metarail

[metarail]

The “Porque No Los Dos” approach.  The main index page - a real, itemized index - has a Worlds of the Rail section wherein the things pertaining to that world are dialed in as seen in the second shot.

If this is your first ever visit to the page, you get a sort of conceptual overview of each world.

Then each item in the list links to the location on the world article page where you can find more information on that topic (whether it has its own heading or is embedded within another topic).  The world articles are laid out like I showed you last time, split by topic type so things don’t get muddled.

And, if you’re not looking for a conceptual overview but you don’t know which world article has the topic you’re interested in, the indexy index page has a straight up alphabetical list of cultures and species and I guess cities and things.  Eh?  Eh???

[metarail]

ok, suggestion time. To keep myself organized so far, I've tucked things into the following categories:

Geographic Regions

Geo-Political Regions

Civic Centers

Rail Towns (which are largely city-states)

and,

Cultures

and I've drafted the World pages to fall down through this list in order. As in:

Earth

Geographic Regions

Pacific Ocean

Sahara Desert

Nile Delta

Geo-Political Regions

Japan

Egypt

Civic Centers

Tokyo

Alexandria

City-States

Singapore

Cultures

Japanese

Visual Kei

Singaporeans

Eqyptians

Bedouins

HOWEVER is this pursuit of orderliness too disjointed? Would it be more natural to dial it in like:

Pacific Ocean

Japan

Japanese

Tokyo

Visual Kei

Singapore

Singaporeans

Sahara Desert

Egypt

Egyptians

Nile Delta

Alexandria

Bedouins

even if it means kind of mish-mashing the content type on each level, bouncing between geographic and cultural information? Even if it was written out prose style, these topics still need to be addressed in an orderly fashion - even starting with Tokyo and its cultures and then working out from there in an option, I guess.

If you were on this page just to pick up the one topic and be on your way, I feel like the first option is good enough. But if you were reading the thing top to bottom, probably the second would be better for getting the big picture. I guess the real question is, which scenario is more likely?

[metarail]

Good Morning

So I’m finally getting around to drafting this site in article format (one page per world and probably some miscellany, rather than as a hundreds-page wiki) and while I personally am attuned to endless scrolling, I wonder if this presentation isn’t going to cause data overload and shut down the end user.  Eh.  It’s just a first draft.  I’m sure the whole thing will continue to evolve over time.

[metarail]

not dead just sleeping

[metarail]

Collective Chronology

Shake things up here, how about some creative project thoughts this time?

So let’s agree that most fandoms spawn from stories.  Whether film or text or video game or whatever, generally speaking the core of our shared experience is some sequence of narrative events and its accessories (characters, settings, cultures and the like).

MetaRail, when used as intended, will be a shared experience.  Except its “canon” will be static.  My Meta Prime will be snapshots of people and places and conflicts that are meant to be interpreted and extrapolated into three dimensions by the willing.  Let’s call this frozen moment in time the “Present Day.”

In the long run, then, I would think it would be cool to introduce “Meta Events” that are imagined and agreed upon by the general community.  To piece together a timeline on either side of the “Present Day” that sees empires rise and civilizations fall - to give our shared experience the narrative weight of the passing of time that traditional fandoms naturally enjoy.

The key thing would be that these “Meta Events” would only be as concrete as the Meta Prime originally provided; to be used (or ignored) by each individual as they see fit.

(Similar to Riot’s lore-based seasonal events for League, except with no ulterior motive other than enabling creativity of the masses.)

[metarail]

Don’t worry, guys.  I got this.

[metarail]

back up your junk!

And make sure you do it more than once a year!!!!!!

My data drive appears to be thoroughly boned, but luckily I spent a lot of time on the cloud this last year.  Other than some personal things like tax forms or downloaded receipts, I think the only thing of significance that I’ve lost are the Black Desert character creator files and nearly all my wiki dev progress.  :’)

Pretty much all MetaRail content, images, writing, and - thankfully - even some wiki code is stashed away across a few google accounts, but the loss of the time investment is really the downer.  Onwards and upwards, as always, but truth be told I haven’t felt very emotionally resilient lately.  Wish me luck, eh?

[metarail]

the rail wasn’t built in a day

In the middle of recovering from a BSOD caused by tinkering with eFiction on a locally hosted web server.  I really need to stop running servers on my desktop...

I’ve been shopping around for web hosting platforms, have a pretty narrow list of potential candidates.  I’m hesitant to spring for the upfront costs when I don’t know how much more investigation and setup the technical side of things will require before we can properly move onto the creative side of things that public web hosting will enable.

I’m okay with learning how to manage the databases and the website and the security thereof, but I fear that my becoming proficient in these things will take longer than I really want.  I’m anxious to keep this moving forward.

Do I have any friends or friends of friends who know anything about mySQL or apache or WordPress or eFiction or MediaWiki?  If so, are they willing to help me form a technical team?

[metarail]

Here specifically is 5-6 minutes where I click through some of the wiki pages as if you were naturally using a wiki, stumbling across some code to fix, sneezing, fixing code, and looking at a character design I made in the Black Desert Character Creator.

[metarail]

fake reblob

If you want to see the dev wiki in action!!!!

ayankun

So Firefox crashed and I stopped for the day, but here’s the hour replay with spotty mic audio and rambling step by step instructions on how to use MediaWiki.

https://www.twitch.tv/ayankun/v/50253966

[metarail]

Had a busy IRL week, but we’re still chugging along.  :3

I counted the Species pages as “alpha” ‘cause there was actually a lot of information to transfer from the sheets to the wiki.  Enough to get a person started, anyway.

The yellow cells are page types I haven’t made templates for yet.  Building page shells is astoundingly easy once I have templates to plug-n-play. 

Filling them in later with useful info is going to be the back-breaker.  Can’t wait!

[metarail]

Staged 30 culture pages today, which brings the total Dev’d % up to 27%

But I’m pretty interested in the numbers in italics, ‘cause that’s a picture of the project minus ~100 character pages.  I guess I’m looking at that as a nearer goal post, because fleshing out one-off characters is definitely non-essential.

(I also like being 50% done with characters instead of only 9.45%)

[metarail]

NIGHT MOVES by Valenberg DEVIANTART | FACEBOOK | TWITTER

[metarail]

Or this?

Think of it with some minor animation on mouse-over, okay?  And instead of flat color circles, they’d be stylized or photorealistic planets ya?  That pop up a bit and rotate and show you their name when you mouse over, and come up front and center with a brief description overlaid on the planet when you click. 

The links could be more creatively placed around the outer edge, depending on how the big overlay obscures the selection wheel.

[metarail]

Just doodling.

[metarail]

Throwing a new metric at you: Blue Links.  13.19% of pages referenced have been dev’d.

[metarail]

CHECK OUT THIS SWEET SWAG COURTESY OF @multishep !!!!!!  If that doesn’t convince you to get on this space train, I don’t know what will.