I want to apologise for the past few days of graphical mayhem on the site. I think the storm is mostly over. It’s not the result of any nefarious doings or some vast interweb meltdown. Nope. Just me dickin’ around.
As some of you are aware, I am constantly making small changes to the web site. I try to ‘slipstream’ these so that they are largely unnoticeable as they happen, but over time the site slowly morphs. And all the while, I try to keep ‘the brand’ consistent.
And then there is the occasional tweak that has, what they call over at BP Oil ahem ‘unintended consequences’. And then what you end up with is, as they say in the old country: A lotta tsuris is what you’ve got mine friend.
OK, maybe they say only that in the circumcised bits of Ireland.
Just so ya know… I keep trying to make the site easier to use for people with disabilities and small displays such as iPhone users. (One might say that many of you smartyphone users are by definition disabled with digital smugness but that’s a rant for another day.) Anyhoo, I keep working on various lo-tech solutions to getting a better look, with less scrolling for simpler displays and sometimes? I mess up.
You might be asking yourself why the heck spend so much time on this sort of crap. It’s a fair question. Frankly, when I see a musician’s web site that looks too good it pretty much means that he’s really a web designer—but who spends his nights posing as an artiste with a baroque web site. In fact, there is growing evidence that there may be a law of physics whereby the quality of a guy’s music is inversely related to the quality of his website. I look at it as a tool—it’s the primary way I interact with y’all. It’s my business card. So I take it personally. But I never want to convey the impression that the form (the site) matters more than the substance (the music.) Hopefully the occasional disaster such as you’ve seen over the past two days is reassuring that such is definitely not the case.
And fair warning, this may not be the end. There are a couple of tweaks remaining that you probably don’t notice but which are driving me nuts. And then there is a whole bunch of fantastic new content I’ll be posting in the next few weeks to roll out the Re-Mastered Positive. (Yeah, it’s really happening.) I’m pretty sure that this new content will roll out looking good. Like most problems in life, the sort of site chaos you’ve witnessed recently usually only happens when one is not expecting it. The stuff you’re actually looking out for usually work out OK. Right?
