History


The story of the node began about several years ago, shortly after publishing my first web page (Chobits-Heaven). This was back in the late 90s or so. I don't remember this good...
It never was a specific project I had in mind. More of several projects that altered over the years. Ideas came, ideas got dropped, and so on. At last it all became the tsubaka meshwork and the node.
An original idea I had in mind that someday HAS to be put into action was a web page that interacts to all my projects as some sort of data base or alike. A list or something interactive - was never so sure about the interface. But the user should have been able to be guided towards the content that he is interested in. Like first being in the middle of it, seeing where he CAN go to, deciding, and doing so. Within my world(s).
One project I actually sit on for some 100 hours was a 'virtual browser', covered as a web site. I copied the look and the main functions of the IE6 and transformed them into a PHP based web page. But instead of opening URLs it should have been able to open my web pages, textes and so on in a iFrame (or rather the 'main window').
This project sort of died due to a lag of possible content. Because it was back in 2000 or so and I haven't had much web presence back then. In a late phase it was already been capable of also presenting textes and lists and so on, as the node does today, but well... it wasn't neccesary at all... so what. I also considerated of expand this project form a 'virtual browser' to a whole 'virtual OS', but that was far too exaggerated...
Some other projects are still in my mind but aren't ready to be 'produced'. Parts that are related to it are to find all over my works, but in a rather suble way. For example you may have realised the word Lotus, always being mentioned to music related topics. I won't say yet what it means, but I can say it is a part of another fictional project, that may or may not get real some day.
So, the node works also as a dump for stuff I don't have a platform for yet.
I started working on the node at the beginning of 2008. It changed its title a lot, its purpose and its style. One main problem I had to solve was that I missed the sort of interactivity that also guides TOWARDS the node, not only AWAY from it. So I finally had the idea to give the collectivity of my projects a title. Like there would be some sort of network, connection every part. But some of this projects and sites don't have a direct connection between them, so it wouldn't be a REAL network at all. So I give it some research and finally stumbled over the word meshwork. This fitted perfectly, and soon the tsubaka meshwork was (ficitonal) born!
Another thing that arranged parallely to the node was the regression of my former nick name TsuBaka for the benefit of my newer and much more adequate nick Seth. But I did not want to loose the whole symbolism of TsuBaka that has already been connected with much of my pesonality and so on. The idea was to value it to some sort of 'depiction'. That in the end has to do something with me, but not as an actual 'nick'. To give my upcoming meshwork the title TsuBaka~something seemed to be a good solution.
(Also, this way I could leave some things as they were without changing them, i.e. my MySpace profile. People would have gotten REALLY confused...)
Well, somewhen I realized (while creating the project in my mind) that such a platform for random content may be the perfect project to do something I never really could concentrate on, because I had no platform tor this either: doing arts with HTML!
The problem was always that on the one hand I always wanted to try many things in HTML and CSS and so on, and on the other hand there weren't enough possibilities to do so - where should I have uploaded stuff like that? There aren't ANY platforms on the whole web where to concentrate on this rare kind of art. And a single, lonestanding project with just HTML art would have been rather pointless (who would have visited such a site?). And combining this desire with my network idea of the node seemed to be perfectly fitting.
And here we are now, speaking of the july in 2008. the node is the center of the tsubaka meshwork, linking to all my projects and presenting 'dumps' that I don't have a platform for yet - as HTML art pages. Like it, or close this tab! And thanks for showing interest in this text by reading this far!

EDIT mar 2010
so the story goes on...
last year i kinda had a nice idea to expand the concept behind tsubaka.com. i had this idea in my mind for quite some time, but somehow i needed some years to come up with the plan to combine it with the node: some sort of summary of RSS feeds regarding a specific person or organisation. i always dreamed of a social network based on this concept - a network that does not allow people to upload stuff, but only to add streams and such from other sites. i mean, you can already connect facebook with twitter, myspace with Last.fm, and so on, but i think this direction has never gone far enough!
so when i had to learn how to use Joomla (at work) i recognized its capabilities with its extensions. especially the rss reader extentions instantly caught my eyes. then i thought a good idea was to use the old tsubaka.com as a template and the Joomla part to display all my feeds on the front page. and i started rebuilding the whole thing...
in other news i had some really bad months in mid and late 2009. a lot of bad stuff happened, mostly personal. as some sort of mark i started to use my pseudonym of "tsubaka" in small types only, replacing the old spelling of "TsuBaka". yes, that is meant to be symbolic. tsubaka all written in lower case...
and soon after finishing the re-design, and with this version 2 of tsubaka.com, i realised all the bad side effects of Joomla. like for example that it's totally complicated in structure. to add or edit stuff has then been a pain in the ass, and i often found myself coding in the Joomla core files just to edit a minor thing. plus the limitations the user is forced to live with were also a big downfall. sure, i could finally display my feeds and do some other neat things, but it was simply not worth the trouble i had to go through while maintaining the page. i knew i had to re-do everything again, and this time on my own again, old-skool-style with the editor. but of course i had to learn how to use rss feeds.
the good part of the whole Joomla-case was that i could finally build up a blog that suits my interests best. as a side project i worked on "8106" (yes, that is leet for 'blog'), which shortly replaced my blogs on MySpace and MyBlog.
after i got fired form my last job i finally had the time to learn enough about how to read rss feeds to get it on and re-build tsubaka.com again. and while doing so i came up with yet another idea which i could attach to the node. i always searched for a way to let users browse through the tsubaka meshwork, but without leaving tsubaka.com, so when i some day - once again - complained about all the stupid extra bars that programs used to auto-install in browsers, i came up with the idea of doing the same thing, but in form of a webpage!
users should be able to browse through my sites in a frame that covers so much space, that it is not even recognized as a frame anymore, leaving the actual page only a small amount of space, so it would feel like a navigation bar. and soon i found out how easily this concept could have been done, so i started working on it. and i needed only one month to finish an online-ready beta version of the new tsubaka.com, which is now known as version 3.
in this whole process of re-building the page again i re-structed a lot, and even deleted a lot of stuff, like all the reviews (nobody wanted to read them anyways). and i feel very lucky with all the design ideas i had. yet there is so much to do for me, because - as of today - the page still is in beta phase. i am missing a lot of functions which i have yet to code.