About Thurston Lab

Thurston Lab is the personal space of Thurston Piana Bianco.

This is the birthday present from his dad (that's me writing).
Happy birthday Zampa!

Love you so much.

dad

The way it works

This website is currently hosted on a server on Linode (now part of Akamai) and it's run by Ghost, which is a CMS (Content Management System) – to simplify.

The site uses a custom theme, called thurston-lab which is providing the look and feel for the front end of the site (the back end, the part that is used to update content and manage other settings is Ghost own and cannot be customised). You can change the theme, as well as other stuff, through the back end: thurston.pianabianco.com/ghost/

Currently you are the sole user of this site back end, and have admin rights. This mean you are the sole user that can write, upload content, update the site; you can also add other users, the users you add can have the same rights as you, or less. No need to say: be careful who you nay grant access to this.
Also, at the time of writing this (and of you reading it) the site is private, apart from the home page (where you are asked to enter your credentials), not other page of the site is visible to the public.

In the same way you may add users to the back end, you can also grant access to the content, either by providing credentials or by granting public access--that is everybody can see. Simply said: you can add people as reader, you can add people as editors. Or both.

The password to access the front end is the same you use to access the back end. You may eventually change those to two different ones, but you will only ever be able to reset the one for the front end (by following the forget password link on the home page).
I do not have access to your content (I cannot read or see what you write/upload), unless you'll give me users credentials or you'll set the content as public. Also, I cannot access the back end; the only thing I'll be able to do is to update the Ghost CMS--new versions are released periodically, to keep up with bugs and security issues.

Anything you may need to operate the website you can find on the Ghost website (e.g. https://ghost.org/resources/) – of course you can ask me for help anytime.

The way I currently set up the logic of the site is:

Lab Notebook: this is a journal (or blog) of sorts, here you can write any thoughts, articles, notes, etc. Posts can also have images, video, links to external pages or sites. For posts to appear here, they need to have notebook as the first tag associated with them. You can also add other tags to a post.
All tags: here you will find the alphabetically ordered list of all tags used, that is all tags that have been associated with a post and their relevant posts. You won't find here notebook as this is used only to make posts appear in the Lab Notebook section. Neither you'll find here posts that have been tagged with moodboard as the first tag.
Moodboard: this section is thought mainly for images, you can also add text to these posts, but the idea behind this is that it serves you as a visual "inspiration" wall of sorts. For posts to appear here, they need to have moodboard as their first tag; you can also associate other tags to these posts, they are use to aggregate and build same tag lists. The tags used for moodboard are not shown in the all tags section.
Radar: here you can subscribe to feeds (RSS) of websites, so you get the updates from those websites. Not all websites provide this feature, add the url of a website and the system will find out if there is any available feed to subscribe to. I added some, for you to start with; of course you can get rid of those and add your own. The page should be self explanatory enough (also you are smart enough to find out how does it work).

All content currently posted is just for you to have something to start with, and explain the way the system works. You can obviously delete it, and create your own.

You can also add pages, like this about page– and do other things to tweak the site and shape it to your needs and likes. I recommend you first read the how-tos on the Ghost site, before doing any configuration change. Again, anything you may need just shout and I'll be more than happy to help.

I hope you find this helpful, and the site something you can use and play with. Don't worry if something "break", we'll fix it.

lots of love,
dad