I suppose I can now call the web site complete....Even though its going to be an on-going thing for me, everything for the project is now there and I'm pretty happy with it. The other day I posted the .tk up on a couple of Sheffield band forums I found out about in my research and got quite a lot of feedback almost immediately. Most of it was positive with several people saying it was good but mentioning improvements that I mostly agreed with. Since then I have had 7 songs emailed to me by bands which I have put up on the MP3 player and they are available on the podcast too. A couple of people have registered in the forum and hopfully from now on I can build it up. I was really supprised that most of the music sent to me was actually quite good. They sound like proper serious bands that have recorded their music well and have their own web sites. One guy suggested that I put a 'Gigs' section on the site (which I have begun to in place of the guestbook) but when he found out that I wasn't in Sheffield to keep up with the scene he offered to inform me of all the big gigs so that I could post them on the site. Another suprising offer that I got by email was someone who had taken a look and offered to moderate the forums if the whole thing kicked off....I DON'T EVEN KNOW THESE PEOPLE!!!
Overall I'm really happy with how the whole thing has worked out and I hope I keep it up.....Although I have no idea how I'm going to cope if it gets too busy lol.

Just sorted a couple of problems with the site and podcast and everything should be working perfectly now...Well, apart from the podcast which takes a few hours to refresh. The mp3 player on the website loads as 'paused' so that you don't have to turn it off every time you go to a new page. I figured that it would get quite annoying if the first track in the play list started on its own when you didn't want it to. The other thing that Rob helped me fix is the fact that the podcast was only displaying one of the four tracks submitted to it. This was simply due to the fact that the 'unique ID' for each track was the same so iTunes could not distinguish between them. I changed them so they are now different and hopefully by tonight or tomorrow morning they'll all be up there ready to subscribe to. All I need to do now is add a little more information and the site is finished. Its a good job as well because our peer presentations are in two days and I want everything to be working and complete so I can show it off properly.

Wooooooooo! The MP3 player is working!....and it wasn't half as hard as I thought it would be. The podcast is sort of working too so I'm really happy. The podcast is on iTunes for people to subscribe to, its just that the songs aren't there properly yet, hopefully by the end of today they will be though. The rest of the site is looking pretty good too if I do say so myself. The little scrolling news text feed on the index page is there now and I've nearly done the links page too. I only have to add a few hyperlink images to that and then its done. Other than that I just have put fill the few information pages that are left and then its finished!
I started planning out my presentation yesterday in the tutorial so I just have to finish that and make a few storyboards to complete the whole project. Of course there are a few little things that I can do which aren't majorly important but which might add a little bit more to the site. For example I could put a few sounds on the buttons and in the name-generator demo simply to make it a little more interesting...After all, it is a site about sound and music.
I'm now definitely on the home straight and I'm pleased with how its all gone and how well everything has worked. I haven't had half as many problems as I thought I might.

Not done an awful lot since the last post because I've been concentrating on some of my other projects. I have however done some more in my sketch book. I'm on my second one of those so far n I think that most of the stuff is there, if not all of it that's supposed to be. Ill double check with Dave on Monday or Wednesday about that. I'm still waiting on Rob to get the master podcast file to me because the original email didn't work so he said that he'd put it on blackboard but so far hasn't. I'll try n get it on my stubby tomorrow. Hopefully tomorrow will be a very productive day if we have a lot of time to spend on our projects. We're not starting until 11.15 but I'm going to go in at 9,15 anyway n get on with some stuff. I have to add another review section to the forum which allows people to post reviews on the demos submitted into the media player and I also have to put all the other pages of the site together. I already have most of that information though so that wont be too much trouble. Another thing I might start tomorrow is a demo for the name generator that on the home page. One problem with that though is that at Uni they have flash MX2004 and I only have MX so I have to remember to save it in MX format or I can't open it here at Storthes.
I think that's it for now, until next time........

