Sadly I haven’t had a lot of time for meetube over the last few months… I mean, it’s not all bad because the main reason I haven’t shot any new videos is because Trunkmonkey has been doing so well and I’ve been playing practically every weekend myself. Figure I might as well get it while I can because after all, when I run out of gigs, there will always be somebody else out there playing that I can shoot for meetube.

In the meantime I’ll be hitting the blog sporadicaly but all the hubbub with the coming election has caused me to put up MoFoCulture.org and I do most of my blogging over there. Initially I started posting political stuff here but I took it down. This sites going to stay about music and I can get my political rocks off somewhere else.

Anyway, I will be uploading new videos from time to time but it’s all unreleased material from last year. I’m still piecing the DVD together, it’s so close but it’s just hard to make time to get everything done. Hang around though, it will be done in time for Christmas!

I’m taking a guess that a ton of people must have tried to check out the live feed performance last night we were going to do from Dublin Square in The Gaslamp because when i checked the server stats this morning, there was crazy activity. The kind of numbers that can make a server crash if you’re not careful. Hopefully that didn’t happen.

So anyway, apologies to all who were looking to watch us play on their computers yesterday, but not to fear… The only reason we didn’t go ahead with it was because there was a Padres baseball game going on last night Downtown. What does that have to do with the live feed? Easy, let’s just say that when it takes you 45 minutes to park you car, it doesn’t leave a whole lot of time left over to do anything but get the sound dialed in and start playing. So that’s what we did…

I’m really disappointed we didn’t at least tape last night’s show because it went over huge. Caroline (a totally smokin hot bar tender who was kind enough to give me a hair tie) told me after the show that never in her three years at the bar had anyone ever called for an encore from any of the bands that played there. Encore? Sheeeit… We had to play THREE of them because every time we tried to end the last set, the whole bar kept chanting, “one more song, one more song!” Somehow, one turned into three and finally we just had to pull the plug to start getting people outta there. That ain’t no shit either.

So, the short end of it is that after last night, they booked us like, 10 more dates starting with TONIGHT. However, I decided we’re going to put off the first live feed until next weekend. We’ll be back at Dublin Square next Saturday (like I said yo, they gave us like 10 more dates) but things are just too hectic Downtown and I need to be in a good head space when I’m getting ready to play. Next Friday, we’re playing The Temecula Wine and Beer Garden and I think the conditions are going to be ideal for the first live feed. It’s an outdoor gig that starts early (like 7:30) so the lighting should be really good. We’ll keep ya posted as the week progresses. We’re gonna whip this puppy yet, or at least find out if the technology is ready to make something like this doable on a regular basis…

Stay tuned!

So the final word from Technorati was to validate the code in the meetube blog… Apparently there are some errors that are creating trouble for the spiders. Why I didn’t check this going in is completely beyond me… When it comes to Word Press (aka, this blog), I don’t know how to do anything from scratch. I typically go get a theme that has the layout I want and then gut the CSS and restyle it. Because I always get my themes from the Word Press site, I just assumed the code was clean. Isn’t there some old saying about assumptions? Anyway, I went back and checked the validator and it appears the php (scripting language that powers Word Press) is generating some bad code because I can’t locate any bad html in the Word Press design editor. So yeah, I spent hours styling out a theme that won’t index correctly with Technorati. How fucking SWEET is that?

A fan(?) who will remain nameless kinda ripped me via e-mail because I write about the above type situations in what is supposed to be an indie music video blog. I can sorta see his point but, I think the point that he, and others might be missing is that everything I do in building and promoting this site are things that you can do to build and promote your band. I go through all these trials and tribulations and write about them on the slim chance someone will benefit and not make the same mistakes. I might have a BS in digital media but school just scratches the surface. The real education comes from going out and getting yourself dirty and I thought perhaps someone might actually appreciate a little information at my expense. Sean from Revenge Club once told me about a gig they were playing in SACRAMENTO (500 miles away) for FREE… Let me tell ya somthin’, that’s the kind of motivation you need to make it in any industry as far as I’m concerned; but if you apply that kind of energy to The Internet, you’re going to get the attention of more people then you ever would from one night in Sacto… Ya feelin that, G?

Oh, and also to the flamer, to answer your question, Technorati is like a MySpace for blogs. Maybe you can grasp that concept…

So you can see by the previous post that I finally got around to setting the blog up on Technorati… So dig this… The Technorati spider indexed ALL the pages that I thought were lost in the upgrade (see post #1 in this blog) and NONE of the pages since the upgrade to Word Press 2.5… I’ve got a ticket open trying to see what’s up… Either way, my hat is off to them because they saved me the trouble of having to become a mySQL guy to figure out what happened to my old posts…

Nice one…

Well, I did it… I went ahead and upgraded the blog (Word Press) to version 2.5, restyled it, and then lost the database… At least I think I did… I mean, I backed up all of the files but I have a feeling the actual posts were stored on the server and though I copied the entire folder containing the old blog… Well, let’s just say that apparently I’ve screwed the pooch. I’ve been plugging away at this pretty much all day trying to figure it out and I’m getting close to just writing the old posts off as a loss. I hate that shit… MySQL anyone? Holla…

Naturally I’m going to be busy re-posting some stuff over the next few days to try and rebuild all this but in the meantime, if you want a little history on the MeeTube.com project, check out the original Z-Axis Blog started back in ‘06 when this was still just an idea. I don’t think I’ll be trying to update the Word Press over there after what happened over here… Of course if you’re just looking for the basic MeeTube Indie Music Video Info… Well, you know what to do.

On a more positive note, I uploaded a new index page for the site on the 11th (right before I jacked the blog). On the surface, it didn’t look any different than it’s predecessor. Under the hood however… Well, that’s quite another story. I’ve recently jumped into the whole SEO thing with both feet and based on a bunch of stuff I just picked up, ended up rewriting a lot of the code and content. It will be interesting to see what kind of results it pulls.

Amidst the SEO stuff, I’m still trying to make time to get the rest of this blog up and fully operational. Right now you can see that a lot of the generic default links are in place and there’s no link back to the videos. Sorry, just hit the back button on your browser… PHP (the code that powers Word Press) chaps my ass and while it’s another thing I’m chipping away at, I still have a some work ahead before I can work it like say, XHTML and CSS.

Wish I had Radiohead tickets…