daveryder.com [the official dave ryder website]

So it turns out that permalinks suck - they look pretty but it changed the htaccess to the point that when you wanted to go to a directory like the downloads directory, WordPress just gave you a 404 error. After spending days trying to find a fix I finally just said, “fuck it” and turned them off. Which led me to my next discovery: password protecting the downloads directory messed up my linking directly to the mp3s in that directory (duh). I can come up with a work-around for that, but time issues are forcing me to put that on the back burner for now.

(EDIT: after re-reading the wordpress codex link above, I’ve got a few more ideas about how I can fix the permalinks issue, but that’s still on the back-burner, too).

Like tonight, another new version of WordPress was released, so I fired up the ol’ auto-update plugin and took care of it, but that was just another thing taking away time I needed to spend getting this site up to at least a bare-bones level of acceptableness.

The good news is I found out these problems now and was able to fix them with relatively little effort and now will be able to focus on other things. Yay.

Well I finally got around to sending out the first Newsletter, mostly a little test of PHPList (which powers my newsletter) and of course there have turned out to be issues I hadn’t foreseen, mostly having to do with people who use gmail, hotmail and yahoo (oh that’s not too big of a percentage, is it?).

The basic problem is this: I wanted to send the email as HTML, so I could make it look similar to the rest of my site, and be able to include a newsletter logo at the top which is clickable , and be able to include images in the body occasionally, also. Here is the logo (I had to shrink it a bit to fit here, so the font looks a little funky):

I have grown used to styling HTML with CSS, and since gmail and hotmail strip <style> tags, many people received a newsletter with black text on a black background (just lovely). If you’re interested, here is more information on how I worked around the problem. Also this article by Xavier Frenette was very helpful, too.

If you want to see the newsletter the way you were supposed to, it is in the newsletter archive (Newsletter #1).

So I will be sending out a second newsletter very soon, pointing the original recipients here for an explanation of the black-on-black fiasco, plus there were a few things I’d left out and wanted to add, anyway. ‘thorry for the inconvenienthe (that is a HHGTTG reference for all you fellow Douglas Adams fans).

Nobody has yet to figure out the secret code in my header:

15.18.21.2.11.5.21.1.19.1.13.13.5.8.11.7.24

The clue is in the upper right hand corner of the header: X=4

It’s a cipher, wrapped in an enigma, smothered with secret sauce (Jimmy James).

I installed Justin Blanton’s Smart Archive WordPress plugin today for my archives page. However, if you want to run PHP code from within a WP Page you have to install a plugin to allow WordPress to execute the code (why? uh, I dunno. you just have to.).

So, I found the Exec-PHP plugin by Sören that is extremely well documented, works nicely and is kept up-to-date. Nice work by both of those guys.

I only had one minor difficulty understanding how to call the Smart Archives function, but that was just my php ignorance - the plugin works perfectly .

Occasionally I want to hear a real audio stream, like this Syd Barrett documentary at the BBC.

Unfortunately, the RealPlayer sucks, for a number of reasons. But I found a place where you can download a special version of the RealPlayer that has none of their spyware features, is expiry-free and nuisance-free: The BBC website.

(One quick note: These are mac and pc downloads - for linux you want the awesome Helix RealPlayer, but of course if you use linux you already know that, ‘cus that’s just how we linux guys roll. Okay, I’m not a real linux guy, I just dabble a little with Ubuntu.)

Because of Great Britain’s strict public service remit, the BBC made a unique deal with Real Network to allow this version of the RealPlayer, which you can obtain by downloading it via the BBC website.

Super sweet!

The entire band got together yesterday for a marathon recording session, and the results are pretty spectacular. I just finished listening to some of the raw, barely mixed playbacks and wow the guys were really on their game. Billy Clark has a new rig that had everybody raving about the tone and I guess savageness is a good descriptive word - I’ll see if I can get him to email me a pic and a description of it, he’s always been cutting edge with his gear and I’m sure it would interest a lot of guitarists out there in cyberland.

Actually me, Don and Dan got together the night before, so for us it was really a marathon session - we did a lot of the prep work like setting up, checking volume levels for the board and the PC inputs and getting the headphone and control room mix kind of set up (I say kind of because until the whole band is actually blasting through a number you can’t really be sure of the headphone mix - you just have to adjust it on the fly).

