solarbird | May. 27th, 2013

The band website has been kind of a mess for a while, partly because I kept adding things in weird places that I thought might work but didn’t, and partly because it has always been an assemblage of parts. The blog is a locally hosted WordPress, the video page was just my YouTube channel, the music page was at least partially integrated but is still really Bandcamp – things like that.

Basically, it was a mess, and entirely out of hand. And I read an article a few weeks ago on focus of presentation on your main band page, and decided to do something about it. It’s not so much a redesign – because it isn’t – as a better and more complete implementation of the existing design.

Originally, I just wanted to fix the front page. But then YouTube threw its new page format at me, and that doesn’t work with what I do. And one of my blog readers told me they turned off stylesheets to read my blog(!) because they simply can’t read white on black, and I’ve heard people say they had trouble with that before, and it all kind of snowballed.

So I pulled a couple of style elements from the blog and brought them over (particularly in the left bar), and hammered the other parts of the blog into looking like the rest of the site, made a videos page that’s not on YouTube, updated just about everything for consistency, and, well, take a look at it, will you? Does it render reasonably on your machine?

One big advantage of the new blog format is that I can post wider pictures without breaking the columns. Yay!

I’ve tested it on a couple of browsers and it’s fine so far, but I don’t have every browser or OS. From here, it looks a lot more consistent and frankly less goofy a presentation, but it’s still new code and parts of it could be broken.

And I’m still not sure what to do on phones. On phones, WordPress flips over to Carrington, which is a mobile-specific standard format, which is a a lot easier to read but… not attractive. Also I don’t know how to get the social-candy-icons stuff to show up over the banner on the blog page, because WordPress. I do know how to get them to show up on the Music page. I haven’t done it yet, but will – it’ll be tedious, and can wait until after Folklife is over.

Anyway, give it a look, if you get a chance. Does it work on your machine?

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come listen to our music!

So at Folklife there was a guy carrying around a sign, “Kick me in the balls for $20.” And I was going to leave him alone but today it was down to $10 and he had some people aggressively shilling for him so when one of them came over to me while I was walking by, we had this conversation:

Solarbird: So where does the $10 come out?

Shiller: No, you kick him in the nads, $10!

Solarbird: Yeah, I get that, how hard to I have to kick him to make the $10 come out?

Siller: No, you give him $10!

Solarbird: But the sign… <points>

Then the guy shilling got mad and walked away which is really too bad, because I have a whole bunch of questions about this whole procedure, like, how did $10 get in there anyway? And if it was $20 yesterday, were there also $20s in there? And where did they go? And honestly, this sounds like some sort of medical condition, and he really should get it looked at, because while I’m no more fond of the American health care system than anyone else, I really have to say that for once this seems like kind of a self-correcting situation, because if you have a condition that makes your body spit out co-pays, that’s a pretty good start. “Yes, I have insurance.” <BALLKICK!> “Here y’go.”

Then Anna wanted to know whether this is related to the condition where you hit somebody ’till candy comes out, and that made me realise: My gods. It’s the tooth fairy. What is her plan?!

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come listen to our music!