In the past month I’ve accomplished some of the crap I felt needed done so I can wrap up this update for the next 10 years or so. I created this site in 1997, updated the design in 2006 and revisited it in July 2014 to do a less dated design.

I don’t foresee doing it again for quite a while. However, this time I have added quite a bit of new material and it’s all better organized, so it was worth it.

I do plan on re-encoding the live videos from VHS when I get a chance because these are from the 1997 version, then converted to flash, which wouldn’t work on this new site, so they were further degraded by uploading to YouTube.

I’ll reconvert and upload mp4 versions that can run directly when I get a chance. They are all on VHS and have to be encoded in real-time, and there’s 20+ hours of live videos, studio videos interviews and guitar clinics that will have to be digitized, edited into songs and encoded into the site, so it will take some time.

I also have all the rough footage for the Beijing video, which was never properly edited nor synched with the audio, and I’d like to do that sometime.

In other work I wanted to get done:

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Another thing is I’m not happy with how mp3 files open when you click on them. I don’t want to embed them all in jukebox type things because then they are hard to download, plus it’s hard to see all the songs and their information graphically that way. I’d rather find a lightbox solution that treats them like images and videos.

This is done. I had to modify the styles so that it works in table and doesn’t break the cells or crowd stuff out, but it works. There’s also a tiny download button that isn’t immediately obvious, but if the new re-release goes through I’ll have to remove the download links anyway, and perhaps only include samples of the songs instead of complete versions.

Somehow I’ve misplaced all the high resolution image files for the covers, and there is a possibility that we might be re-releasing all the old stuff and I’ll need to find those.

Done. They were on the Cafepress site, where for some reason I’d uploaded all 6-8 pages of every album in 1200x1200px and even 2400x2400px versions and I was able to download them. FYI, this is not a normal function there, I had to get support to access them, then they put them in a temporary Dropbox type account for me to download. Just using the normal interface I was only able to access 400x400px versions.

Some I recreated – after finding the old fonts again, most of which I’d lost due to changing computers and forgetting to save fonts even though I saved all the other work I’d ever done, it sometimes didn’t occur to me to save the Windows folder where the fonts are. I had to re-create some of the pages that referenced our old record company and had outdated or wrong copyright dates or information.

Luckily (and thanks to WhatTheFont) I was able to find almost all of the original fonts to maintain the original look of the cassette and CD artwork. Bad Crazy and Malicious Intent had all the lyrics included, but that might not be possible for the re-releases, there’s 12-16 songs on each album and the lyrics are pretty verbose, meaning it would take 6-8 double-sided pages to fit it all legibly, and I’m not sure the budget will cover that.

There’s still a rounded sans-serif font I really liked called ActualSize I can’t find. The name makes it problematic to search (try searching ActualSize font and you’ll get 10M pages linking to code instead of the actual font).

If anyone can find it, I’d appreciate them letting me know.