IRFP Pages Change Log

IRFP Web Site Changes after 1 January 2005

Sunday, March 02, 2008:

I'm pretty sure I made a few changes in the intervening year, but not many. Clearly, I've done none since we switched servers back in September, 2007.

Today, I removed the style-sheet switcher from the front page. The infrastructure is still there, just not the selector. I'll get to that eventually.

I removed the Joyent affiliate tags from a number of page

Saturday, January 06, 2007:

I made a bunch of changes over at Flower Electronics. I need to make up a change log for there.

I put in a link on the machines page to FlowerElectronics.com, put up thumbnails of the two versions of LLB. I didn't want to make local LLB pages, so I put on external links. I don't like that, but I did warn people.

Thursday, January 04, 2007:

Reword the announcements for the Little Boy Blues to indicate that they may be gone, but to check for availability.

Changed the announcement on Flower that said all deluxes were sold out. Now it just says "supplies limited; check for availability".

It appears the reason the Flower Electronics Google Analytics tracker wasn't working is because I commented it out. WTF?

Saturday, December 30, 2006:

I noted that the deluxe Little Boy Blues were sold out and that only two standards remained. I did it by using the delete tag. I thought it might be more graphic that way.

I changed the style sheet so that the adtags badges were better spaced out.

Saturday, December 23, 2006:

I put a link in to flower electronics now that the site exists in more substantial form than just a place holder.

A week ago, I made a bunch of .mp3 for Jessica and uploaded them. Now I've linked them all as well.

Thursday, December 14, 2006:

I put on an "emergency update" regarding the availability of Little Boy Blue in hopes of garnering some more sales.

Tuesday, November 21, 2006:

I fixed an encoding problem on the Tours and Europe2006 pages and also added the TxD/SS/Joyent coupons to those pages.

Sunday, November 19, 2006:

I made a reference on the news that a comprehensive update would be RSN

I added TxD/SS/Joyent badges to the home page, irfp releases page, machines page and orders page. To do this, I had to update the style sheet a bit.

I moved Juliett, Prepares to Fail Again and Can't vs. the World from available to unavailable releases.

I added Lush Life to the currently available. The thumbnail I was able to snag from MS Word sucks. I need a proper graphic from Jessica.

I deleted all possible entries from the order page (just commented them all out). That is, nothing can be ordered at the moment.

I deleted some obsolete text on the Machines page.

I put up a couple of links to European things, an interview in Dutch, a video from Belgium and a "web release" from Russia.

Tuesday, November 07, 2006:

I made note of the fact that Little Boy Blue was sold out. Basically, I did a bad thing and added <s> tags around the relevant parts. Not valid, but it will work for now.

I fixed up some issues in the schedule. I should have done more fixing earlier, but better late than never! I'm not sure I got it all correctly, but the wrong ones are in the past.

Sunday, October 08, 2006:

Uploaded the itinerary for the European tour in October through November 2006

Updated the TourDiaries page to point to the European itinerary. Probably won't get the Russian tour diary pirated from MySpace, but soon!

Made some changes to Hot News section, including info on European tour and link to "Little Boy Blue" brochure.

I made mention of "Little Boy Blue" on the Machines page with a link to the brochure. Soon, I need to make up an html page to describe it.

I also changed the e-mail address on the contact page to the gmail address and put a little "[IRFP]" tag in front of the subject so we could track the origin of the e-mail.

Monday, September 11, 2006:

I updated the tour news to talk about Russia.

I moved the old tour stuff to a mid2006 page off the Tour Diaries page.

I updated the Tour Diaries page appropriately. Mostly, it's not diaries, but just itineraries.

I made some updates to the Hot News Section from the .pdf I got in August. But I decided to go to bed rather than figure out how to do all that stuff. Oh well, a start, ne?

Saturday, August 5, 2006:

I made a couple of changes to the "news" section and linked a .pdf that had the actual news. I didn't ahve time to properly format things before going on vacation. I had only gotten the .pdf the previous evening.

Friday, July 28, 2006:

I uploaded the site to TextDrive and found a way to check it out before I changed the nameservers.

I discovered my .htaccess file was for the local host. Has it always been wrong? Yikes!

