The Hobby Webmaster Blog

I have recently been adding some content to my Mixer in a Box site. I have just uploaded a page about the scenes system incorporated in the SAC software. This scenes system is very powerful. The resolution of the scenes system allows one to control a single event on a single mixer up to a global snapshot of all twenty five mixing consoles in the Software Audio Console software. Read more about the uses of the scenes system on the Scenes Page at Mixer in a Box.

I have added a Mixer Views page to the Mixer in a Box site. This goes into some detail about the various views that are available in the virtual mixer. I am illustrating these new pages with screen shot cuts of the various parts of the mixer. I even got a little fancy and made a hover pop-up enlargement of one of the images.

I have at least two more pages planned for this site. The next page will be about effects patching and the scenes system. Then I think that I will write an article about using the virtual mixer in real live situations. I will probably work some more on this tomorrow, and then on to the next project.

I am proceeding with the update to the MC Rally site. I am adding a tribute page to Bruce Rossmeyer the local Harley dealer who died in a motorcycle accident in Wyoming just before the Sturgis Rally. This was a great loss to this community. A local artist did a painting of Bruce at an event in Daytona. Perego gave me permission to use a picture of that painting on the tribute page. The site update is still in progress and the page is not yet linked but you can Check It Out Here.

I finished work on my new background image gallery. It is one of the larger galleries on the site with 96 images. These are processed from images of fabrics that I found on the web. There is a wide diversity of fabrics represented in the gallery from lace to upholstery fabric. Some are quite happy and others are rather sedate.

I modified my gallery generating software for this site so that it produces pages using the background image for the page background. This duplicates the original pages that I built by hand in an instant. The only time consuming part of the process is preparing the images. Once the images are prepared, page generation and final processing and uploading is very fast.

It is always interesting to me to see the images in use as a background. Just seeing the image does not tell the whole story. When the images join to form a continuous background there is often quite an impact. Check out the new gallery on my Symmetrical Backgrounds site.

The new Mixer in a Box Blog is fully operational at this time. I may investigate adding a few pictures, or I may put up a gallery on the main site. I did complete the template work and learned a bit more about working with the WordPress theme. I also added a new info page with links to my other sites and the developer’s SAC site. I included also a system integrator’s site that offers packaged SAC systems. My vision for the service offered by Mixer in a Box is more of a custom build site than a packaged system site. One of the attractive features of the SoftWare Audio Console system is that you can use the same mixer with full features with inputs for just a few items on up through 72 full stereo channels. It just depends on the hardware that you select. It is possible for a solo or duo act to go out with a laptop and a few inputs and have the full quality and features that are enjoyed by a full concert system. I invite anyone who is interested in live sound, digital audio, or computers to visit the blog and site.

Work has been interfering with my web play time, and it is only going to get more in the way for the near future. I do and will have things to post to the AudioArtSound blog though. I did write an article for my site Selling on Your WebSite this evening. The article is titled ‘Traffic is not Enough!‘ It talks a bit about the importance of targeting the traffic that you draw to your website. The title is a link to the article, if you are interested.

While I was paying attention to that site I also did some minor updates to reflect my most recent site configurations. I had brought the site up to spec last month, but as I go I think of some small things and learn some new tricks. I took care of some back office tasks, tweaking the code and css, and made minor cosmetic changes. I have been adding my navbar background to the left nav box recently, color coding all the nav areas the same. I have also been putting a background in my right column ad box because I use both 12o and 160 pixel skyscraper banners there with a frame. The narrow banners look better, I think, with a background color to fill the frame.

Last evening I went live with the update to The Closet Online, check it out!! The primary feature of the update is the home page with eight boxes with randomly rotating content. The page will look slightly different on each load (hint, when you visit the page hit the refresh button a few times).

I learned something about the clear function in css. The page was falling apart at lower screen resolutions (I am designing on a 19″ 1440X900 screen). I tried inserting a spacer div to keep the page from falling apart at anything below about 1300px and that includes at least 75% of viewers probably. Until I thought to apply ‘clear: both’ to the div in the css I had no success. Since I found this key I have added the spacer div to my starter pages. I had been applying a height value to my content area. That kind of works, but when the screen resolution is reduced past a certain point the content spills off the bottom of the page. I will need to revisit each of those pages probably to correct this problem. I probably can’t craft a ‘find and replace’ for this situation because the content varies from page to page.

In other news, I started a ‘to do’ list a couple of weeks ago with jobs and ideas for the websites. I add things as I think of them and delete completed projects when I finish with one. So far, the list gets longer much quicker than it shrinks. I will have plenty of tasks lined up for this slow season in my regular business. Somebody may even find one of these pages and click on a banner or link and buy something.

I put the ad rotator script into action on the Shopping for Electronics site. If you refresh the page the skyscraper ad on the right should change most times. This is a random ad rotator (from the six ads that I put in the file) so it is possible for the same ad to display a second time. Roll the dice and see what comes up!!

I still have most of the more info pages to do for this site and my navigation trees to grow for all three of these affiliate sites. That is why the space on the left is blank at the present time.

I have seen some visitors to this blog. Thanks for stopping by!! I would be interested in seeing some relative comments.

I added a concert blog page and post in the new blog on the AudioArt Sound site. We did an Eddie Money show at the Coliseum in Daytona Beach. I wrote up the show and an introduction of the page.

The new Intel i7 CPU’s were launched today. One of my tech news sites had a micro-photo of the new chip. I used various areas of the photo to make some background images. The photo has a lot of colors and intricate designs. I like the images that came from this photo a good bit.

I had thought about my methods of making the images and was able to cut out several steps in producing the images. That saves quite a bit of time in making the images. Together with my modified gallery software to build the pages the process is now much faster.

In my travels on the web I ran across a site called Ice Rocket that has a free RSS feed builder. I had been thinking that I should have an RSS feed from several of my sites, so I signed up for the service. I registered several of my sites, and will probably add some more as I go along. Since I was updating the site Symmetrical Backgrounds is my first site to use the service. I have two entries in the feed for my two most recent galleries of background images. You can check out the new images HERE.