TrumpetBoy
Trumpets, Music, Gadgets, Web Dev. and any other nonsense I feel like mentioning…
Archive for February, 2005
Wordpress 1.5 as CMS!!
Feb 25th
I’ve just finished the first stage of converting the Cat Pack website to run from a Wordpress install. The reason for this is to allow the bandleader, Rich, to update most of the content himself.
All in all it went pretty smoothly – the theme functions are great for this purpose. It now runs as a series of static pages generated from the postings which are split into categories with the same names as the pages. It’s probably a severely convuluted way of doing things but it was the one that made most sense to me.
Before long, I’ll have much less responsibility for this site which will lessen the load considerably – funny how voluntary work ends up taking over your life….
Snowbound in Vienna.
Feb 19th
Spending a fine week in Vienna although we’ve spent it knee-deep in snow! When we arrived on Tuesday, there were various signs of winter but by the time we got out of the first show the snow was already accumulating. It continued throughout Wednesday and Thursday morning so that by Thursday evening, we could see parked cars completely buried!!
I find it interesting to see the Austrian’s reaction to this much snow. With the very lightest snow in England, things go to pieces – Rail services collapse, schools and shops close and people completely lose the ability to drive. In Vienna, with over a foot of snow falling in 2 days, it’s very much business as usual. Public transport has continued to operate in it’s usual efficient fashion – we’ve taken trains and trams to the theatre every day. Pavements are quickly cleared to leave the minimum amount of dirty slush underfoot. Of course, they have this much snow here regularly so it’s no surprise.
The show is going well and it seems that we’ve got some more dates for the summer. They will be added to the Schedule page as soon as they get confirmed. We’re playing here at the Museumsquartier in Vienna until Sunday night – Monday we fly to Dortmund.
Packing again….
Feb 14th
I find myself packing again today. It seems to be a full time occupation these days. Ho hum….
The good part of this is, of course, that it marks my return to mainland Europe. We head to Vienna tomorrow morning to do another week at the Museumsquartier. It’s a great city and one of my favourites. The venue is also good and we had a pleasant time there during our 2 and a half weeks in September. The other cool thing is that my girlfriend, Cynthia, will be visiting for the week from America. Should be a fun week….
Problems with the site…
Feb 12th
Thanks go to a good pal of mine, Neil Gordon, for pointing out the problems I was experiencing with my homepage in the last day or so. This, I think, was down to a Wordpress upgrade I had applied. Specifically, I upgraded to the Gamma release of the new Wordpress 1.5. The software itself is great – the new features have improved things considerably in the inner workings of my blog. Unfortunately, some coding differences had caused the themes module to kick in on the homepage which should have been out of the Wordpress loop and simply including some recent posts. I’ve applied a temporary fix – it’s not pretty but will have to do for a while. This will force me to finally finish off the tweaks and changes to my site design to accomodate some new Wordpress features in the new version. So look out for some changes around here in the next few weeks…
Swinging to the Salsa beat….
Feb 5th
This weekend I’ve taken an unusual step for me – I’ve depped out a couple of shows!! On previous tours I’ve done this hasn’t really been an option so on the Rat Pack 2004 tour I never got around to it. However, in the name of personal sanity, I’ve taken the plunge.
The reason behind it was the chance to do a couple of gigs with one of my favourite bands; "AlmeidaGirl & Descarga". I’ve played with them occasionally since recording on their CD last year and it’s always so much fun. It’s an 9-piece line-up fronted by vocalist Kirsty Almeida and organised by bassist Matt Owens. Between them they’ve written a great set of original Salsa and Latin-Jazz tunes as well as some interesting arrangements of well known tunes. You haven’t heard "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" until you’ve heard the Salsa version! They’ve also put together a great band of guys from the Leeds and Manchester areas.
We played last night (Friday) at The Brindley Theatre in Runcorn to one of the oddest crowds ever! Many of them were from a local salsa class and it turned out that there had been some confusion over how the gig was to run. The teacher from the local class was insistent that she’d been booked to do a class before the show. Others got equally insistent that we were advertised as playing at about 3 different times! No one seemed to quite know who was right so we went on at 7.45pm to appease those who thought we were late already. We started with an instrumental opener and apparently during it we missed an altercation between the Dance teacher, our liaison at the Theatre and Kirsty! The teacher was outraged at not getting to do her class and insisted that none of her students would dance to the band out of loyalty to her. It got calmed down and we did get a full dance floor for much of the 1st set but talk about local politics…
Tonight we’re playing at Po Na Na in Manchester which should be good fun and then on Sunday we’re taking part in a Tsunami benefit at the Forum in Sheffield. It’s great to have a chance to play with this great band (as well as simply doing something different) again before we head back over to Europe with the Rat Pack tour. Who knows? Maybe I’ll take the bold step of depping out again!!