In the last few days I have come very near to completing the forum which in my opinion is looking pretty good. It's all up and running and will stay as it is unless I have some extra time before the hand-in to tweak tiny little things and personalise it even more than I already have. (http://sandbox.studio309.org/cskelton). I have also just about completed the look of the index page and all its information. The only thing missing now is the media player which is a bit of a bitch because it uses Flash MX 2004 components and I only have MX so its impossible for me to sort that out at home. I'm going to give that a go in the tutorial tomorrow morning. As soon as I get that in the index page then I'll bung in all the other information into the other pages and I'll nearly have a completed site. There is still some information that I need to gather and several other things that I could do with doing like the news feed to the home page from news page, and also maybe give the guestbook a go, but at least I'll be well on my way to completion. There are only 3 or 4 weeks left now so its a good thing that the end is in sight.
........Oh, and I have to set up the podcast too, hopefully that wont take long.

I had a talk with Dave on Monday about the site and he ripped most of it to shreds which I didn't really expect. Its for the better though because now I can consider his points and improve on them. In the end if I take on board what he's said then my website will be a whole lot better. He said it was a bit boring basically and emphasised the point when he read something in my sketchbook that said something along the lines of "I want to create something which is professional and fun looking and want to move away from a very formal lay out". I haven't done this at all but its basically because there's too much information to enable me to. It would look messy and un-organised and therefore be hard to navigate etc. To solve this problem iv firstly changed the left hand navigation bar and added a little more animation and pictures to it. Simple things like this can bring the whole ting to life. Hopefully when the title bar, the links on the left and the media player are added it'll look a lot less bland. If it doesn't then ill have to re-think it a bit.
Another idea that im playing with is having a band name generator on the homepage where you can type your name or something in the box and it'll create a band name based on the number of letters you submit......Or something along those lines anyway. This will add another 'Play' element to it because it'll be quite fun. There's something called the WUname-generator that's the same kind of thing.
On Monday I also got access to the university server and the phpBB forum that Iman set up for me. I've edited the forums and thing in that to what I want but the themeing is still the default. I uploaded my site as it stands too so people can actually view it on the web even though its pretty far from completion. I'm actually very pleased with my progress since Monday morning because a lot of things have fallen together. The media player is now something that I can work on after talking to Rob about it and hopefully I'll have an email waiting with a master XML file for the flash player and iTunes to link to.
The final thing that happened yesterday is I talked to my mate called Robin who's in a band and has a demo. For the project I don't think that the upload of files to the media player will be possible so I'm going to put a couple of tracks in there myself so that you can see how it works and so there's something to play. I asked if I could use his demo so that there wont be any copyright issues as I have his permission etc and it'll actually be downloadable via an iTunes podcast. He still hasn't got back to me on that though because he had to ask the other band members. He was ok with it at least so I'm sure they will be too.

The web site is coming along nicely now. I've settled on a colour scheme of blue and black mainly and iv got most of the template pages set up with flash navigation bars. I still haven't thought of a name yet though, I've got several that im tossing about but im not sure that im that keen on any of them. I've also nearly filled my first sketch book so ill have to buy another one of those too.
Still not herd from Iman by email about the forum so ill have to ask him on Monday what's going on with that. There's only 3 weeks left until the peer reviews so iv made a week by week time table that I can follow so I make sure everything is done in time.
I've started putting the content in some pages such as the 'Stores' page and the 'About' section. I would've done a lot more today, I wanted to finish all the 'Information' section, but the internet here was down all afternoon so I couldn't really do that much without researching the locations of places online. Ill try and have that all done by Monday so that I have the next two weeks to concentrate on the forum and media player.

