I’m working on a new tune for Hors d’Oeuvreture. It’s a little goofy, and at 176 BPM, it’s probably the fastest track I’ve ever recorded. The tempo also inspired its title, “Morgantown Expressway.”
Note: To conserve server space, I’m clearing out older versions of the Hors d’Oeuvreture songs. Visit the album page to hear the latest available version of each track!
One thing that surprised me when I started using WordPress again is that its search function only searches on blog posts, not on static pages. I suppose if most WordPress sites are 99.9% blog posts, then it probably makes sense, but I have enough static pages on my site that I’d like to make searchable to warrant changing this.
Fortunately, someone has. Unfortunately this “Search Pages” plug-in is out of date and no longer works with current versions of WordPress. I dug in a bit and figured out why: the plug-in alters the SQL query that performs the search, but the substring it replaces in the query no longer exists! So I hunted down the place where the query occurs in the WordPress core, adjusted the plug-in as needed, and it works!
Here, then, is my hack of the Search Pages plug-in, modified to work with WordPress 2.1. (I’m not sure which other versions of WordPress it will or will not work with.)
I’ve continued to tweak the two tracks I’ve been working on for the new album. I just posted a major update to “Heavy Water,” which you can listen to here or on the “official” page for the album.
I also posted minor updates to both tracks yesterday, in place of the earlier versions that were there. I didn’t bother to draw attention to them though, as they were basically just tweaks to the masters.
In addition to the current projects, I have a 16:18 ambient track I recorded last year, called “1.618” (because it’s based on the golden ratio… the length of the track is a deliberate play on that number), that I’m planning to add as the final track on the CD. It needs some clean up back over in Pro Tools (because I discovered GarageBand buckles under the stress of loading a pair of 16-minute waveform tracks) and a new master. I got a new computer since I worked on it, and all I seem to have backed up are the Pro Tools project and an MP3, but no CD-quality mixdown. More on that later.
Note: To conserve server space, I’m clearing out older versions of the Hors d’Oeuvreture songs. Visit the album page to hear the latest available version of each track!
The first couple of tracks for my new CD, tentatively titled Hors d’Oeuvreture (and tentatively featuring the wonderful Photo Booth-generated photo of yours truly, shown at right, as cover art), are now posted for your listening (dis)pleasure. Check them out now!
The new WordPress 2.1-based version of room34.com is here! I’ve been tinkering with this for about a month now so I’m very excited to finally have it online. And I think WordPress has really taken a major leap forward with version 2. (My loyal reader may recall that I had previously moved to an earlier version of WordPress, only to abandon it a short time later. Frankly, looking back I’m just amazed that I actually used it for 8 months; it seems like it was much less than that, but maybe that’s just because I’m thinking about how I only had Drupal running for about three days.)
There are still a few things left to do: some pages have missing content or broken links; I’m still working on a top navigation bar with dropdown menus (for now the navigation is buried below the fold in the right sidebar… look for Points of Interest and the various links that follow); and there are a plethora of WordPress plug-ins I’m eager to implement.
I’m also moving the photo albums of the kids over into Gallery 2. There’s a lot of work left to do on that, so I apologize to family and friends who are looking for photos. They’ll be back online soon, I promise! (I mean, “I hope!”)
And finally… in the time that I’ve been working on this, I’ve written a few other new blog entries (six, to be precise), which I never bothered to post on the old site. But they’re here, below, so read on!