Site News
Monday, March 17th 2008
Quite a long time since the last news update, and a couple of things to comment on. Firstly today marked the final demise of the old website location. Despite the many reported problems with Demon hosting, they were remarkably quick at removing all trace of my old web space and email hosting (within 5 minutes of my phone call). I'm expecting to get a set of emails from folks not able to find the site, but this should calm down. Site hits on the old site had fallen to near zero, and while referrals still continued, I'll gradually find them and sort them out.
You might notice the little box just to the right of this text. I'm experimenting with the web-based messaging interface, meebo. If I'm logged on you'll be able to use the box to send me an instant message. We'll see if it works and isn't abused! Let me know what you think.
Thursday, September 6th 2007
Rather an extended gap since the last site update. Summer holidays seem to have extended for a long period wrapped up with a busy period at work so I'm just attempting to catch up with the backlog. In doing so we've reached the 500 ENSEMBLE milestone!
Monday, June 25th 2007
When you start running a web site, one thing you start to find in your inbox is a pile of email from "well-wishers" wanting to help get your site noticed. They promise to register your pages with every search engine, robot, spider, or whatever to make sure you get the most hits possible.
When you want to retire a site, however, no-one ever tells you how difficult it's going to be! Because once your site has been around for a few years it IS in every search engine, robot, spider or whatever and it's almost impossible to remove it. As you might guess this is what I've found at the end stage of moving the site hosting. I'm still getting a stubborn 20-30 hits a week on the old site location (running at 300 or so a week on the new site), nearly all the hits resulting from Google searches. So I've been learning about robots.txt and meta tags, and hopefully I'll be able to remove the site completely soon...
Thursday, March 28th 2007
Stage 3 today - removal of all the pages from the old site location. Of course for now I've replaced them with a "moved" page which automatically redirects to the "new" location. I'll track how often it gets accessed before finally removing it - hopefully not too long so that I can discontinue paying for the space! There are a number of places where the old address is linked from - time to get on to Google and find them all...
Wednesday, March 27th 2007
Well I'm happy to say that the move seems to have gone without too much incident, just some residual tidying up to do, and so far no-one seems to have noticed. The Amateur Orchestras page now has its own host, and doesn't rely on a sub-section of my personal site, which is a relief. I can now get on and move that too, except this will mean changing the domain name which will be a bit more traumatic. If anyone has any good ideas for a nice domain name, I'm all ears.
Tuesday, March 26th 2007
I mentioned the change of hosting in January and of course the tyranny of choice has meant that it's taken me a long time to decide how and where to move the hosting of the site. It has been complicated by the fact that I also want to move my own pages, change my email address etc etc etc. Anyway, the net is that the decision is made and tomorrow I start the process of transferring the website from one server to another. Hopefully not too much will break - probably wishful thinking!
Thursday, January 4th, 2007
The email "obfuscation" appears not to have too many problems which is a relief. Of course it could simply be that no-one has visited the site in the last month and tried to get to an email, or everyone links to the orchestras directly. Anyway, I've not had any complaints in the month since I started the experiment.
Of course a New Year starting would be nothing if it didn't mean some kind of change. In the case of the Amateur Orchestras site this will very likely to be a change of hosting. Since it started I have actually held the pages on my personal site and used a website re-direction service to "pretend" that it's at www.amateurorchestras.org.uk. This is becoming limiting in a number of ways, not least of which that my current ISP doesn't allow server-side scripting for personal pages. So during the course of the year I'll be moving the site (physically, not logically) which will probably break all the old pointers that folks have. So first, I have to track down all the people who point to my site that way...
Wednesday, December 6th, 2006
It's been a while since anything significant changed with the site. The number of ensembles now stands at 447, with 475 entries once the duplicates are built in.
So naturally I wouldn't be writing this unless something significant HAD happened. Following an email conversation with one of the orchestras' contacts I've decided to try to alleviate some of the problems caused by the "harvesting" of email addresses from the site. I've chosen to use a mechanism that obfuscates the email addresses then uses a script to rebuild them when you click on the email links. I've tested it with IE, Firefox and Opera and it appears to work, thanks too to my willing external tester (for it was he who suggested it).
If you use a tool such as Proxomitron or disable scripts you will now be unable to easily send mail to the orchestra contacts. I anticipate a little difficulty with this at first - let the email comments commence!
Friday, June 30th, 2006
Following a recent collection of updates I've made a couple of changes to the website design, one very subtle and one not so subtle. The latter is in response to a comment that it is sometimes not obvious that to reach an orchestra's own website you have to click on their name in one of the main tables. So for now I've added a little icon to see if that helps. Let me know if you notice it!
In the process I discovered that some of my previous html is "deprecated" and that it's replacement is to use the float stylesheet property. Well I duly did this and also simplified the underlying table by using the same construction to display the email icons. In doing so I saved a bit of space and the layout is mostly more pleasing. Not perfect. Just a bit more pleasing.....
Monday, April 24th, 2006
A work trip to Italy and the Easter holiday are amongst the things that conspired to prevent me from making an update since March. And of course as soon as I turn my back a good crop of emails arrive, and hey presto the number of ensembles is now 420!
Thursday, March 16th, 2006
One of the things I find hardest about keeping this site is having to turn down a group for listing. I think when I started I'd intended to list only orchestras, you know the things with Strings, Winds, Brass & Percussion. As the more perceptive amongst you will have noticed I haven't managed to stick strictly to that criterion, so there are entries for amongst other things string-only ensembles and wind & brass only ensembles (typically called concert bands).
