Website Projects
Page initially created: 2025-04-19.
Website Projects
My Own Websites
tomhull.com
hullworks.net
Main thing here is the
Francis Davis Jazz Critics
Poll. Discussion on that has been moved
here. The Francis Davis prospective website
described below would eventually incorporate the Poll website, but
for now can be considered separate projects.
notesoneverydaylife.com
Robert Christgau
Francis Davis
At various times I've proposed to Francis Davis that I build him a
website. I had two ideas:
Provide an archival website for a substantial amount of his
writings, much like I did for
Robert Christgau. As
Davis has just died, the focus would be more on his legacy, as
opposed to promoting new and future work. But he does have a
substantial body of work, some in book form but much more in
widely scattered forums (including liner notes). Such a site
would be a valuable resource for everyone. Provide a permanent home for his Jazz Critics Poll. I have
essays, ballots, and dotals since its inception, stashed away in a
directory under my
Hullworks website,
but it is significant enough to stand on its own, and should have
a pretty thorough redesign. Placing this website under his legacy
website would.
The prospects for this website depend on whether Davis's widow,
Terry Gross, wishes to approve of and facilitate the project. What
I'm proposing is a memorial/legacy website, which would provide
an overview of Davis's life and work, including a comprehensive
bibliography, a page for each of his books, and as many of his
essays as we can secure permission to reprint. This could, over
time, be expanded to include unpublished materials (journals,
letters, etc.), interviews, pictures, a selection and/or guide
to secondary materials about him, etc. Off in one corner of the
website would be the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll, which
would house all of the relevant data for the 19 polls to date,
as well as any new ones that are conducted under his name.
Alternatively, the poll could be housed on its own independent
website, with or without a continuing connection to Davis. I'm
assuming here that Gross is willing for us to continue using
Davis's name in the poll going forward. If not, the most likely
fallback position will be to keep the existing data on Hullworks,
tidying it up a bit, and possibly starting a new poll under a
different name. If Gross allows the poll to continue, but doesn't
want to create a legacy website for Davis, I will secure a domain
name for a new poll website, and build and maintain it on my own
(with whatever volunteer help I can muster). But if Gross agrees
to the legacy website, I would like to continue the poll under
its auspices. What follows below assumes agreement to go ahead.
I have a server which can host the website. Its cost is
covered by my existing reseller hosting agreement, so there are
no costs for hosting or maintenance. I am also willing to cover
any miscellaneous out-of-pocket costs, such as registering the
domain name. My labor is pro bono, subject to availability (as
I have other projects I am also working on). Conversely, I am
not expecting that the website will generate any revenue (e.g.,
from advertising, soliciting donations, or a sales front). The
server comes with cPanel for account management. We need to decide on and register a domain name, Someone
else has registered the obvious francisdavis.com, but it
shouldn't be hard to come up with an available name.
My initial thinking is to use WordPress to build the website,
primarily using the pages (as opposed to the blog-oriented posts)
model. It offers a modern design framework, with highly customizable
themes, and good indexing tools. Most importantly, it allows multiple
editors to collaborate, so that Gross could engage directly, and I
could delegate some work on the project. I'm inclined to disable
comments (although we may allow editors to use them for annotation).
Some thought needs to go into the use of categories and tags, which
can be a big help for browsing. WordPress also offers hundreds of
extensions, although I'm not aware of any that I consider necessary.
There are other content management system tools that do similar
things. I'm inclined to go with WordPress due to familiarity and
confidence that it suffices and will continue to be supported,
but I'm willing to consider alternatives. The Jazz Poll piece consists of essays, which can be filed
as WordPress pages, and data. The latter is currently stored in
flat text files, which are then processed by a Makefile and shell
scripts to generate pages which are then interpreted using PHP.
Each year is stored in its own directory, and each has its own
make process, with various editing tweaks from year to year.
I'm proposing moving the data into a single MySQL database, and
writing a new set of PHP scripts to access the data and present
it in the form of web pages. This would allow development of
some new functionality: for instance, to track a voter and/or
an artist from year to year. While this could be developed as
a WordPress extension, it should be simpler to keep the two
parts separate, and just use links to go from one to the other.
I also may continue to use the old system to initially collect
ballots, only adding the ballot information to the database
when we're ready to publish. I have some vague ideas about community development above
and beyond the poll itself, but they need not enter here.
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