Author: Laura Conrad

More site fiddling

Bad Behavior seems to be successfully blocking the comment spam, so I have removed the requirement that I moderate all comments.

I was really enjoying the WIKI stuff I was doing, so I have activated the Textile2 plugin, to see if it makes posting a blog entry more fun. I like writing html with psgml in emacs, but getting there from wordpress is several steps:

* click on the html box
* right click on that and invoke mosex
* move to the emacs window
* get into html mode (for some reason, wordpress gives the file a .txt extension — if it were .html, we would be in html mode by default)
* remove the page template that psgml generates for you
* start typing html.

I still think Ctrl-C Ctrl-E tag name is a lot easier of a way to enter a tag than remembering a lot of different punctuation marks, but for a normal post with only a couple of links and lists, I think the textile markup may well be easier.

t turns out to be easier to deal with textile 2 list formatting if you turn off the rich visual editor.

Anyway, I’ll leave it for a while, but I may go back to emacs.

Some tweaks to the blog

After I posted the report on this week’s meeting of the Cantabile Band, I got irritated enough at the bullet style to do some work to fix it. I had to do some googling to figure out how to do that, and so I did some more reading of one of the helpful sites, Lorelle on WordPress.

She has a list of WordPress plugins she finds useful, and I got inspired to install Bad Behavior and Random Quotes.

Bad Behavior shouldn’t affect you as a reader; just the amount of spam comments I have to deal with as an administrator.

If you scroll down to the bottom of the sidebar, you can see a random quote from my quote database.  Feel free to suggest other quotes to be added.  In the course of looking up some quotes I couldn’t remember exactly, I found quotationspage.com.

Report on the August 22 meeting

The next meeting of the Cantabile Renaissance Band will take place on Tuesday, August 29, at 7:45 PM at my place.

I don’t know of any reason why we won’t be having our regular drop-in meetings for the next few weeks. The two election days (September 19 and November 7) are the only times in the next few months when I expect anything different.

We may continue to have 6-8 people for a while, so suggestions for five or six part music are welcome. I think there’s enough interest in the Gabrielli we’ve done at the last two meetings that we’ll continue that.

Last meeting

We played:

  • Byrd Susanna fair
  • 2 settings of Ein Feste Burg
  • Gabrielli, Canzon II a 6
  • Dowland group:
    • O sweet wood
    • Fine knacks for ladies
    • A shepherd in a shade
    • Clear or Cloudy
  • Ravenscroft, He that will an alehouse keep

Meeting announcement/report August 15/22

The next meeting of the Cantabile Renaissance Band will be on Tuesday, August 22, at 7:45 PM at my place.

We may continue to have a larger number of players than usual, so if there are 6-8 part pieces you’d like to play, let me know.

Last Meeting

We played:

  • Andrew Charlton Krummhorn arrangements:
    • Almaine by Thomas Strangthfield
    • My Thing is my Own, from Pills to Purge Melancholy
    • Triste España
    • Bon Jour Mon CÅ“ur
    • A Policeman’s Lot is not a Happy One
  • Giovanni Gabrieli:
    • Exaudi Deus for 7 voices or instruments
    • Canzon II a 6 from Canzoni e Sonata (1615)
  • Susato group

Plans for the August 15 meeting

The next meeting of the Cantabile Renaissance Band will be on Tuesday, August 15, at my place.

We will again be doing our usual drop-in stuff, possibly with an unusual cast of characters, since it’s August and some regulars can’t make it and some non-regulars can.

We will have an unusually large amount of sight-reading material, because Hope brought over five large boxes of music that she is no longer using for her CCAE coaching. So if there’s something you want to do that you think we haven’t been doing because we didn’t have the music, let me know, and I’ll pull it out if I run into it going through the boxes

Last Meeting

We played:

  • Glogauer Liederbuch: Es solt ein man
  • Gervaise, Dix Bransles Gays
  • Guidiccioni, Il Bianco e Dolce Cigno
  • Tye, two In nomine‘s
  • Holborne group
    • 64. Galliard: As it fell on a Holy Eve
    • 53. [Pavan:] Last Will and Testament
    • 40. Galliard
    • 63. Galliard: The Fairie-round
    • 34. Muy linda
  • Dowland, A shepherd in a shade
  • Dowland, Come, ye heavy states of Night
  • Let us drink and be merry

Plans for the August 8 meeting

We’re going to be missing a couple of regulars (Anne and Ishmael), but some people who don’t come very often have said they’d come tonight. So it should be a good night for trying out a bunch of new stuff.

Last week we did all but one of the pieces in the new Swan Songs book, so we’ll try to do the last one.

We’ll be doing drop-in meetings on Tuesdays at the usual time and place for the forseeable future.

Last meeting

We played:

  • Both Silver Swan rounds
  • Gibbons, Silver Swan
  • Dowland, Me, me and none but me
  • Dowland, All ye whom love or fortune hath betraid
  • Arcadelt, Il Bianco e Dolce Cigno
  • Vecchi, Il Bianco e Dolce Cigno
  • Ravenscroft, O my fearful dreams

Added sidebar to single post display

I had noticed that looking at a single post, e.g. http://laymusic.org/wordpress/?p=267 didn’t have the navigation sidebar, and had vaguely thought that might be a problem.  But then I started using an RSS aggregator (Google Reader)  and realized that everybody who gets to a post that way is seeing the single post layout.

So I edited the single post Presentation file so that it included the sidebar.  This reminds me yet again why wordpress is so popular — the PHP in the  Presentation files for the default style is really pretty easy to read and modify, even though I’m not a very experienced PHP programmer.

Dog Parks

I haven’t posted much about politics in this blog, but there is a political change that’s made a major difference in my life over the last year or so.

Sunny, May 2006 My dog Sunny is well-trained indoors, but by no means impeccable outside when he thinks he knows how to get food. The nearest official dog park to where I live, Fort Washington Park, was for some time enclosed by a fence with several ungated gaps in it. The railroad track between the park and MIT is a hangout for homeless people who make use of the shelter on Albany St. at night. So one of Sunny’s major activities at the park used to be running out on the railroad tracks to steal the food from the homeless people. This was embarrassing to me on any number of levels.

Over the last couple of elections, one of the issues in the Cambridge City Council race has been who is most interested in getting more and better dog parks, and last year, this finally translated into some money for putting in a new gate and closing the other gaps in the Fort Washington Park fence. So now instead of my trying to police a food-obsessed dog, Sunny and I just go to the park and hang out with our friends.

Removed Cafepress

I’ve found that Cafepress doesn’t work for my purposes, so I have removed all the items from the store, and removed references from my site. If you still want to buy a drinking songs book or a t-shirt, email me and we’ll work something out.

I am researching other ways to do e-commerce on this site, and expect to have something working soon. Leading candidates are zen-cart and lulu.com. Let me know if you have an opinion.

Removed the phpwiki’s

I had written phpwiki‘s for a couple of recent performances by the Cantabile Band.  It’s pretty good software, making it pretty easy for a group to collaborate on a fairly complicated site, but there’s no security at all.  So when you go back after not looking at it for a couple of weeks, the front page has a bunch of links to porn sites.

So now that people don’t need the links to print their music out or get it straight what the routes of the pieces are, I’ve removed the Wiki’s.

Next time, I’ll either go back to the tiddlywiki software we used for the Walk for hunger, which is very secure but not so good for letting people collaborate (which they didn’t do anyway), or find a different Wiki solution.