Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

The Last Train's Gone

In times gone by, my various websites have housed a side-project of mine called "The Tube", an attempt to write a series of occasionally-linked vignettes with one for each station on the London Underground. It had been updated only ccasionally for the last couple of years owing to, well, lack of creative time.

I decided last night to take it down for the time being. See below if you want more details:

"The Tube" hadn't been going anywhere for some time, and large amounts of it are badly in need of being looked at, edited, and possibly thrown away and rewritten from scratch. Rather than leaving it publicly accessible on the web for people to leave stinky comments about, I've decided to pull it offline for some time to give me a chance to take a long, hard look at it.

While it's often fun writing things like this (and the balance of the feedback I received from the story ratings was that people kind of liked, well, at least some of them) doing all 200-odd stations is a big project, at least if you're going to have any kind of variety in what you do. The version of the project that was online was kind of basic and unpolished as well - today's web browsers demand snazzy graphics and better navigation, and while I'd been intending to get that side of things sorted out, I never really got round to it. What always happens in projects like this is an initial burst of huge enthusiasm in which a lot of work gets done, then it tails off until there's no more than a trickle with long periods of nothing at all happening. With the amount of work still to do, I'm happy to confess that I was overambitious, and the pressure (mostly in my own mind) to produce new stuff for the site occasionally made me post some pieces which were, not to put too fine a point on it, real stinkers.

So where does it go from here? Well, I hope that I'll find the pressure's off a bit now that new stuff doesn't need to be posted (not that any had been posted for a long time, but nothing is worse than seeing the words "check back often!" on a site which hasn't been updated in months). I also hope to spend some quality time during my commutes on the Northern Line going through the material I've got and being ruthless with it. There are some stories which I know are utter crap and need to be rewritten from scratch, there are others which just don't work and seem to have been shoehorned into the context of the Underground, and there are even a few which are actually pretty damn good but are buried in the mediocrity.

It is time, in summary, for a rewrite and redesign, and by doing this offline I hope to be able to get it back online at some point rather than sitting there festering away in a half-forgotten section of a website. I want to do it - it's important to me - but this time I want to make sure it's presented, and handled, right.

I did appreciate the kind words and helpful suggestions (and sometimes even praise) some people had for the project while it was available. Thanks to all the people who provided feedback.

It's entirely possible that new stories may occasionally appear, but if they do I'll be posting them directly on my homepage rather than in any dedicated section of the site. Other than that, well, watch this space.

Posted by mpk at February 5, 2004 3:37 PM | TrackBack