What the hell, I changed the nameservers too.

Monday, July 10, 2006:

I tagged the rest of the pages with the Google Analytics tracking script and also with the Metastable States i.d.

I also tagged the "About" pages, although technically, they're not really a part of the web site. I should probably have them on MsS.com.

About a week ago, I moved the registrar away from WebHero.com (the new arm of Catalog.com) to NameSecure.com. The reason was to separate hosting from registration so that there would be no conflict should I decide to switch hosts. Having the hosting independent from the registration makes it less likely that one or the other will screw things up.

Sunday, July 2, 2006:

I started adding tags for Google Analytics to each of the pages. I just did pages in the primary directory, but didn't upload any of them.

I also tagged the pages with a notation that the web site was "a Metastable States' web site".

Wednesday, May 17, 2006:

I deleted some more things from the order page. Actually, I just commented out a few more rows of data. We need new stuff, it seems

For some reason, Windows changed the case on this particular file. So I changed it back. I sure wish the M$ folks would let me choose how I like things and not try to change them on me.

I changed the ftp server and password. It seems that someone breeched our host's security. I expect we'll be changing hosts come August. I've already picked one out.

Sunday, April 16, 2006:

I updated the "Hot News" section. Mostly I took stuff off. Jessica sent me a list.

I deleted three sold-out things from the order page. I suppose I should check that the page still works with missing stuff. Essentially, all I did was comment out three rows of data.

I put up an "alternative" Bio page. Basically a review of Jessica's work by someone else. It is linked from the regular bio page

Sunday, February 12, 2006:

I changed the order form to indicate that one could pay by PayPal *or* credit card. Jessica has set up her PayPal account so that she can accept credit cards.

I revamped the "hot news" section on the front page. It was long overdue.

I added a couple of dates to the Tours page.

I added two new tapes to the Current projects page. I'm not sure I like the effect. I should probably cut the text down and make up little description pages.

Thursday, February 02, 2006:

For some reason, Jessica wanted her e-mail changed back to hotmail.com. So I made that change on the Contact page. The mailto: link at the bottom of the page is still gmail.com

I posted an apology for the contact-form screw up on the main page.

Monday, January 30, 2006:

I got home early from jury duty. Jessica had forwarded to me the response on the trouble ticket. It appears that catalog.com now requires an explicit path to the sendmail application with an explicit "from" address included.

I made a simple php.ini file with the following line in it:
sendmail_path = "/usr/local/safe/bin/sendmail -t -i -F jessicarylan@irfp.net -f jessicarylan@irfp.net"
and things appeared to be working again, both the contact page and the order form.

I added apologies for the mail() screw-ups to the Contact, Order and home pages.

Saturday, January 28, 2006:

Well, we're back to the order form problem.

1. I had to remember how to make Apache run on my computer. [command box and type Apache from the Program Files\Apache Group\Apache2\bin directory]
2. Then how to make the local host run for irfp.net [http://localhost/Irfp-dot-net]
3. Then remember to change the "original" form to "Post" method.
4. Then I hard-coded in all the items we're selling on both the Order page and the OrderThanks page. I've still not figured out — not taken the time really — how to do it with a simple array transfer. I should ask my nephew, Dave S.
5. Then I fought with the java script for quite some time. It seems that JS doesn't like functions with the same names as the fields in the form. That is, if you have a form item called "total" don't have a function called "total" as well. Rather, use "total_cost".
6. Along the way, I discovered that the html formatting I did of the Thanks message was pretty much useless for e-mailing. One needs the html for the page that displays, but plain text for the follow-up e-mail. So that makes two sets of text messages that need to be put together.
7. There are still formatting problems with the follow-up e-mails, but they work.
8. I really should work on some server-side error checking as well. I've not done that yet. Maybe next year. It only took me a year to get this far.

Vain person that I am, I added mention of the order form in the "Hot News" section.

There's some problem in the rendering on Opera. The frameset doesn't encompass the whole of the order form. The Order page looks fine in Firefox and IE. What's up with that?

When the order form went live, it didn't work. Something changed on Catalog.com. The form itself worked and the Thanks page appeared to work, but no e-mails were sent, either to Jessica or in confirmation. So I filed a trouble ticket.