Iv been looking at colour schemes and experimenting with navigation tabs and things today. I made a red and silver music player skin which is exactly the same as the original experiment but red rather than all silver, but then when I started making the background and stuff red I decided that it wasn't the right colour. Then I began making some simple navigation tabs that end up looking pretty cool. They were blue and silver so I changed the background of the index page to match and it looked a bit better. I still don't think ill stick with this in the end thought. I might keep the blue tabs but make the background much lighter....White maybe. Its hard to tell when there's nothing else in the site. It might look completely different when the table is full and you cant actually see much colour around the different sections.
iv also decided after looking at the MTV site amongst others that I want to include at least a few flash animations into it. I just think a little bit f animation adds a whole different dimension to a site and can make it infinitely more interesting to view.
that's all for today, noting like the monster of a post I left last time.

For gods sake!!!...Iv just written this once and its vanished so iv got to do it all again....Bloody computers!
I was advised to talk to iman about setting up a live forum so on Monday I pulled him to one side and discussed what I wanted to do. It was a bit mind boggling as a lot of things were thrown at me and a lot of questions were asked and I don't really understand the whole thing....But, it was very useful. It was decided that he will upload phpBB onto the university server and give me access to it so that I can play around and farmiliarise myself with it. I was told that the appearance is editable so I can customize it to an extent to fit in with the theme of my website, and also that you can hack it to replace things like the phpBB title with your own, this would obviously make it fit in with the rest of the site even better. I can set my own topics and allow certain people access etc etc....I have herd of it before but iv never had any experience. I will hopefully receive the log-in details of the server and info on what I have to do in the next week or so so ill get cracking with that asap.
the other stuff that iv been doing has all been in my sketch book. In the last week of so iv made a lot of headway. Iv done all sorts of lay out designs and web architecture and sketches of different visuals and im trying to lay it all out on paper before I start with the digital stuff. I did a few media player sketches and the only bit of digital work iv done so far is to make a simple music player skin. The reason iv not done anything else is because I want to cover absolutely everything to do with the site in my sketch book first. This is because it should make the building of the website very easy if everything is written about or drawn already so I don't actually have to think about anything. As well as this iv been looking at some other websites. I came across the Sheffield ones that are on the same theme and I wasn't very impressed so I thought I was a good idea to check out some that have had a bit of money pumped into them. Not necessarily on exactly the same theme, but so that I can get some influences. I don't want to make the site too formal because it may scare the younger generation away if it looks like something their parents should be viewing, but I want to make it professional so hopefully looking at work that is already on the net will help out a bit.

Iv been looking at some websites yesterday and today, to try and get to grips with what's out there already. I mean in terms of Sheffield music sites. I didn't think that there would be many because id never herd or been told about anything along the lines of what im planning to do. I was quite surprised three or four websites that have similar intensions but the thing is, they're all rubbish. There's one called L2SB (listen to Sheffield bands) which is the best. This looks pretty professional and they have proper forum moderators and journalists who interview bands and write it up for the site. It is quite interesting and seems to have a decent following in the forum, although there aren't half as many topics compared to what I intent to include. The other ones are metalliville which looks completely amateur in terms of the design and lay out. They do seem to have good contacts with the metal-scene in Sheffield but they could do a lot better. There is sheffieldmusic.com which has masses and masses of info on it about everything you could possibly imagine to do with music. Sheffield band listings, music teachers, record shops, agents...The lists go on. It has gig times and places, reviews and again, a forum.....But again, the site is rubbish. Its boring, "un-cool" and there is far too much text and info in one place. Its an excellent place for reference but I couldn't stand navigating around it for long, it was a bit too overwhelming and un-interesting. The last one that iv found is soundaloud.com which has a decent forum with plenty of members and some good info on the whole scene but once again, the web design completely spoils it.

all these sites have links to one another so they all navigate traffic through each other which is a good thing. If I got my site known by these then that would increase the potential of building a community dramatically. If I make my site a hell of a lot better than most of these then I wreckon my chance of success after the project is finished isn't too bad at all.

this simply emphasises my point from yesterday - I HAVE TO MAKE AN AWESOME SITE!!
its also brought to light the fact that I should think carefully about the amount of information that I include, I don't want people to be overloaded with lists and lists of shops, websites and venues and be mind-boggled about where to start first.