📌 Latest Update – June 23, 2025
🧠 Footnote System Fully Integrated
The long-planned automated footnote engine is now live and working inside chapters. This system supports:
- 🔗 Inline references with automatic numbering and back-links
- 📚 Dynamic retrieval of CPT data (books, concepts, etc.)
- 🧭 CPT-specific icons and smart linking based on type:
- 🎹 Artist Profiles
- 📚 Book Citations
- 🔎 Lexicon Entries
- 👤 Biographical Figures
- 🎬 Movies Referenced
- 💬 Quote Library (coming soon)
Footnotes now pull directly from related CPTs, showing titles, definitions, cover images, and even source links when available — all while maintaining reversible reference arrows (↩︎) for context tracking.
📝 Manual References Supported
Not all references are CPTs. A fallback system allows standalone notes to be inserted manually, using shortcode attributes like text="...". These render in sequence with all other footnotes and maintain numbering integrity.
🎶 Songs Referenced: Structured Support Added
A new ACF field is now being added to each chapter to store secondary songs referenced (excluding the main one). These appear as a styled list at the bottom of the footnotes section, bolding the artist name and keeping formatting consistent:
Songs Referenced:
Tom Petty – Learning to Fly
Peter Gabriel – In Your Eyes
This ensures a clean visual trail of sonic context for every chapter — especially important for readers tracing intertextual music references.
📋 Toward Auto-Updating Artist/Song Indexes
The existing manually built artist–song–chapter spreadsheets are now being considered for automation. With all primary artists already stored as CPTs (and more referenced ones being added), future updates will explore:
- Dynamic artist/chapter cross-lists
- Alphabetical and chronological views
- Public song indexes updated automatically via ACF fields
📚 Chapter Data Normalization Continues
As part of the footnote integration, each chapter is now being reviewed and structured around:
- Featured artist(s) → tied to CPTs
- Referenced books, profiles, concepts, movies → footnoted and linked
- Inline quote blocks → migrating to reusable ACF/HTML fields
- All external sources, even Wikipedia quotes → structured as manual references
This marks a significant shift from static references to semantic, linkable content blocks.
⚙️ Status Overview
✅ Footnote engine fully deployed with CPT integration
✅ CPT-specific icons and dynamic linking based on post type
✅ Manual notes and non-CPT references supported
✅ Songs Referenced field added to chapters
🔧 In Progress:
- Automate artist/song chapter spreadsheet via CPTs
- Create Quote CPT to expand footnote coverage (💬)
- Continue migrating embedded content to structured fields
This footnotes system ties together every element introduced so far — turning chapters into relational nodes that link books, profiles, concepts, songs, and quotes in a transparent, reusable way.
🗓️ Past Updates
📌 Last Update – June 21, 2025
🧱 Foundations Set: Full CPT Architecture Live
This week marks a major milestone: almost all primary Custom Post Types (CPTs) are now active and structured. These include:
- 📚 Books — cited sources with quotes, covers, and links to chapters
- 🧑🎓 Profiles — authors, philosophers, and referenced people
- 🎤 Artists — musicians connected to featured songs
- 📝 Lyrics — standalone lyric excerpts tied to songs, artists, and chapters
- 🎬 Movies — referenced film works
- 💡 Concepts (Lexicon) — definitions and recurring symbolic terms
Each CPT is still in its early phase, but the core relationships are working. These building blocks will power a much richer system of cross-linking and semantic navigation across the entire site.
The only major CPT missing from this is quotes, but the lyric one could take a few weeks or more to migrate, once that’s done, quotes will be easy.
🧩 System Clarification: When Is a Lyric Its Own Thing?
I’ve clarified an important boundary:
- Featured song lyrics that drive a chapter’s core are not stored separately — they live inside the chapter.
- All other lyrics are treated as independent CPT entries (reused across multiple contexts).
This separation will allow reusable lyrics to appear in artist profiles and a new centralized “Lyric Quotes” directory — while preserving more narrative, embedded ones inside chapters.
🧪 Rendering Lyric Blocks
A breakthrough this week: lyric CPTs can now render full Cover Block HTML inside the frontend — not just raw text. This opens the door to eventually replacing static lyric blocks in chapters with structured, centrally managed versions. The visual design is still being refined, but this is a key technical unlock.
Next Steps:
- Shrink and standardize Cover Block layouts (esp. mobile readability & image balance)
- Strip leftover formatting/code from plugin residues
- Decide whether original chapter lyrics will be replaced or duplicated
🧱 Theme CSS Refactor Underway
To support long-term consistency and load performance:
- All custom CSS is being migrated from the WordPress Customizer into a proper
style.cssfile in the child theme. - CSS is now being reorganized with section headers, comments, and dead code removed.
- Image styling (especially for artist portraits and lyric backgrounds) is being evaluated for mobile/desktop responsiveness.
