wanted to add more "Site Features" (static pages that are constantly updated) and I was running out of room in the nav. I also frequently receive complaints about how textually busy the site update is. I've aimed to improve both of these problems with this update.

• Removed Google Analytics
  • The only remaining external javascript dependency is disqus... that will be the next target.
• New site layout!
  • Site Nav - I found the site nav difficult to use.
    • Increased size of elements
    • Increased size of header
    • Removed busy recent/tag sidebars(!) - It is an extra click, but I've never felt that they present the information well.
    • Added simple left-nav
      • It sucked when I made it.
      • Wife helped me make it not suck.
    • Move tags year/type widget
  • Post Layout
    • Adjusted header spacings.
    • Allowed header to gracefully fail on different viewport sizes
    • Remove section hierarchy in posts
    • Add dynamic in-page breadcrumbs
      • On desktop as you scroll, the current header and sub-headers attache to the top of the screen to display your reading position in the outline.
      • This breaks all of the interviews pages. I'm aware. I don't have a fix yet.
  • Pagination is back.
    • I set it to paginate in 20... but it's only showing 10. I'm skeptical. Please let me know if it's broken :)
  • Each post has a previous/next post button at the botton now.
  • Themes
    • New Theme Color - Dark Green!
    • Updated theme pickers with indicator
    • Yellow theme is now darker
    • Theme color boxes are a bit more desaturated and more accurate.
  • Cleanup
    • Fixed a number of tags
    • Fixed all sorts of weird stuff I missed
      • My wife found them, thank you.
• New feature!
  • Health - I get a few e-mails a week about my health, so I thought I'd put up a full page about it. My hope is that this disclosure will help other people with similar problems navigate their options and know they are not alone.
• Updated About page
• Updated Favourites - specifically the EDC section (and some other minor updates)
• Added "Last Updated" to all static pages.

In the last post I changed what hotkeys mean in the context of mouse modifiers.

Now I need to think about what they mean in the context of hotkeys.

Currently using REAPER 6.18

More REAPER setting changes! Maybe one day I'll get around to using the thing :)

Currently using REAPER 6.18

Today I'll be going over a basic design or plan for audio editing layout, taking inventory of the available commands and thinking of a hotkey scheme.

Currently using REAPER 6.18

In this post I'll be taking inventory of the available functionality for implementing my proposed MIDI editing system in REAPER.

I temporarily installed SWS extensions to see if it was valuable to use them at this stage, and it is not.

Currently using REAPER 6.16

Short post today to design the MIDI Editor interactions to my liking.

This is all text, and ideas for my interaction with the MIDI editor on a fairly basic level. I'm posting this to get feedback and let myself sit on it before I start changing a bunch of actions.

Currently using REAPER 6.16

Let's hop straight again to Day 5 with some GUI tweaks, meta discussion and some more settings to change.

Rant Warning - wall of text ahead (then some REAPER things).

Currently using REAPER 6.16

You might be aware that I 'was' a big fan of REAPER, and I amassed a somewhat ridiculous configuration which I'm not even particularly happy with anyway!

REAPER 6 came out and I thought it was a disaster, largely the GUI. I was annoyed with REAPER at this point because of my (over?)use of scripts and their instability. Perfect storm of reasons to move on.

I stopped using REAPER. I've been happily using Studio One 5 and Cubase 10/11, with Logic Pro X for any video production (nice integration with FCPX).

I've been doing my "30 days" in private. Various self-improvement tasks, depriving myself of things that I think I rely on, 30 days of playing a single instrument, etc... I think it's about time to do another 30 days here with my readers.

Here we are: 30 days of Starting over with REAPER.

Next up in the latency/jitter testing is Studio One!

If you don't understand what this is, please read the introduction post (This article is being updated if/when changes are made!).

Other parts in this series: