Site plans and features
Here are some of the changes and features of the new site:
Organization
Firstly, I expect to have categories of information in my blog. I will only publish “sitewide” news to the news section. Use the navigation on the left to view content in different categories.
More importantly, I’m re-organizing and moving all of my lesson oriented guitar content to its own section. It’s probably worth bookmarking https://rexs.tips/guitar separately from the homepage or my blog if you find yourself going there frequently.
I’m hopeful that navigation will be quite a bit easier.
I’m in the process of bringing over all the old content, one page at a time, making edits and improvements as I go. It will take quite a while, but I’ve wanted to re-organize the content and tighten up the prose for quite a while.
I’m editing (shortening!) most of the posts. Almost all of them were too long with a lot of redundancy. I’m trying hard to “kill my darlings.”
Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
— Stephen King
It will take me quite a while to move everything over, but I’ll start with the most important bits. Re-used content will keep the date of the original posting, any new content will, of course, be dated after March, 2020.
New features
Github issues and edits
If you’re on a desktop with a wide enough viewport, you should see a menu on the right that allows you to either create an issue or directly edit any page in the github repository (assuming you have the appropriate permissions).I’m also hoping to introduce a new idea in the guitar section: “test driven guitar”.
With every “lesson” page, I hope to include one or more proficiency tests to let you know when you’ve mastered a topic or skill sufficiently. I haven’t yet decided how I will style these “proficiency tests”.
In addition to drills on each “lesson” post, I’m planning to create “Learning tracks”: ordered lists of drills and their associated posts. A “beginner” track, for example will have tests for learning the notes, playing basic chords, practicing with a metronome, etc.
Eventually (hopefully soon) I want to allow users of the site to track their progress with the various proficiency tests (with states of “not started,” “in progress,” or “completed”). This requires logins and some sort of stateful API, however, so at least for some period of time each user will just have to keep track of their own progress.
Lastly, I eventually plan to add support for Soundslice especially with the proficiency tests. The idea being to have both a video (YouTube) and synchronized tab (Soundslice) for each test.