TDobes's blog

You are currently viewing Tom's MerrillvilleChoir.com development blog. As I have been making a lot of changes to the site lately, I decided it might be beneficial to everyone if I posted about the changes as I made them. If you're looking for my personal blog, it's on a separate site entirely.

Look at Tom's ToDo list for MerrillvilleChoir.com (includes the status of putting concerts online)

I know I know... I'm overdue for an update. I've been working on putting together the online version of the fall concert, but it's still not ready. I think I'll try and get some Seussical photos set up over in the gallery pretty soon here too.

In the meantime, we're now featuring a vastly-improved search here on the site. Results should be much more accurate and searches which previously may have returned few or no results now return many. Try it out!

I'm working on getting some funds to hire help to run this crazy thing. It's really difficult to run a web site of this size by oneself. (especially when you're a lazy college student like me!)

Tonight, I finished putting Saturday's "Welcome to Choir" Potluck online... I have photos + audio for everything but the barbershop quartet. If anyone has a photo of the barbershop quartet performing, please let me know. I'd be happy to give you a photo credit in exchange for letting me place your photo online.

Unfortunately, the audio from this concert did not turn out as well as I might have hoped. The sound system at Pierce is so terrible... noise reduction can only do so much to get rid of buzz + noise. Hopefully, we'll have this fixed up before next year's potluck.

I'm hoping to have a quick turn-around time like this for putting future concerts online. I guess we'll find out if I can keep this promise after the fall concert.

Just a quick note about two more new things that we added this week...

We recently added the "choir chalkboard" which is basically a log (or "blog," if you'd prefer) for Mr. Emig very similar to this one I'm using. The goal here is to replace the old page we had set up, which was very seldom updated. We'll see if he actually updates this one... feel free to bug him about it.

There seems to be a great deal of confusion over when events are happening this year. As usual, there have been several thousand changes to the calendar since the parenting calendar and student calendars were printed. Therefore, I've posted a calendar here on the web page. For now, it's just a table listing the dates and events... eventually, I hope to turn it into an actual interactive event calendar. We had one of these on the old site, but I'd like to set one up here such that folks other than me can maintain it. (Whether they actually will or not remains to be seen. )

Anyway, that's all for today. More later this week... maybe.

Today I finished putting the audio online from part 1. I still need to capture photos for both the 1st and 2nd part before the concerts are officially "finished."

Tomorrow, I've got a lot to do, so I don't expect to have any time for the web page... and Wednesday looks busy as well. Look for the next update on Thursday or Friday, most likely. In the meantime, enjoy the audio... that's what it's all about, after all.

For a while, I'm going to concentrate my choir efforts on putting concerts online. I've been sorely neglecting this job for the past few years... I spent a bit of time and put together a table of the present status of all concerts. As you can see, there is much work to be done. Today I made some progress on both part 1 and 2 of the 2004 Contest concert. Music from part 2 is now online, although captions and photos are still missing. I hope to finish the music from part 1 tomorrow. (and hopefully at least get started on the photos from both parts)

It took from roughly noon till midnight (minus a 2-hour break for dinner) to finish and set up the music from part 2. That's 10 hours, for those keeping track at home. I think I'm beginning to remember why I was so lazy about getting this done in the first place. *grumble*

Anyway... stay tuned... hopefully more progress soon.