Sunday, January 15, 2006:

I put the dates for new shows on the Tour page. There are about 5 of them over the next three months.

I made a number of text changes to the Tour page, including cutting out the references to most of the old shows.

I moved the links to the reviews and interviews from the European tour to the TourDiaries page. That's the one with the overview of all the diaries, most of which are still to be written.

Saturday, January 07, 2006:

I made some small updates while waiting for real content. Because the December tour was over, I moved the itinerary off the Tours page. I just put some weasel words on the Tours page about not touring much anymore, but doing some festivals.

I also put the stuff about not touring anymore, but just doing festivals, in the "Hot News" section.

I've removed the "where is jessica?" link from the index page.

I began munging the e-mail address at the bottom of the page with numerical character references. That will make the page look more professional, but should still foil spam bots. We'll see.

I also munged the webmaster e-mail link on my series of site-development pages and fixed some typos on the site-development log.

Tuesday, November 29, 2005:

Jessica agreed with me about the picture on the home page. So we swapped a new one in.

Added a thumbnail for Wicked Witch on the IRPF page and moved Wicked Witch and You Don't Get to Live to the out of print section.

I added a blurb about Dirty Dynamite Gang to the Current projects page.

Monday, November 28, 2005:

I had to do several updates for this page. I'd fallen behind.

Added two thumbnails to the irfp page.

Added three thumbnails to the Current Projects page.

I changed the photo on the front page. I don't like it in that it is too long and forces all content to "below the fold". Besides, I thought the other picture was rather nice. This one's only 'ok'.

I added a picture to the Can't page and changed the text. I slipped in some extra paragraphs. I hope Jessica doesn't mind. It does make things easier to read.

Wednesday, November 23, 2005:

I updated the Tours page because there was an added date or two and some relevant urls.

I posted a couple of reviews for the New Secret picture disk. It seems that folks like it. Well, I think it's my favorite so far as well.

Sunday, November 20, 2005:

I had to change the order page again. After yesterday's update, someone sent a quick e-mail to order one of the items for which there was a limited edition (Dirty Dynamite Gang 1-sided lp). In essence that particular item sold out in one day!

Saturday, November 19, 2005:

I updated the order page.

I added the bit about the installation at Lokaal01 in Breda, Holland, Listening Post.

Current and past projects pages updated and irfp releases page updated. Some things moved, some things added

Wednesday, October 26, 2005:

I linked to the California tour itinerary from the front page. Actually, it was already linked from the "Upcoming Tours" link and the "Where's Jessica" link. But not within the hot news item from which it should have been linked.

Tuesday, October 25, 2005:

I updated the "hot news" section on the front page.

I did a preliminary formatting of the December tour itinerary on the Tours page.

Sunday, October 09, 2005:

I did a small update on the index page. The "where is Jessica" link now points to the Tours page.

The Tours page now states she's home, mentions the summer's tours and links to a couple of reviews and interviews.

Sunday, September 18, 2005:

I did a small update on the Links page. Zach no longer lives in Japan.

Sunday, September 04, 2005:

I updated the information on the Euorpean Tour page.

I redirected the "Where is Jessica" link in the alert box to the European Tour page, and made a couple small edits to the "Hot News" box to update where we were in the tour activities.

I did a quick summary for the Tours page of all the tours between June and September, and gave the midwest and Canada tour a separate page off the Tour Diaries page. I hope someday we'll get some diaries for those tours.

Sunday, August 21, 2005:

Hazel noted a couple of fairly obvious typos on the Euorpean Tour page. I fixed those. I still need Jessica to supply more details.

I redirected the "Where is Jessica" link in the alert box.

I hunted up some of the web sites for the places Jessica will be playing. Man did I come across some sucky web sites.

Sunday, July 31, 2005:

I changes the link in the little alert box from "tours" to "Where is Jessica?" I thought it gave things a bit more punch. It was sort of in response to Zach's asking me that question yesterday. I said I didn't know, but the answer would be found on her web page.

I made a couple of minor updates or typo fixes to the Tour page.

