~09/02/2008~
There is much that is new, and much that remains the same. Over the summer I upgraded my pa cabinets by purchasing some older JBL concert series top boxes. The double 18" cabinets that I have used for many years are copies of the JBL concert series subs from the same era, so now I have a matched system of very serviceable cabinets. I got 12 of the top boxes, so now I can put up a 6 over 4 system for a concert situation. In June I had two major events that ran concurrently and for the Sturgis Rally there was a requirement for two stages, with one stage hosting nightly concerts. These events provided the need and the cash flow to extend my capability. In order to transport the additional equipment needed for the Rally I took the plunge and acquired the transportation that I have wanted for several years. This consists of a Dodge 3500 duellie pickup truck and an 8.5 X 20 foot trailer. This setup made the Sturgis trip much more pleasant and less fatiguing than the old truck that I have driven for the past 4 years. I have just uploaded the pictures from Sturgis to the MC-RALLY.COM site. There are 11 galleries of new pictures from Sturgis 2008.
~07/13/2008~
I had so much fun redoing my galleries that I redid the ones on my other sites. Being now enthused with the galleries, I have begun to assemble the galleries from the Myrtle Beach Spring Rally this year. I have decided to display them on one of my other sites, MC-RALLY.COM. I put up the first gallery of eight or nine this evening. The discoveries with the editing software make it almost as easy as it has been with the old sites. There are two extra steps to be ready to publish, but they are completely automated, just like building the galleries to begin with. The automation of the photo editor, text editor, and file renamer is a nice package.
~07/10/2008~
I updated the galleries on both the winklongnecker and audioart sound sites. When I moved the sites the linking was not right. I corrected those problems and while I was at it I changed the look of the galleries a bit. The task would have been hough, but I found a couple of pieces of software to help out. The first is Notepad++. It is a text editor, but much more sophisticated than the simple notepad that comes with windows. There is a find and replace function that came in handy a couple of times. Then the file extensions needed to be changed to function with the hosting service and some of the functions that are available to me there. I found a program to change the file extensions this evening. Both of these softwares are freeware, and they saved me a lot of time in this conversion.
~06/30/2008~
Although this is not actually on this site, I am establishing two sister sites that go along with my primary business. The first is a music player site, AudioArt Music Player. The music player is set up so that you can start the music player and have it run in the background while you continue to surf. The player opens in a small new window and goes to the background when you click on the page or move to another site. It will continue to play until the playlist is finished or you turn it off. I will put up more of my live recordings there and am offering to host music for the community. The second is a staff referral service, Event Staff Online. This site is designed to put experienced event staff personnel in touch with event producers and vice versa. Stop by and visit the sites to see the progress I am making.
~06/08/2008~
I have moved the site to my paid space. I was up against the wall as far as space on my ISP space and I have several more music players that I have wanted to put up and some additions to the current players. I have opportunity to hear some very good stuff and record some of it. I do ask permission of the artists before I make material available to the public, but I have a good working relationship with many of them and they kindly allow me to put the music up. Since it is on the paid space there are a few commercials, but I try not to mess things up too much. I still have to re-do the galleries so that the links work properly. That has gotten easier with practice, so it should not take too long. The major problem is that many of the photos are not currently organized into galleries. The were just dumped into a pictures folder, so I will have to sort the pics into galleries before I turn the gallery software loose. I also took over four hundred pictures in Myrtle Beach this year, so there will be some new galleries on the way.
Oh, yes, I have been working and need to update the gig and rally blogs. There has been the Myrtle Spring Rally that I mentioned and several other events that I have neglected to chronicle.
~03/14/2008~
It is somewhat hard to believe that it has been nearly two months since I place an entry in this space. There has been some stuff of note that has been going on, but I have neglected to keep this log updated. Today I have made the first entry for this season in the RallyBlog page. This comes most of a week after the end of the rally, but I am still picking up equipment from the event. (In Daytona I can take my time. Most rallies I pack the truck on the day after the event and get on the road.)
In addition to my regular gig schedule over the winter I put up a few new websites. This has become somewhat of a hobby for me. If you are interested in a list of my new sites you can click HERE.
~01/16/2008~
This is the slow time of the year for me. I haven't had a gig yet this year, although that is about to change. I have a rental this week and one gig a week for the remainder of this month. I have been busy putting together a website. I may be sorry if it really takes off, it may be more work than I want. I rented some web space and am offering to put up websites for bands, clubs, and churches. The process is not presently automated, so there will be some work involved. If you are interested in checking it out you can find it Here. I am allowed to host multiple domains on my space, so I have purchased some additional domain names and will be opening other sites in the near future. All of them will require some work to maintain. I am signed up for Ads by Google and one other ad program at the present time. With any luck the advertising will pay for the cost of hosting and domain name purchase, but I am not holding my breath. I have found that I enjoy building websites, and my free space with my ISP is nearly full. If nothing else I get some entertainment value out of this!