⚙️ Status Overview
✅ CPTs created: Books, Profiles, Artists, Concepts, Lyrics, Movies
✅ Cover Block rendering enabled for lyric CPTs
✅ CPT-specific pages and relationship fields functional
✅ Custom CSS moved to child theme for better control
🔧 In Progress:
- Standardize Cover Block sizing, layout, and cleanup
- Image positioning and mobile styling adjustments
- Begin migrating reusable chapter lyrics into lyric CPTs
This sets the stage for future dynamic views across the site: artists showing all lyrics, books pulling all quotes, and definitions aggregating references — all connected by relationships, not repetition.
📌 Update – June 20, 2025
🔗 Cross-Linking Architecture Expands
The reference system has grown significantly this week. Additional Custom Post Types (CPTs) are now live, and the workflow for structuring, linking, and visualizing them is becoming much clearer.
New CPTs Created:
🎤 Artists — now linked directly to chapters instead of tags, featuring primary headshots and optional secondary fields
🧑🎓 Profiles — for cited philosophers, historians, and thinkers, with Wikipedia summaries or custom bios
🎬 Movies — rectangular poster-driven layout, following the Books structure
💡 Concepts (Lexicon) — individual definition pages with alphabetical navigation and future aggregation of quotes from Books, Profiles, and Chapters
All CPTs now include ACF fields for summaries or excerpts and are indexed by custom directory pages (e.g. /artists-featured/).
📖 Goodbye Tags, Hello Objects
The old WordPress tag system is being deprecated in favor of structured relationships. Instead of showing generic tags, chapter pages will now pull connected people, books, movies, and concepts through ACF relationships — creating a clean, semantic index of what each chapter references.
➡️ Plan: Eventually phase out tags completely or retain only as search helpers for unstructured mentions.
🎯 Single Page Navigation Unified
Each CPT now includes its own version of alphabetical navigation at the bottom (e.g., “Next Concept”, “Previous Profile”). These use rounded or rectangular thumbnails depending on type — reusing featured images for visual consistency with the homepage.
🧰 Tools & Automation
- WP-CLI scripts were used to:
- Batch assign featured images to CPTs missing thumbnails
- Generate excerpts based on title patterns (e.g. “Books Cited Page for X”)
- Extract and import Wikipedia slugs for Profiles, Artists, and Movies
This makes it easier to scale new entries and ensure visual consistency across search results and index grids.
💡 Editorial Logic Clarified
CPTs are no longer limited to content already featured in chapters. I can now create standalone concepts, people, or works that exist independently — and pull them into chapters only if relevant. This opens up the site to speculative entries, archival sources, or pre-chapter research.
🔄 Live Data, Linked Cleanly
Each CPT single page (Concept, Artist, Movie, Profile) can now act as a source of truth — storing not just a summary, but connected quotes, lyrics, or references. This means one artist can list all featured lyrics, one book can show all cited quotes, and concepts can show all related appearances — even if the concept isn’t fully developed in a chapter yet.
Next Steps:
- Migrate legacy tags into structured CPT entries
- Standardize image dimensions for Book and Movie covers
- Begin collecting quotes into a dedicated CPT or shared repeater field
- Continue building the backend infrastructure to support footnotes and backlinks
Status: Site-wide architecture is now flexible, futureproof, and fully CPT-driven. The foundation is in place for content to evolve organically — with better structure, better relationships, and fewer hacks.
📌 Update – June 13, 2025
📚 Narrative System Update: Dynamic References & Book Integration
As the site’s thematic narratives expand, I’m beginning the process of building a structured reference layer alongside the existing chapters. This will support reusability, dynamic aggregation, and more intuitive organization for books, quotes, footnotes, and symbolic elements.
🎯 Immediate Task: Create a book Custom Post Type (CPT) to store all referenced books independently from narrative threads.
Why Books Come First
- Books are consistently referenced across chapters.
- They contain quotes, footnote data, and symbolic importance.
- Creating a CPT allows books to be listed dynamically and reused elsewhere.
Coming Functionality
- 🗂️ Grid Page to display all books with covers and links.
- 🔗 Relationship Fields in each chapter to connect referenced books.
- 📝 Custom Footnote System that pulls linked books (and other sources) into a clean reference list at the bottom of each chapter.
On Footnotes & Fragments
Existing footnotes were manually copied from older posts but lack structural integrity. A new footnote system will draw from structured sources: books, movies, songs, and possibly narrative fragments. This supports dynamic generation and long-term consistency.
Forward Plan
- ✅ Create Book CPT with ACF fields (title, cover, author, quotes, related chapters).
- ✅ Add “Referenced Books” relationship field to chapters.
- ✅ Display books dynamically at the bottom of each chapter as footnotes.
- 🚧 Evaluate quotes, songs, and other references for future CPT integration.
- 🚧 Create fallback repeater field for manual footnotes (non-CPT sources).
This system will evolve one chapter at a time. Each chapter will be reviewed and linked to its sources, gradually revealing the larger structure of the site. As always, form follows function — the design will emerge naturally from the content itself.
Status: Planning complete. Build starts tomorrow.