Hi. Obviously it’s clear that this blog is underutilized. It’s intended primarily for postings that aren’t necessarily news and I’m slowly working on rewriting our whole website so that this blog fits in better. Until then, this blog will remain underutilized.
Lack of updates.
August 10th, 2011Lyric Visualization
February 9th, 2009Wordle is a website where one can put in a sampling of text to be analyzed and rendered as a word cloud. If you use delicious.com or certain blog providers, you might be familiar with this concept already.
I was intrigued enough to put a small sample of our lyrics in to see what might happen. Below is the result:
Now, I didn’t imagine the word ‘god’ would be so prevalent but the sampling of lyrics did include a song called ‘God Hates Me’ so I suppose that skewed the data a bit. I imagine I’ll try again at some point with different lyrics in a larger sample set and see what other results I get. I’d love to just dump all of our lyrics into the site, it would almost be like a free psychoanalysis.
Drummer Search 2009
February 9th, 2009So the time has come for us to embark on our newest search for a drummer. This will be our fourth drummer this time around so for those at home keeping score, the current count is:
Singers: 1
Bassists: 2 (Although Josh’s tenure pales in comparison to Ian’s 7+ years)
Additional guitarists: 3
Drummers: 4
So what happened with Dave, you might wonder? Well, Dave was a wonderful drummer but I’d say we grew apart. Between Ian’s move to Corpus and Barrett’s two international trips to parts unknown, a lot of downtime was experienced for Spitting Angels as a band. Once Ian moved back and we got our friend Justin from Halix on board to fill in guitar playing duties and we were ready to move full steam ahead again, Dave was involved in several other projects (one of which being our dear friends, Rainsliver) and it became clear that he did not have the time needed for us to get our momentum going again. That was in May of last year. It was hard for me to let go of the prospect of continuing with Dave but we simply need someone able to invest the necessary time to get the recordings done and rehearse enough so that we are at the top of our game with live performances.
Now, through all of this downtime, yours truly has been busy working on new recorded material (which deserves it’s own separate post to talk about but as of this writing there are 3 albums planned) and improving my home studio and mobile recording setups plus building towards visual enhancements for our live shows.
I’m really hoping this time around we can take our time in our drummer search to find someone whose interest, ambition and goals match ours and can help fast-track our band’s rise to stardom.
Technical Mumbo Jumbo About The New Site
January 31st, 2009So spittingangels.com has new new look and some new tweaks. It’s been a bit long since the last major update. I’ve always got big plans for the site (well, I’ve always got big plans for almost anything I do so that’s no surprise) but I wanted to take a moment to discuss my design philosophy.
I’ve been web-designing (although web-developing is probably a more appropriate term) since 1998. I started in college with crude html written in either notepad or textedit. After a brief stint with Dreamweaver that didn’t quite workout, I went back to hand-coding. And that’s how almost everything is written, even to this day.
Several years ago, I made the jump to php/mysql when the music page for spitting angels became a bit unwieldy (it was basically a giant table in a static html page). From there my love for a dynamic/database driven website was born. Along with my migration to php/mysql, I also took the plunge into using CSS and so that’s how everything is done.
Currently, with the exception of a few news posts I have to update, the entire site should comply with web standards and therefore look nice with any modern browser. Even IE 7. I don’t give a flying fuck about Internet Explorer though and if you view the site on IE 6 or earlier, you will see a message at the top of each page.
A bonus for Firefox or Safari users: we use cutting edge CSS-styled rounded borders which you won’t see unless you use a mozilla or webkit based browser. Google Chrome uses webkit but if you use Opera or any version of IE, you are out of luck.
I used to avoid javascript like the plague but it’s really come into it’s own in the last couple of years and so now I’m trying to determine which js framework I wanted to start using. You can thank Google Maps for getting me over my fear of js.
Obviously, I didn’t code this blog or the forums and I’m not sure how I want to handle a gallery going forward. Flickr is nifty but I don’t know if that’s the best idea to implement. We could stick with the gallery software and upgrade to version 2 but that would be a lot of work on my part to integrate it better into the visual look of the site and maintain it.
I code on a Macbook Pro using textmate and a local test server and use subversion with my test server. I’m a Mac fanatic, having worked for Apple (and prior to that, Dell – which gives me a good counterpoint to strengthen my fanaticism) but I also own several PCs, all of which I’ve built myself. I’m hardcore DIY which is one of the reasons why Spitting Angels has had such slow output in the last few years. Info about the music is for another post though.
As for the current look, I got an idea for an online band application just before Christmas. I did the bulk of the coding during the week of Christmas and was so impressed with the resulting look that I immediately wanted to base the default look of the entire site of of this style. We are in dire need of a drummer to move forward with live performances and also recording. Once the nice and shiny bandapp was done, the rest of the site looked even more dated in comparison. But changing the style, the look of the site required a fundamental rewrite of the entire site. Every page was rewritten. Several about pages were rolled into one. Some pages had their underlying queries rewritten so that 5-6 different queries were consolidated into one. Basically a job I had been putting off for a long time had to be done now, since we need to make a positive impression on any potential band-members we might be recruiting.
So after about a month, everything was ready. There’s still more work to be done but other than some minor tweaks, any major work will have to hold off until more progress is made in our recording efforts.
Flickr
July 30th, 2008This is a test post from 
, a fancy photo sharing thing.