~12/31/2007~
I have just updated the GigBlog to include the events of the last couple of weeks. I have also procured some web space and some domain names. This is a move into some commercial sites. It may provide me with pocket change or if one of the properties gets popular there could actually be a profit. I have added a page on My Links page to list my other sites. If you would like to check it out click Here.
~12/17/2007~
I have written up the events of last weekend in the GigBlog.
When I did the site update I included Google Analytics on the updated pages. Google Analytics is a traffic monitoring system. I have had a system similar to this on a few pages, but this is much more comprehensive. In the two weeks since the update went live I have had visitors from 24 states and 15 other countries. Most of the international visitors, as well as some of the US visitors, come from the user forum for the web page editor that I use. I also included pictures from my tour of duty in Viet Nam, and sent out a mailing to those for whom I have email addresses. I have not sent out a general announcement to my email contacts. I am sure that would generate a spike in the visitor count, but the changes were purposely mostly under the hood. The general look of the site is not greatly different.
~12/10/2007~
I have written up the events of last weekend in the GigBlog.
~12/02/2007~
The major site update is now live. I completed the last page and uploaded the site this afternoon. I am still in the process of checking for broken links. There are bound to be some on some of the pages of the site. My web space total available is 155 MB. This space is broken into six accounts with 25 MB and one account with 5 MB. When I completed the update I had too much in one of the accounts. Therefore, I had to transfer part of that to another space. The most logical arrangement was to transfer a relative large chunk to one of the other compartments, which meant that room had to be made there for the large file. In the end I completely took down two of the 25 MB spaces and reloaded the new content. If you should find any broken links in your travels around the site, please let me know. There is an email address on the contact page. Thank you!
~12/01/2007~
I made significant progress today. There is a new Wink Longnecker home page on the server. I have one page total left to redo, and a bunch of uploading and housekeeping to do. That will wait until tomorrow. Of course, there will be a bit of testing once it is all uploaded. The pictures pages for AudioArt and WinkLongnecker have not been uploaded because of the housekeeping that will need to be done on the server. I have changed the file system to a certain extent, and more content will be in sub-directories. The maintenance interface will be much cleaner with the update.
~11/30/2007~
I have updated the AudioArt Home Page today. I also did up the equipment list and calendar (still have more to list, but there is more current info on the new page). The update on the equipment list went quite rapidly. I made a template to start these pages with some of the generic info already filled in. It only took a little while to update this page. The calendar page was a lot more hectic. I spent a good deal of time there and used a table to present the data. I consider it to be tabular data, so that is not so bad, but I may not have used best practices in implementing the table. If not, perhaps someone on my KompoZer forum will point out the error in my ways. The contact page should not be to time consuming but the pictures page and the picture display pages could take a lot of time. I may just convert all the old picture pages to the new format and have my regular index open into the thumbnail page. I have put all the galleries in sub-directories until now, but that may not be necessary, although that would organize the site a bit better. There are also the music pages to update as part of the AudioArt site, and then it is on to the Wink Longnecker site. The home page will be a challenge, but I have a few ideas as far as that is concerned. I will want to update the look a bit anyway.
The updates are flying fast and furious right now. This morning I have updated the contact page and the music landing page. Additionally the three music players accessible from the music landing page have been updated. I may get more pages updated later today.
~11/28/2007~
I finished changing the picture galleries to the new format today. I also redid the galleries index page using the new format. The refreshed galleries index page can be seen here. From that page you can follow links to the refreshed galleries. With the addition of my BiketoberFest pictures I have nearly used up the 150 MB of space that I have been allotted. I am investigating other options as far as storage is concerned. The camera has co-operated by having dead batteries the last couple of times that I have thought of taking pictures, so I don't have any new additions right at the present time.
~11/27/2007~
Yesterday
evening I
returned from the Church of God Florida State Youth Convention.
I
wrote up my Gig Blog entry. I am changing the format of the
site
to be more standards compliant, so I archived my old gig blog, in the old
format. I
have had trouble reproducing the exact format using the standards
compliant tools, but I like the new format. I also archived
the old rally blog
of the 2007 season and
put a placeholder page in the new format up. If I waited
until I
had something new to write it would be March of 2008 before the new
format was in evidence on the rally news front. If you are
interested in the place holder page it is here.
~11/22/2007~
I am going with this as my new design for my blog pages which include my Gig Blog, My Rally Blog, and this What's New page. I am learning more about web design and it was brought to my attention that the way that I had laid out my pages was 'old fashioned' and not considered to be using best practices. As I post the next updates to each of these pages I will use the new format. There are real advantages to using the new (to me) technology. The whole look of the pages can be changed easily by making changes to one file, rather than opening each page in the editor program and changing things individually. I still have a lot to learn about this new system. I wanted to duplicate my old format, but I don't yet have enough knowledge to do that. I have gotten close if viewed in FireFox, but that pretty page is nearly unusable in Internet Explorer. This page seems to display nearly the same in either browser. If you want to see what the old page looked like or are interested in the previous additions and changes to the site, the old page is here.
