It's now been a month since I got the ball rolling on revamping the website, and I must say... it's looking good! Still having some teething problems with Internet Explorer 8, however it's largely due to the fact it's not HTML5 compatible! So upgrade your browsers everyone!
The biggest news of the year so far was the completion of the lighting system on 30th December 2011! The final four Colortubes arrived earlier that week and it was off to Keith to spend four days locked in a hall by myself, alone, with 90 DMX fixtures and a PC! There is a SD (standard definition) video on YouTube at the moment, but there will be some HD footage coming later in the year of all the combinations of light show I can offer up to anyone who's interested. You can find the link on the lighting page, it's fairly obvious! Feedback on Facebook has been overwhelmingly positive and I'd like to say a big thank you to everyone that has actually sat through the entire 25 minutes without skipping through it! Ha!
There will continue to be changes to the site for most of January and February as I continue to work out the teething problems. A massive thanks to Alex Saulys who took some time working through a number of browsers looking for problems. I think the majority of the hassles will be found on the sound page. More photos will appear of lighting shows before very long, so feel free to check that out!
It's official! I hate Internet Explorer 8! You would think that Microsoft Web Expression 3 would be compatible with Microsoft Internet Explorer 8? No, I'm just getting cascade style sheets fired back at me all wrongly! However Chrome and Firefox display them beautifully, purposefully and perfectly. Figured out why my proxy/firewall was blocking some of the images... only because it contained the word "banner" and mistaken the pictures for advertising. Anyway... design of Eat Audio Dot Com V3 is going very well, and it's nearly ready for launch in early 2012. I've come to the conclusion I have a lot to do for getting the video up and running, so my shiny new Sony HD video camera is going to be put to a lot of good use at future gigs!
The photo album is looking pretty good, and I must admit that Visual Slideshow has done a great job of all the sliding panels and the effortless display of all my gig pics! A massive thank you to everyone who's been at a gig in recent times and went snap happy! The only major problem I'm having is linking some of the panels to pages. No matter how I try, I'm getting nowhere fast trying to apply hyperlinks to them.
Remember my story about my dbx DriveRack PA+? I had an e-mail from Dolphin Music the other day tell me that the Peavey VSX26 is now in stock! So I'm getting one of those shipped to me instead! Delighted! Rockmessy went down a treat and I'm pleased to say that gig will pay for my last four ColorTube EQ 3.0's. I should have them in time to get programming the remaining light shows in DMX Control! Had a couple of good DJ gigs this past while, and inevitably I'm back at the Station Hotel in Portsoy on Christmas Day! Looking forward to it a lot, though I've still not made my mind up with what gear I'm taking! Hmmmm!
So, Eat Audio Dot Com is finally getting a makeover! By the time this website gets relaunched in early 2012 a lot of the hard graft, and work will be done. This will be the third version and will hopefully last another three years before it starts to look a bit tired and dated! That'll take us into 2015, 2016 with a bit of luck! The website is still hosted by Canaca over in Canada and a pretty damn fine job they do of it too! With the launch of HTML5, a lot of the old Adobe Flash has been discarded. There's much better Java integration for photo slideshows and modern browsers play MP4 video files without any fussing, all done with a few lines of code rather than tricky Flash code to integrate.
Earlier in 2011 I'm pleased to say that all the main parts of the sound system were completed. The only thing I'm waiting on now is the dbx Drive Rack PA+ crossover. I've not had a lot of luck waiting on Peavey's VSX 26, and I've been waiting since February for it to become available. Unfortunately Peavey are having distribution problems on most of their outboard so that idea had to be binned! Which is a pity because the VSX has all the Versarray programmes built in. Now I'll just have to programme the dbx unit by hand! Never mind! Also in terms of outboard I'm waiting for a dbx quad compressor for vocal inserts.
The lighting is mere steps away from being completed. The Chauvet Colortube 3.0 EQ's are looking great. Having picked up four of them, and possibly another four over the course of the next few weeks that will mean all the lighting is completed. Having just added a 2200mw full colour RGB laser, it's a very exciting time. The sheer quality of the scanners and the brightness of each colour component is astounding. Over the tail end of December I have a hall booked to be able to programme the rest of the DMX show, and now integrate the ColorTubes, strobes and colour lasers into the system. Currently the RGB laser and large strobes are being operated manually which is far from ideal - but it's not been so bad.
A lot of DJ gigs this month all over Aberdeenshire, and one final hit in Moray with the Rockmessy event at the Longmore Hall in Keith on December 10th!
Time for a change...