Go Team Pandy!

I’ve finally begun to roll out the new design for thephiller.com. So far it’s only been updated on the podcast portion of the site, but it’ll pretty much be the same for the remaining portions as well. The only difference will be the background and link colors which will match the color in the header next to the link for that section of the site.

I think it is a lot cleaner and simpler than the old look and maybe a little fresher with the crisper colors. Things that can still use some work are better differentiation between the main content portion of the site from the header area of links and the logo in the left column. Comments/suggestions gladly accepted.

So I was about to do some programming on The PhiLL(er) when I noticed that once again the Features sidebar menu was missing and replaced by a message that I did not create. This time it was “the hacker owns”. I’m not sure why people find my site worth messing with and replacing files with their own content, but this is the second time in the past few months it has happened. I know that I am lucky that these folks haven’t just decided to delete all my files, but it’s still annoying even if it is easy to fix.

This of course just reinforces what I have already known in that my current content management setup is total crap and I need to re-work the way it is set up now that I know a tiny bit more than I did when I created it. Well and I guess I could manually edit permissions every time I change a file. I’ll try rolling bits and pieces in as I update the layout and just cross my fingers that this doesn’t happen again.

Well I think that it must be CD season as I’m starting to feel a bit like I did back at WRCU. Granted at the station I was likely to have well over 50 if not 100 cds to go through at any time, but having a queue of over 20 CDs to review for the website is kind of crazy for me. I guess some of these could be viewed as “optional”, but I really want to be able to review every single CD that I receive in the mail. If you or someone you know is interested in reviewing CDs, please let me know.

So I finally got a myspace.com profile up for The PhiLL(er) over the past week or so and now that I’m finally getting into this whole “making friends” thing, I keep getting these stupid errors
!!!

What’s the deal?! For the most part, myspace has been the faster, better featured, and more stable version of Friendster so it sucks to see it getting all out of whack. Myspace does deserve major credit for their excellent music portion of their site. They’ve scored some major deals managing to be the exclusive place on the internet to stream Death Cab for Cuties new single.

Okay, rant over. Do I seem to be complaining a lot about online services lately?

Well I managed to get the interview done today. I was pretty nervous at first, but then I finally realized that it doesn’t matter if I sound like a complete dumbass since I am planning on overdubbing my questions to improve the quality. At first I didn’t think it was actually going to happen at all because when I called Joey at 3pm he didn’t answer, but luckily he called back at around 4 and I was able to do it right after work. It actually worked out for the best because work got all crazy.

I’m going to start uploading the audio and then doing my overdubs/edits before putting it up as a podcast. Then will come the fun part of transcribing the thing.

I know that I have said this before on my blog, but one of the few things I do worse than writing is interviewing. I’m not sure if I hate it or that I just realize I’m bad at it or I hate it because I’m bad at it or what, but it definitely isn’t something that I look forward to ever doing. I might admit that I even felt a sense of release after possible interviews with Cex, Steve Burns, and Northern State fell through…a little disappointment on a missed opportunity, but still a definite sense of relief.

So anyway, I decided to bite the bullet again and try my hand at interviewing De Novo Dahl tomorrow. I think part of what made me feel more comfortable about it is that there are some definite question to have about the band. As I covered in my review of Cats & Kittens, the band is a sextet and chose to release a double-disc debut with the second disc being remixes of the first. That’s just something to be curious about right there.

I plan on releasing the interview in podcast format as well as transcribing it. Now it’s time for me to come up with some questions!

Well, I posted my first podcast for The PhiLL(er) early this morning/late last night. Overall I think it’s a success…well I don’t think anyone has downloaded it yet, but it does work so that’s good plus I got it to clock in at exactly 30 minutes.

I spent most of the day helping Yaeka help her mom move so I’m pretty much pooped. I was planning on getting a review done today since it’s been 2 weeks since the last one, but I guess that’ll just end up having to wait.

I’m going to begin a podcast on The PhiLL(er) hopefully this weekend and am not entirely sure how to get the feeds to work properly. This is just a test to see if I can subscribe to my blog feed and have the MP3 file download. The file just says, “This is a test” so don’t download it, it isn’t interesting!

Test MP3

When I get the actual podcast up, I’ll let you know.

Update: That totally didn’t work…ugh!

Update 2: Now it’s working right. I’d just like to take this moment to say that while ourmedia is cool in that you can store and host all your media files there, it still has a lot of bugs to work out.

So a while back I did a review of this compilation CD from this new label Hello Sir Records out of Athens, GA. Seems like it was one of my rare moments of good writing (or at least legitimate gushing) as they have chosen to quote my review right on the front page of their site. Now only if they linked to my site!

Jade Tree Records out of Deleware was kind enough to allow me to link to some MP3s on their server on The PhiLL(er). It would be tremendous if you would check them out here and download them all. There’s some really good stuff there and I want to make sure that Jade Tree knows I appreciate their help.