I just got back from a week-long trip to New Brunswick, where my uncle, an accomplished 80-something musician, just had his first heart attack. Details of his prognosis weren’t available when I flew out the door, but it turned out to be a non-event – he went into the hospital standing up, and was already out by the time I arrived! Once again Uncle Jamie, you’ve shown us how it’s done!

I should get back to building gear this weekend. The only thing keeping me from electro-music wizardry is this amazing weather, so we’ll see.

Site Stuff

After a week away I had 9 spam comments to delete. That’s still pretty manageable, but I am prepared to install any of a number of anti-spam countermeasures if it gets much worse.

Sadly, still no real comments. (Come on people, I know you’re out there!)

Oh, and the “Social Sharing Toolkit” plugin decided to take a shit and no longer load Facebook’s “Share” button. Apparently it was Facebook’s fault, so I had temporarily told the plug-in to display icons instead of loading custom buttons from [insert your soul-sucking social networking vice here]. Just now I updated the plug-in to its most recent version, re-activated the loading of the “share” button (for now), and added a little Google+ thing. Does anybody actually use Google+? I know I certainly don’t.

The long and short of it: Facebook’s ugly little button loads again. And don’t think I’m not also annoyed that its dimensions are still different from Twitter’s button.

If trends continue, this site will have spat out over 140 gigabytes of (mostly musical) traffic during July 2012. That’s more than I hoped for, but I can’t help wondering if this will raise any red flags with the ol’ ball and chain, my web host. I paid for one of those “unlimited everything” packages, but when numbers start standing out, people start acting funny. I don’t know whether I should expect an email requesting an explanation at the end of the month.

Over the past few months I’ve been fiddling with WordPress plugins, options, child themes, php, css, and all that bullshit. It has been a huge learning experience, but I have now accomplished almost everything I wanted:

1. The front page displays only “frontpage” posts (thanks to the “Frontpage Category Filter” plugin).
2. Each category (artist or blog source) can now have its own custom header image, presently visible on nebula, v0ins and The Kids Want Techno. This was done with some PHP hackery, and if I find time maybe I’ll figure out how to make it work for pages (like calendar, videos and OM Sets) as well.
3. The custom header on the category pages is smaller (less tall) than the huge front page header. Also done with a bit of php re-coding.
4. The verbage at the top of each category page now only shows the category description, including any embedded html. This is perfect for very small artist bios. (Presently the Boots page is nothing but a long bio, but he will be editing that down)
5. Heading (i.e. “H1″) text is smaller across the board. I haven’t decided whether to make paragraph text a point smaller. (What do you think? Is this too big?)
6. The search box is no longer in the page header (it looked really dumb on the iPhone). Took care of that in header.php.
7. I found a great audio player that seems to work on everything: Firefox, Chrome, Safari, MSIE, Windows, Mac, iPhone, Commodore PET… It’s called “oEmbed HTML5 Audio” if you’re wondering. The Flash player is a bit crashy on Firefox, which is not surprising considering Flash sucks donkey balls.  Of the many players I tried, this is the only one that works pretty good, and it makes embedding an audio player really easy.
8. After playing around with several “Upcoming Events” calendar plugins, the most stable and predictable one I could find is “My Calendar”. This is most defintely subject to change, but its presentation suits the site’s needs perfectly. The only issue is that there is unfortunately no way, using shortcode, to create an event within a post.

I’m sure I’ve done more than that, but those are the biggies. Please leave a reply below (haha, as if) if you see anything that’s not displaying correctly.

All this stuff needs to settle a bit before I consider upgrading the site to the newest WordPress.

All that’s left for me to do before the site’s official launch:

1. Finish the contributors’ documentation.
2. Create some more custom category headers.
3. Chase down the last few contributors.
4. Favicon!
5. Get rid of menus on iPhone
6. Get subcategory listings when categories “artists” and “news” are viewed

UPDATE:

The Favicon’s done, and I had a little help from the Dynamic Drive Favicon Generator site. Fair is fair, so I share the following link:

UPDATE: (2012-06-10)

Just for shits and giggles I’ve been approving the comment spam for this post. I just pull out all the links and email addresses.

Oh, and I almost forgot: “Frontpage Category Filter” (which I mentioned above, and thought was simply awesome) was fucking things up. It scrwes up certain database queries, thus breaking other plug-ins. Support requests are unanswered. I disabled it about a month ago and hard-coded its functionality into my WP theme via PHP, alongside the header customizations.