I validated the "Tour", UKTour, and EuropeanTour pages (and also this About page). There were some problems, but it wasn't too bad. The primary problem was that I had embedded some <h3> tags inside my definition lists. Apparently, that's not kosher.

Saturday, July 30, 2005:

Chaged the venue for the Ottawa show

Broke up the European tour page into two, one for the UK part and one for the European part.

Began adding European dates and venues. Didn't get too far.

Changed a formatting issue on what is now the UK tour page. It's no longer semantic mark up, but looks better and I was too lazy to fix things by changing all the style sheets. I would have had to fiddle with a special class, then add it to all the alternative style sheets as well... and so forth.

Quit and went to the Lowell Folk Festival.

Wednesday, July 27, 2005:

I made some updates to the tours page. One venue was added and some of the others now have more detail. I had some work to do, but I guess a father's devotion to his daughter is greater than one's devotion to a job that no longer pays full time, but for which one is still expected to do a lot of extra, free-time work.

I also updated the European Tours page, but I'm unhappy with the formatting. I'll have to work on that. But not, I really do need to look over my presentation for tomorrow.

Monday, July 11, 2005:

I finished editing the set of pages for Jessica's grant application to Creative Capital (I also did a bit yesterday). I'm not sure why I'm mentioning all this given that the pages are not for public consumption. If anyone reads this and is curious, perhaps Jessica will supply the secret url.

Saturday, July 09, 2005:

I made up a set of pages for Jessica's grant application to Creative Capital

I made up a robots.txt file so that we could keep Google from indexing Jessica's grant application pages

Wednesday, June 29, 2005:

I moved the May–June, 2005 show listing to an archival page

I put the July–August, 2005 show listing, including the Canadian tour, on the Tours page

I started making up a page for the European Tour itinerary

A few updates to the hot news section of the index page

Whew, I did the UK/Europe itinerary too!

Finally, I put a link to the May and June schedule on the Tour Diaries page. No diary, however.

Monday, May 30, 2005:

I fixed a formatting problem on the Tours page. I had missed an end tag on one of the items. It affected general lay out a bit, but wasn't a big deal.

There was also a problem with a <div> nested inside a paragraph. I don't have all this straight, but one can put paragraphs inside <div>s, but apparently not the other way around. I'm not sure why. Anyway, it turns out the problem with the spacing that I mentioned in my 25 May update was caused by this coding bug. When I fixed the improper nesting, I could change my style sheets back to the way they had been, and things rendered properly in IE. So, I must confess that my denigration of IE was misplaced, and the poo should have been on me rather than them. It also goes to show why one should always check pages for validation.

The February Tour Diary didn't validate because I had nested my image-containing <div>s inside paragraphs. So I un-nested the <div>s and it was all fine.

There was another problem on the February Tour Diary with two & characters. The & character isn't allowed. One must substitute a proper character reference instead, in this case &.

The past projects page didn't validate because I had some <br /> tags outside the <li> and </li> tags, but still inside the <ul> pair.

Wednesday, May 25, 2005:

I fixed a problem with line spacing that showed up in IE. It required making small changes to each of my css files. I don't know why IE had a spacing problem. It showed up in both IE5 and IE6. Poo on them.

Tuesday, May 24, 2005:

I formatted the February 2005tour diary. Lots of pictures to resize.

Monday, May 23, 2005:

I corrected a couple of things on the Tours page, which at the moment is just a listing of upcoming shows.

I added a review of the Final Performance CD-R

I added a review of the Jessica Rylan/2673 splid CD. It wasn't clear to me that the review was positive (unlike that for Final Performance which was quite positive).

I made up a page for No Touching and also added a reference to it to the Current projects page.

Sunday, May 22, 2005:

I listed several upcoming shows on the Tours page. Not really a tour per se, but performance dates, none the less.

I updated the hot news and saved the old news for the news archive I hope to make one of these days.

I updated the Order page, deleting three items and adding one.

I updated IRFP page, moving three items from "available" to "out of print".

Deleted a bunch of things from Current Projects. There's something to add, but that may have to wait.

Sunday, April 10, 2005:

I fixed a cosmetic problem on the Order page. I had some empty list items which didn't show up in Opera, but did show up as empty, numbered list items. The real problem was that when the list items were empty, the vertical line spacing got screwed up.