Plus we drank a lot of beers. I stupidly drank about 5 coronas with limes, and I always forget the hell I pay the next day. Our friend Paul brews beer as a hobby and we’ve talked about the so-called corona effect, and it’s true - there actually is a scientific reason why you get a headache from mexican beers. I’ll see if I can get him to clarify that a bit for our beer drinking readers (what? Beer drinkers and hell-raisers read this blog? I’m shocked). Kent wisely drank Sam Adams.

I forgot to take pictures of it (dammit) but here’s an older one of us recording - trust me they generally look pretty similar, only we usually wear rattier clothes and there are more beer bottles on the tables:

Since I am setting up the new photo galleries as well as reinstalling my old gallery from the old daveryder.com, I’ve been looking through a LOT of photos. And, because there is a kind of piratey theme running through the new daveryder.com website (and because I haven’t really said much about the biggest joy in my life - my son Muggy), I thought I would post these scary pirate photos.

These are actually from the Halloween before last, so are almost a year and a half old (wow time flies):

Here we are at the Magic House touching the freaky static electricity ball (that thing always gives me the heebie jeebies for some reason):

3 of the scariest pirates you’ll ever see - Me, Kristian (muggy’s cousin) and Muggy):

I think this is the best Captain Jack Sparrow you’ll ever see:

Aaaarrrrgggh so pirate me ye scurvy dogs or I’ll gut you and send your carcasses down to Davey Jones’ locker!

I have been recording a lot of music lately - some by myself, and some with Dan McHugh monday nights at his home recording studio. We’ve been coming up with some really interesting stuff, but since I’ve been so busy I haven’t been able to do much with the website. That’s how it is (with me anyway): when the spark to make music is there you just have to do it, and everything else takes a back seat.

I did upload a bunch of new photos, but I have to set up the simple viewer galleries for them so that may take a while. I’m not so familiar with the simple viewer plugin yet that I can just do it without referencing the readme.

I will be happy when the basic website is finished and I can just upload new music and post about writing and recording music, which is after all the whole point of this site - I just thought I would kind of document my experiences with WordPress as well while I redesigned the site. I don’t know if any of my friends will actually be interested in any of that stuff, but maybe some other people will, plus it’s kind of cool for the band members to see the huge amount of work involved setting up the site, so they don’t think I’m dicking around wondering why it’s taking so long.

It’s actually funny now that I think about it: I have spent an enormous amount of time since 1998 when the first daveryder.com was posted on the internets learning HTML and how to FTP and manage a web hosting account. I really don’t begrudge it, if it wasn’t for all that work and time spent learning I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing with the site now. I suppose I would have to outsource it and that would just kill me. I have always been a hands on guy and I love the fact that as ideas occur to me regarding the band’s web presence I can just implement them, or write about them as soon as I think of them.

Today I installed the Enhanced WordPress Contact Form.

Check it out: Contact Me.

This one, as well as the sociable plugin were written by Joost de Valk. Here’s a photo of Joost:

I like his plugins for a number of reasons:

So I just want to say well done Joost and thanks for the cool plugins!

I noticed that the Code Markup plugin I installed the other was breaking my WordPress layout in Internet Explorer. There is nothing wrong with the plugin, it’s just doing what it is supposed to do, i.e. display code snippets or blocks of code exactly - without rendering HTML in the browser. And I think if I had a WordPress layout where the sidebar and menu was on the left side of the page, it wouldn’t be an issue.

But I don’t (my sidebar is on the right) and I had to do something about it.

So here is how I fixed it:

Whenever you insert code into your post editor, you have to put these tags before it (and of course close them out at the end of your code snippet): <pre> and <code markup=”none”>

Then insert this into your theme’s CSS (style.css):

/* code markup */
code {
	font: 1.1em 'Courier New', Courier, Fixed;
	color: lightblue;
	}

pre {
  overflow-x: auto;
  width: 410px;
  overflow-y: auto;
  height: 110px;
}

html>body pre {
  overflow: auto;
  width: 410px;
  height: 110px;
}
/* End Code Markup*/

And the problem is fixed .