March 2009

When in the course of your bands business, it becomes necessary to cast off your old, crappy website and the confusing, unnavigable interface which you present to the world as your first impression, and to assume the powers of PHP, CSS, XML, RoR, and other technologies not yet invented in the pursuit of a highly compelling online experience, a more meaningful dialogue with your fanbase, and the glorious rewards of possibly higher merch sales, a decent respect to the opinions of webmasters everywhere requires that I should declare the causes which impel me to dream of a better way....

Now, this part won't be any news to anyone, but will mainly serve to help organize the thoughts in my brain. First, the old way:

Here's a band with the resources to do something cooler than they are. Is it just me or is this front page totally overstuffed with info, rendering it almost impossible to glean the useful bits at a glance? Are the links at the top of the page really 2003 looking? Are there an obscene amount of links on the right border that take forever to load?

This cannot be allowed. There is a definite whiff of opportunity here...

So Eminem's old producers sued Universal over royalties. For those of you who have never been signed to a record contract, they are shadier (pardon the pun) than you probably imagine. The whole point of getting a record deal is to try and make some money off of selling your recording, right?

Alright! I finally have some time here. I apologize for the dearth of interesting verbiage from this blog over the last week or so. I'm still getting the hang of this whole thing, of course.

Sitting here in the surprisingly nice Richmond VA airport, so I thought I'd check in. Cool cabby on the ride here. He saw my big PHP book and started asking me about what I was doing, so that pretty much filled up the 20 minute cab ride.

It occurred to me last night during the show (where I do all of my best thinking) that of all of the thousands of websites that I've pored over in this quest, of all the books that I've perused, of all the tutorials that I've read and followed through, the one thing that was missing was the square one explanation of what the hell we're doing here in the first place. Everything I've read so far assumes some sort of foreknowledge or education to prepare oneself for the task of learning software development. I have no such education.