However, I decided some time ago that to avoid a potential mushrooming of the site I would not list chamber ensembles. An additional consideration was that the prime intention of the site was/is to match players to larger ensembles, and I wasn't sure whether it was the ideal place to bring together chamber players. I'm still not sure. Finding someone to replace the missing player from your wind quintet, for example, is a bit like match-making. You need someone who is compatible with the existing players, both in character and in playing ability. This, it seemed to me at the time, is best done personally rather than impersonally via a website. This is less important in a larger ensemble where the playing and personality differences are to some extent subdued by the conductor - ah, could that be it? The elusive definition I'm searching for - only conducted ensembles?
Of course that doesn't help the poor player who is desperate to play in a quintet but doesn't know anyone else. That was my thinking when I started the wiki (see the link above and the comments below). It hasn't exactly been a roaring success, but we'll leave it for a while longer to see.
If you are actually reading this and have any thoughts, please let me know!
Thursday, September 29th, 2005
After a few recent emails I've been prompted into starting an experiment to see whether some collaborative efforts might be worth trying. Specifically I've started up a "wiki" at http://ukamateurmusic.wikispaces.com/ which I hope could be the starting point for a set of bulletin boards and information exchange between players looking for ensembles and ensembles looking for players. At the moment I'm cavassing for organisational ideas for the space, so if you have any thoughts drop me a line or add your comments to the front page of the wiki.
Thursday, July 7th, 2005
Against the background of the terrorist attack in central London it seemed somehow surreal to be updating the site, perhaps that's enough said for now.
I checked the statistics, and I've been averaging 35 hits a day over the last four months. I don't know whether that's more or less than I expected.
Thursday, April 14th, 2005
Well it finally happened, complete meltdown of Windows on my PC. I'm a short distance into rebuilding my machine after trying (perhaps too hard) to salvage a working system after a power blip at the weekend stopped the machine from doing anything remotely like working. The good news is that I've made it as far as being able to once again automatically generate the web pages for this site - only four days. Great. What is interesting is what DOESN'T get re-installed....
Tuesday, March 8th, 2005
Well I clearly had the bit between my teeth this week! It turns out that my excitement at going over 350 entries was perhaps a little premature. I've finally dealt with my slightly flakey mechanism of keeping track of entries that were duplicated between regions (for boundary reasons alluded to below). As a result of doing that I discover there are actually 343 ensembles represented, which expands to nearly 360 entries. I've also re-written the page-generation code to cope with the new way I store the data, doing it the way I should have done in the first place. Doh.
You may also notice a little counter has appeared on the bottom of most of the pages. This is to help me optimise the site for the majority of users. So far the browsers viewing the site split 4/3 for Internet Explorer 6/Firefox, but it's far too early to draw any conclusions. Did I mention I usually use Opera?
Monday, March 7th, 2005
A concerted (!) effort today has brought the number of entries to over 350. I normally rely on word of mouth and osmosis to garner new entries to the list, but I've had a list of orchestras hidden in my browser bookmarks for a while. As it turned out some of them had already been added as a result of requests, and the remainder (largely from Scotland and East Anglia - not sure why that was) I've added today
One of the things that has begun to bother me about the pages is the somewhat arbitrary nature of the areas that the country is divided into for this collection. It raises its head particularly for orchestras whose home lies close to a boundary, and since the boundaries are rather loosely defined that can be a challenge. For example, is St. Albans really in East Anglia? Thinking people might say no, but when I "borrowed" the map in the first place I don't think I intended it to stay as it is. SO - if you have a better idea, let me know! Perhaps I could forestall some of the questions by putting a list of counties for each region? Should be simple, eh?
Geoff
P.S. OK, I thought about and have added the county names to the title of each regional page - that'll save me having to think about the problem for another few months!
Monday, July 5th, 2004
I returned from holiday to an email from an observant orchestral player who spotted that actually finding my contact details wasn't as easy as it could be. In the redesign I completed last year I'd neglected to include a link to the form for adding an entry! Well, it's reappeared as a link off the task bar, and I took the opportunity to spruce up the backgrounds in various places. Let me know what you think - changing back can be done in the blink of a style file!
Thursday, January 29th, 2004
I'm managing to break the back of a rather large number of updates that have arrived over the last few months. My apologies to those who sent emails to request an entry for your orchestra towards the end of last year - it will appear, SOON.
I've just added, amongst others, the Ernest Read Symphony Orchestra. How on earth I can have left this orchestra out for so long I cannot imagine, after all it is based in London and my original attempt at these pages started with a list of London orchestras in 1999. Oh well, at least that omission is now rectified.
Finally I'd like to add a public Thank You for the unsolicited emails of support I receive from time to time. These emails seem to indicate that these pages do sometimes act successfully as a recruitment advert.
Happy New Year!
Geoff
Thursday, December 4th, 2003
As you may have noticed, the site has undergone a radical re-design. These appear to be obligatory for any website after a period of time is up! I hope that you find this one improves the site. Please let me know if you have praise or complaints.
For those that might be interested, two underlying things have changed:
- I've converted the design to use a Cascading Style Sheet
- I'm using a custom-written program (in Rexx) to generate the pages themselves
These two combined should ensure more consistency between the pages of the site and a common viewing experience. This will of course depend on the capability of your browser in its support of CSS2. I preview the pages in Opera 7.2 (my usual poison), Internet Explorer 6, Netscape 7, Mozilla and Netscape 4.7 just to check what the style-sheet "challenged" will see. If something isn't quite right in YOUR browser, I'd be interested to hear from you
Geoff