I also fixed some cosmetic problems on this very page. It turns out I had some empty <dd> tags under some of the dates. This screwed up the spacing.

I made a small change to the About page. One can now access the annotated block schematic of the page design structure directly from the main About page. Formerly, a link to it was hidden toward the bottom of the design goals page.

Wednesday, April 06, 2005:

Updated the information on the Tours page. We finally got details on the Albany show.

Sunday, April 03, 2005:

I scanned the covers for Thrasher/Princess and the Jessica Rylan/ 2673 split CD. Thrasher/Princess was added to the list of IRFP releases.

I started the Projects05 page, adding the info on the BCA installation

I added Thrasher/Princess and the Jessica Rylan/ 2673 split CD to the current projects page.

I'm not getting to making a proper order page. So I put up a list of what's available. Jessica seems to think one can send money via paypay if they just have an e-mail address. I need to learn about paypal, but they don't really want to tell me how it works, only sign me up.

Saturday, April 02, 2005:

Yet another update to the tour itinerary. Actually, it was a "put-back". Flywheel Arts wouldn't let Jessica cancel her appearance out there. They even posted her picture! So back there she is.

Wednesday, March 30, 2005:

Once again, I updated the tour schedule and uploaded it.

I updated the "Hot News" section

I put a visibility:hidden; property in my style sheets so that the damn clearing <hr> wouldn't show in IE.

I added some "News and Reviews" to the New Secret page.

Saturday, March 26, 2005:

I updated the tour schedule and uploaded it.

Saturday, March 19, 2005:

I fixed up the figures on the page about the electronic-bird installation at the BCA. The quality of the figures is much better now even though the file sizes are considerably smaller. For some reason, the editing program Jessica used to crop and resize the figures screwed them up. But, VuPro was no better. In the end, I used the new photo-editing program from Google known as Picassa. It's not all that easy to work with nor all that flexible, but at least it preserves image quality. The one weird thing, is you only can set one dimension, but they don't tell you what it is. I think it is height, but sometimes when I tried setting what I thought was height, it ended up setting the width instead. Width would be much more useful for configuring pictures to be used on web pages.

Saturday, March 12, 2005:

I updated the April Tour Info.

As part of the update, I made a slight change in the way the style sheet handled definition lists. I put a bit more padding on the <dt> element so that the beginning of each grouping would have more space to set it of from the various sub-items within the group.

I made up a page describing Jessica's electronic-bird installation at the BCA. I'm not particularly happy with what I did, but I guess it will pass for the moment.

Saturday, March 05, 2005:

I put up the preliminary April Tour Info

Tuesday, March 01, 2005:

I fixed up the favicon so that it has a more proper color combination.

I commented out the link to the tour in the alert box since the tour is over.

I changed the text in the Hot News box about the tour and mentioned that April was coming.

I set up links to the February tour itinerary and tour diary. Now all I need is a diary.

Saturday, February 26, 2005:

I switched all the e-mail links to gmail. I did a bit of research, and the sketchy service from hotmail has been going on at least since last December. In the past couple of weeks things got worse, and as nearly as I can tell, hotmail has been totally unavailable for the past two days at least. I'm surprised a company with the resources of MS would let this problem fester for quite so long. It's good for the Google (GMail) and Yahoo folks.

I feel like such a nerd. I made up a favicon for IRFP.net and put the appropriate link on all pages. I'm not sure I like what I did, but it will do for now, I suppose.

I set up the pages for the February2005 Tour Diary. Now all I need is the content.

I also moved the February2005 Tour itinerary to the appropriate subdirectory and turned the main Tour page back into a couple lines of teasing text.

I scanned the cover of MCvC and put a thumbnail of it on the IRFP release page. I added a bit to the description of that out-of-print recording. I loved the cover; it just had to be displayed.

Tuesday, February 08, 2005:

I clarified a couple of items on the hot news part of the home page. Partly it involved adding links to the BCA and Berwick, and partly I added some extra information.

I made a slight addition to my cheesy css-style popup which describes what IRFP.net is.

