May 2010

The newby web programmer. Episode 3.

Submitted by jgrubb on Mon, 05/17/2010 - 8:34am

So, you've spent the last few months teaching yourself Wordpress. Good job. There are lot of crappy websites out there, most of them built by some site-builder commodity crap-stuffer at GoDaddy or Network Solutions or some other budget host. These are God-awful examples of poor web development practices. They're ugly. They don't render correctly in browsers.

A tale of two doc sections

Submitted by jgrubb on Wed, 05/19/2010 - 8:04pm

I don't know about you, but the difference between an exciting open source project and a less than exciting open source project boils down for me when I get to the first page of their documentation.

Open source the music business!

Submitted by jgrubb on Fri, 05/21/2010 - 7:32pm

That sounds like the spirit, then! How do I explain this?

Open source and why it's cool

Submitted by jgrubb on Sat, 05/22/2010 - 10:30am

What is open source? It can actually mean a variety of different things, but most simply it means free software that anyone can use as is or alter as they see fit for their particular needs.

Open sourcing the idea.

Submitted by jgrubb on Thu, 05/27/2010 - 12:19pm

So, the 14 of you that still swing by here know my backstory. Sometime in 2003 I joined a band with a neglected website.

I had this idea for a band...

Submitted by jgrubb on Fri, 05/28/2010 - 9:01pm

So, the software model of yore is just that. The one where you go to the mall and buy a box with a disk inside of it. Do you remember doing that? I do. I actually remember it more clearly than going to the music store, but that's probably a figment of where I'm at right now in terms of my interests. I digress, within five sentences...

Ignored by dinosaurs - part 1

Submitted by jgrubb on Mon, 05/31/2010 - 9:43am

If the music business is ever going to be saved, if musicians are ever going to be allowed a chance to achieve a minimum standard of living, if we are going to rescue music itself from it’s place as today’s disposable trinket and restore it’s place as the universal human language, then the paradigm has got to be completely and utterly reinvented.

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Ignored by dinosaurs - part 2

Submitted by jgrubb on Mon, 05/31/2010 - 11:54am

I realized about a year ago that nobody anywhere even had a clue, never mind a plan that saved what was worth saving about the music industry – the music part.

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Guilty. Most of us reading this are. There were several entire generations that went by where it was a perfectly logical thing to associate money and music as somehow being comfortable companions if not downright synonymous. It was BIG business - not in the way that defense contracting is, but it was perfectly logical for a certain subset of money and attention seeking individuals to get into the music business. And you didn't even have to have musical talent! In fact, there was more money in it for those who didn't! Word eventually got around and by the late 80s most labels heads weren't music lovers but lawyers. The snake started eating its tail sometime around then. Nirvana was arguably the last great, game-changing band that came out of that entire era.

I don't mean to sound like one of those bloviating music biz pundits. So anyway ->