Splitting the Atom December 9, 2019

If there was one word I’d use to describe Nucleus, it’d be “kludge”. It seems like just enough work was put into it to get it functional but not enough to make it pleasant to use. It has a wicked learning curve to administrate, its editor is junk, making themes for it is a pain, really the whole nine yards. And yes, it’s from the early-mid 2000s, and PHP software at the time was abysmally clunky, but Nucleus goes beyond the pale.

I originally chose Nucleus for Letters From Somnolescent out of curiosity and a desire to try something that wasn’t WordPress, and I’m regretting it. borb was having trouble logging in, which I naturally assumed was a password error, but things continued not to work even after I reset it. And then I couldn’t log in. dcb was able to get me back in after I manually edited the database table to give him admin access, but really, the whole thing’s fucked. I have no doubts some part of it’s susceptible to XSS and the spam problem is bothersome anyway.

I’ve been staring at phpMyAdmin for the better part of three hours, transferring posts, comments, and metadata to a new WordPress install that’ll become the new CMS powering Letters. This has been a long time coming, and I initially meant to hold off until the new year, but it’s happening now instead. Can’t have login errors during the festivities.

In all honesty, transferring posts is the easy bit. Converting the theme’s gonna be way more fucking annoying, but it means I’ll be able to tune the blog up with proper pagination (which it doesn’t have at current) and make sure it’s all ready to go for the rest of the month’s barrage of sappy retrospective posts. Still, wasn’t expecting it. Thanks, Nucleus.

I also spent part of today fucking around with ostrich tuning (where every string is tuned to the same note, in my case D) and reverse delay using an open mic and GarageBand. I need a proper direct input cable for my guitar to really get it working like I want it to, but using Soundflower as an intermediary between GarageBand (which wets and monitors the guitar sound) and QuickTime Player (which records the guitar sound) worked rather nicely. Now if only I could play the damned thing.

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