I put a link to the "We Are the World" video on the 2002 Projects description page.

I fixed a coding bug on the 2002 Projects page so that it now validates correctly.

Saturday, February 05, 2005

I fixed a typo on the Tours page

I amplified on some things on the page which describes the design layout. Since it's total nerd stuff, it's of little consequence to most people, although anyone reading this is probably nerdy enough to care.

Wednesday, January 26, 2005:

I finished uploading the songs from the New Secret picture disk.

I made some small changes to the style sheets in an attempt to get all the elements of the nav bar to have one line only. Of course I can't fully control this because the font size is a function of people's preferences, and they should be able to set things as they please. Note, however, that this heretical belief is counter to the one held by the pooheads who designed the intranet pages at my work. They claim that anyone who isn't using IE at 1024x768 should go f* themselves — that's essentially what they told me when I complained. Excuse me, Dorkbait, 11px fonts in 1024x768 are basically unreadable by anyone over the age of 30.

I made a trivial change to the order page. Unfortunately, I don't actually have it working yet, however, since I am the problem, not my host, I thought I should point that out.

I discovered, yet again, that I can't proof read for crap.

Tuesday, January 25, 2005:

I put up the September, 2004 tour diary.

The New Years mini tour is now linked on the TourDiaries page.

I'll try to get the .mp3s from New Secret put up. I did the page, but didn't have time to upload the sound files. Perhaps tomorrow.

I put pictures of the cover of BRI: air on the Current Projects and BRI: air pages.

Monday, January 24, 2005:

I updated the February tour itinerary.

I moved the can't songbook to the our-of-print irfp releases.

New England and Final Performance removed from current projects and put in with 2004 projects. I had to update the mininav bar I put in to traverse the 2004 projects.

We no longer list .mp3s as being available for the Puerto Rican Boom Car CD (bummer, that).

I put three new items on the Current Projects page: BRI:air, Private Time, and New Secret. This included making up description pages for each. I think there is a problem of where the pages belong, 2005 Projects or IRFP. I'll have to straighten that out. At the moment, it works, but maintenance will get increasingly difficult if I mix things.

Saturday, January 15, 2005:

I changed the mailto: link at the bottom of the "About" pages to point to webmaster-at- irfp -dot- net rather than to me. Well, webmaster@irfp.net is me as well, but not my normal e-mail, nor even the non-normal one I use at the bottom of my personal (i.e. vanity) pages.

I did a bit of editing on the Oops page that is related to the "About" pages.

Thursday, January 13, 2005:

I had the incorrect e-mail address for Jessica in the php file that sends of e-mails from the on-line form. I had it sending e-mail to jessica -at irfp -dot net rather than to jessicarylan -at- hotmail -dot- com. Now it's fixed.

Wednesday, January 12, 2005:

The php scripting problem turned out not to be too difficult. I read what to do, then didn't do it. Three things are necessary:

1. One needs to put the path to the php interpreter on the first line of every php file. (Does this mean that IE6 will then render in "quirks" mode?)
2. One needs to upload the file in ascii mode (auto/ascii isn't good enough).
3. One needs to set the file permissions to include "execute" for both "group" and "other".

Setting the file permissions from WSftp_LE isn't obvious. It turns out to be a feature offered on the right-click menu after a file has been selected, but is not available from any of the normal menus (at least not that I could find). Oh well, it works now.

I updated the pictures of the Personal Synth, finally. Jessica asked for this fix back around Thanksgiving!

I fixed a broken link on the Design Goals page (it still had the student-site link) and updated some of the text on that page.

Sunday, January 09, 2005:

I was hoping to "go live" with the new site design. Already there are problems. I can't get my php scripting to work on our host (catalog.com). Thankfully, they wrote back fairly quickly and I got straightened out (see above entry — it wasn't their fault).

I put together a new structure for these "About" pages.

I removed the "nerd" box from the index page, but left the style changer.

I'll put up dummy pages for the Contact and Order pages until I get the php scripting problem solved.

I put up the February Tour itinerary.

I began adding descriptions of two new recordings. One, New Secret, has a bunch of associated photos, so I played quite some time with layout on that. I'm not sure I got it correct, so I didn't upload the page.