New Edition Day

This is the URI! Zone's 28th birthday month, which means it is the only website to avoid the dreaded "27 Club" effect (where amazing founts of creativity implode through self-destructive habits).

By the numbers, here's what the URI! Zone looks like today:

• over 206,000 unique visitors since 2003
• 5032 blog posts since 2001
• 9418 comments from 153 unique visitors since 2003
• 10,202 images, MP3s, and other files, totaling 573 megabytes
• over $4650 spent on web hosting since 2003

As regular visitors can plainly see, the URI! Zone has mostly been in maintenance mode for the past few years -- barely showing a pulse through an intravenous diet of child pictures and reviews. This is all slated to change over the next 12 months as I've spent the summer learning modern web development and becoming okay with the fact that I no longer have to account for Internet Explorer incompatibilities when implementing web interfaces.

Here are some of the areas I'd like to explore with the URI! Zone on the yearlong path towards a 30th edition:

• Makeover the entire website, even considering a move away from the iconic "yellow sign" design.
• Modernize the entire tech stack, from database to web page, so the makeover isn't just putting makeup on a corpse.
• Clean up all 5032 blog posts so they're more searchable and taggable, and flow well across different devices.
• Add an Export function that spits out PDF files of each year's posts for offline preservation.
• Add a feature that lets me write blog posts in Markdown instead of HTML.
• Throw the corpus of blog posts at a generative AI and see if it can figure out what I would sound like on other topics. Eventually I can take 3 month vacations and no one will know.

I have also felt the itch to get back into music composition, but from the perspective of the final product being a recording of exactly what I want to express (read: Cubase) rather than a printed score that real musicians will never be able to recreate as well as I can in my brain (read: Finale). This would require a whole 'nother skillset that I've never explored before.

Thank you for your continued friendship and readership! I hope you're around for year 30!