13 jul 2004

as you can see, things have been quiet... well, on the online front at least. in reality, we moved out of our house in the middle of may and have been living with the in-laws ever since. fortunately we should be moving into the new house by the beginning of august.

additionally, my pride and joy (my laptop) died on me. i suspect a busted hard disk but i can't prove it and therefore don't want to buy one and then find out it's a waste of money. damn thing's three and a half years old now anyway and is always being used. so that's pretty much killed off any personal projects at the mo *sigh*.

05 mar 2004

i've only just noticed that the downloadable versions of my tracks are all in 96kbps resolution. don't ask me why. i've reencoded all of them from the original wavs to 192kbps. some of them sounded absolutely dire at the lower quality.

i've also had a spring clean of the fastrax music page as there were some really poo tracks sitting around on there. can't have people listening to them these days really. also in the process of getting the domain name transferred from freeola to 49pence this week as it's soon to be up for renewal so it's a good time to do it. no more of this redirecting bollocks.

04 mar 2004

over the last couple of days i've been implementing some background changes. the main one is with regards to how various sections of the site are accessed. previously there would be a page per section in the root i.e. music.html, news.html etc. but i've changed this to use the technique thugz uses i.e. the same areas are access by appending /music, /news to the site address. just keeps things tidy i think.

plus i put each page through the w3c html validation service and eked out any bugs that were floating around (hence the two logos that have appeared on the index page. the main offenders were no alt tags on images (something i was intending to get around to) and no page reference associated to form actions (?). this validator is all well and good but it doesn't fix it for you, it only tells you what's wrong. so it took me a little while to work out what was actually wrong, largely thanks to the o'reilly html reference library. the one thing i've not fixed which i won't fix is that apparently a height attribute on a table is illegal because browsers should be left to work it out themselves. which is stupid. because then the table on my index page is supposed to be full screen height and width.

at some point in the future i'll get around to making this site php so i can dispense with the dreaded frames!! i'm happy enough with the way things look at the moment actually. and i still cringe when i look at my old design. i was proper chuffed with it back then but now i think i'll just delete it!

02 mar 2004

as i built up the tunage page (which is now referred to as 'other music' on the main menu) it started to get bloody huge so i had to break it up. the obvious way to do this was with a separate page for each genre. but once i'd done that it still didn't look right so i considered having two columns of the tracks instead. this didn't work too easily either so i simply made each table half-width and centered it. and it looked quite good - made the descriptions look much more proportionate where i imagine they were quite difficult to read before as they required scanning the width of the screen.

unfortunately what this also meant was that it was a logical layout to apply to the rest of the site. so i spent hours reformatting the music pages so they look the same. this also gave me an opporunity to test all the links and update some of the descriptions. i've also moved the news link from the main menu to the top of the info page instead. as if anyone wants to read this babble!!!

01 mar 2004

following on from the flurry of updates i did in the latter half of last year, not much was needed doing after that. which was lucky because i've been backwards and forwards job-wise since the beginning of november and haven't had any time at all. i have made some design changes like adding hotspots to the logo on the home page. then there's the tunage page which was formerly a feature on the romfordthugz site but was a bit wasted there. seems a lot more logical to have it on this site. this i'll be expanding over time, depending on how much time i get to rip my vinyl.

things i still need to do are some updated mix sessions as the ones there are quite old now plus a links page which is a glaring omission at the moment.