Well, I must admit I’m getting pretty tired of typing “new and improved,” but there’s really no other way to describe it. I’d like to say I was patiently biding my time in waiting to move the old existing site, which has been up since early 2007, from it’s ugly old home at magwiki.things-and-other-stuff.com to this spiffy location, but truth be told it took so long because the old MediaWiki site architecture had just beaten me down. It took me awhile to create new listings on the original site, so long in fact that I eventually stopped doing it.
But beyond looks, this new magawiki has got performance going for it as well. I gave up after 1,200 of so listing over there. Or maybe it was 1,500. I don’t remember, but it’d been about 6 months since I’d put up anything new. This new site, well, it wasn’t even an idea just one week prior to my typing these words–and it contains all existing files plus another dozen to twenty listings I’d created since importing all 2,900 or so of those original ones.
If you want to see the true spark for this revamped version of the site you’ll find it in this write-up I did for the Robert Donat movie “The Magic Box” on the Examiner.com. It’s less of a review and more of a rumination about inspiration in classic movies. When I mentioned being productive, this site was the end result. And that was dated September 7, today is September 13.
It looks better, it’s much more complete, it’s faster, it’s better organized, okay, but then if you’re new just what is it?
Well, quite honestly that’s all on the home page but to boil it down as far as it goes the magawiki is a tool. It contains page after page of indexes and contents to old magazine back issues offering details only gleaned from paging through the entire issue. The tool is hopefully an early step towards achieving knowledge, though it’s also quite capable of making you money when either buying or selling old magazines as well. If you know what to look for.
The video below is currently on the home page and other pages inside the magawiki. I expect it will be replaced or moved around eventually, so I want to place it here in the blog section, right at post #1, so you’ll always know where to find it.