The Crawling ChaosOfficial Website

The website has had a bit of a going over, visually.  Hope you like it.

BTW.  Please send duff links informatio to the webmaster on the contact page.  Thanks.

Yep. It’s in the title really.

I’ve re-set the comments to appear on (virtually) every page to add a bit more spontaneity. I initially locked stuff down quite brutally after the twit muslims had hacked my site and duffed up some pix. I fixed this almost straight away with heaps of extra security that I’ve now discovered (so thanks for that chaps, and you are chaps, I can tell), but have only got round to re-implementing the functionality now. Why? Dunno. So there.

A contact page is on the way. The host supplied script doesn’t work in the blog so I’ll find another way.

The photo page has been re-jigged a bit. I’ve lost some of the stuff from Holly. I may have to ask again if I can’t find it as I lost the email with a bit of dodgy computer upgrading…

Strangely Perfect

The planned update has been successful. If only everything were this easy :-)

See main message at Strangely’s site: http://www.strangelyperfect.tv/?p=165

It means that the last time a post or page has been edited by anyone, it shows on the post/page, as well as the original creation time. It is useful to keep track of things and see if anything has been altered. From my (Strangely Perfect) viewpoint, I make changes to the original articles just as I make changes to recordings. That is, it’s quite hard to be really satisfied with anything as after time has passed, I can always think of new bits to add.

Other reasons might be to add or remove some defamatory or complimentary remark in light of changing circumstances.

Or even amend or add a fact, or a spelling mistake …

zzz

I recently met Paul who’s demonstrated to me his gear and I also gave him some pointers and history for analogue stuff that he’s interested in. It set me thinking to when I first started making “sounds” as opposed to music and that I still haven’t properly recorded a tune I made up on a school cross-country run and that’s still in my head. See http://www.strangelyperfect.tv/?p=157. Delia Derbyshire could be said to have inspired several generations of synthesised music players and composers.

I’ve added a much better search function to the site(s) which appears right at the bottom (so just hit “End” on the keyboard and a user will go straight there). I’ve set it to search virtually ALL data fields in the database. The previous built-in search just searched posts so didn’t provide decent research facilities. It’s the work of Dan Cameron mainly and is available here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search-everything I had to turn off the Jerome bit as it just popped SQL garbage up all over the screen. Once that was done it works fine. Let’s see what happens when WP is updated…

All I have to do now is get a better theme worked out using more columns for all the widgets and plugins I’ve got! More to follow as well.

I’ve added a couple of widget things to see what they feel like. One pops up a little page preview and the other is a chat facility. Currently I’m just talking amongst myself, are you? No I’m not.

But you know… It may be of value somehow. I’m of the opinion that everything is a benefit. If there’re any problems they’re easy enough to take off and if the chat gets abused or my bandwidth suffers then I can easily allow it for registerees only. Speaking of which, the numbers are going up. I like this way of doing things; people have to make a genuine positive effort to get involved. Not like myspace (my pet hate – hey! that’s a good name) which is just a bit like click here to vote – like der..

However, I think I need a different wordpress theme, a nice 3-4 column job. I’ll still do it in green and gold because I like it, but I’ve too much stuff to get out and the layout is a bit restricting whilst not providing all the functionality I require. I know there are ways to get the major posts centrally while allowing a non-interactive front page, so I’ll look into it.

I’ve decided to put a bit more logic behind the organisation of the information on the site.

• all the music wiil be grouped by the release on which it was issued and in the order it appears on the release.
• Unreleased and bootleg stuff will appear on their own page
• As much info as possible (except the lyrics which take up acres of screen) about a piece will appear on these pages as well as the facility to play the track whilst reading the blurb I’ve included. This may or may not increase the enjoyment of the said track – but hey!…whatever!
• removed the posting facility from all pages except a posting page as the posts are too spread out and I want them grouped for maintenance purposes.

Mr Sympton left a message (so ta for that) correcting my impaired hearing and memory over the lyrics for Ashen. Fuck me, for years I thought Paul sang summick else!

This has been done. However, as part of the update I found that the links from the posts weren’t updating properly on the lyrics page, so I’ve put the old lyrics page back, even though I didn’t want to use it as I can’t get anchors to work on it like they do on plain HTML. This has left a bizarre situation for postings that I’m too tired and not really bothered to fix at the moment. It’s not unsurmountable, it’s just getting a handle on all the mySQL database/php/code/theme interactions I guess. zzzz

The site has now totally moved across to a WordPress operation. Music and links are nearly all sorted out. I’m going to get the song lyrics set as separate postings to make future indexing easier. Probably have a better linking, playing and info structure in place as well for all the spurious information. Using the backend databases to support everything is a much better way to do stuff than mixing the content and presentation. I still have much to learn, especially with regard to details of presentation and using the correct standards-compliant code.
All domain hosting is managed in-house now. I’m not reliant on third parties. If the hosting company goes under it’s a simple job to hop off somewhere else! I’ve space to host four more totally independent domain structures – wahay!