Since no one will read this much text (a well researched fact), I am rather safe in writing whatever I want here. But I think I'll actually talk a little about the system. The webpage is based on wiki-system. However, since I have no intention to make this public playground, I've promptly removed all public rights.

I've also struggled with the problem that all Wiki's have.

Navigation.

I want people to be able to navigate even somewhat intuitively. Since there is little I can do to counterweight the jungle-like mess of pages any Wiki is bound to get, I've tried to keep the pages extensively networked by different lists, so that you would have greater chance of stumbling upon something useful.

I've also added a lot of redundant information, repeating several lists and links in different pages so that they are easier to find. I think I've managed decently to reign in the growth of the weeds, so to speak. It also helps that there is only single contributor and administrator, which keeps the website much more cohesive than a public wiki is likely to be.

http://www.straechav.com was planned to host STRAECLOPEDIA from the very start, or at least something like it. The idea has been floating around in my mind since the advent of first blogs years ago, when I hosted several music related blogs.

I quickly fell tired of their lack of archiving and features. Like all blogs, they lived only in the current moment and only the lastest entry really mattered, which was not what I wanted. The old reviews were equally important and should had been more easily accessed, not to be accessed only as an afterthought.

So, the idea of building up a music-archive began to float in my mind.

However, I did not want to build up the good-ol'-review-site that just had a number of reviews online... I mean what's the point? If you know the band, you probably have their album and you don't need the review for it? Sure, you can check if the new album was any good in someone else's opinion, and that person is someone you probably don't even know.

I wanted something a bit more personal and useful than that. Those review archives are all nice and everything, but they won't help you at all when you're trying to look for new music, there's just no way to be sure you didn't miss a good band when going through the list in alphabetical order. And you're likely to get bored before you even get out of "A" to "B", since you had to browse through some dozen (if you're lucky) bands like Anal Cunt or Atrocity.

So I came up with Tags, although the system I use now doesn't yet work quite the way I want it to. The search engine needs to be updated so that one can search for entries that are in multiple categories. Other than that, it works beautifully.

After that, I got busy. I spent about a week busily getting acquitanted with different Wiki's and their differing logic-bases. After while, I settled up on a one and spent two to three weeks busily making myself a temporary website while also working on the wiki and trying to iron out the logic how to construct the site.

After intensive period of work, I sighed, took a break and left it alone for about 6 months. Then I started the mindbending work of starting to make the idea reality. So, I had given up on database based review archive, and instead opted for Wiki styled approach. That was both good and bad.

Bad in the sense that indexing the data was a lot more difficult, and so was searching and making the results look even somewhat pretty would require coding I know I am not really cut out for.

Good in the sense that the content could be a whole lot more fluid, and would not be so strictly constrained as a review of an album. I now could include any text or data I felt like adding.

So, I reskinned the damn Wiki, put up a blog, and then gallery, making both look about same. This took about three weeks to do, while adding some content to all of them - which slowed me down quite a bit. I was finally done, and finished with the basic site at end of April, 2006.

After that the site was up with art gallery & weblog for about an year, until I summarily removed all links to these, including Straeclopedia. This lasted for a while, and now 8th of June at 2008, I am putting Straeclopedia back up because a lot of people end up here through Google, and there are several entries at Wikipedia that use Straeclopedia as a reference.

So, I figured that this particular part of the old website is still worth having. So I will be adding few new reviews, plus cleaning & updating the place a bit. We'll see how long it'll stay up this time.

Most likely indefinitely, due the fact that this time I am making no promise to keep updating the site regularly - which seems to be a killing strike for me. If you want to contribute, please contact me and impress me & the editors with your literary skills.