new site

May 7, 2008

New site, new blog home, new shop…

As you’ll have seen by now (unless you’re reading this in an RSS reader), there’ve been a lot of changes round here – the design of stevelawson.net has now shifted into wordpress, the shop is still zencart, but has been given a facelift and most significantly, the blog is now hosted here too, integrated into the rest of the site.

The task of getting everything to forward to the right place was pretty huge – given how highly this blog indexes in google, it was vital that all those link redirected properly to this one, and I had SO much help from my herd of sure-footed trusty geeks: James Stewart, Rev. Gareth, Mike Arthur and The Captain. Gentleman and scholars to a man. I now fully understand why properly trained geeks get paid so much money – they can save you so much money. James did a couple of things this afternoon that quite literally saved me 3-4 complete days of editing URLs and stuff…

The tags from the old site still haven’t copied across, and a lot of the little pages that are littered around the old design still need to be imported and linked to (old gig reviews etc), but we’re getting there, slowly.

I hope you like the new design. Feel free to try out the new shop – if anything does go a bit weird, just email me, and we’ll sort it out – there’s no way you’re going to lose money on the deal, cos it’s actually me who runs it, so if there’s a problem, I can just FTP you the files for the download or pop a CD in an envelope, no worries 🙂

Enjoy…

September 14, 2005

New things at last.fm

First there was audioscrobbler. then they added last.fm, a sister internet radio station that chose tracks based on your audioscrobbler profile.

Hang on Steve, what the hell is audioscrobbler in the first place? Oh sorry. You see how at the bottom of most blog posts, I have a list of what I’ve been listening to, and the word ‘soundtrack’ next to it is in bold. Well that’s because it’s a link. if you click that link you get taken to a page that gives you details of every bit of music I’ve played in itunes over the last year or so. It has charts of who I’ve listened to the most, and for each artist it has charts of how many people are listening to them, what tracks are being played the most, etc.

Anyway, that was the scrob. And they also had last.fm, which had much the same information available on it as the scrob, but in a slightly crappier format.

So the whizkidz behind it decided to combine the two sites, and give the new site a bit of an overhaul. and it’s now last.fm. go and have a look. Do a search on an artist or two. then check out my page – the one that’s always linked from the bottom of the blogs. You’ll see what I’ve been listening to. How clever is that?

Anyway, they’ve also made it much easier for record companies to upload their music for the radio stations. So I’ve just been uploading the Pillow Mountain catalogue. check out the pages there for Grace And Gratitude and for For The Love Of Open Spaces. From there you can preview the CDs, or add them to your last.fm radio station (personalised radio, for free, with no adverts. Oh yes).

All in, last.fm is a music geek’s paradise – head over there, sign up and geek out!

Soundtrack – last.fm solobasssteve radio (you need the Last.fm player and a last.fm account for this link to work)

July 8, 2005

Latest news on the bombings…

From the BBC new site – that’s a page that acts as a bit of a hub for the latest news on the bombing. The death toll has risen to ‘more than 50’ – they still don’t know how many are going to be pulled out of the Russell Square crash.

One of the odd things that happens with tragedies and disasters is that place names take on a different resonance – Columbine, Lockerbie, Hungerford, Dunblane, Burnley (forever tainted by getting a BNP councillor in a local election a couple of years ago), Aberfan, Faluja, Dresden, Hiroshima…

Kings Cross already has had a huge fire which took a lot of lives.

Now Russell Square and Tavistock Square – two of my favourite places in central London – have a new resonance. Russell Square is where I get off the tube when I go into town. It means that a) I get to walk through the lovely square itself, and round past the British Museum and b)I get some much-needed exercise, walking a mile further than I would otherwise walk.

Tavistock Square is a particularly tragic place for such an event, as it’s a peace garden. There’s a statue of Ghandi in the middle of the square, and I’ve been there for candle-lit peace vigils before now. You can’t get much further from peace than a bus being blown to bits. I can’t imagine what the people who saw it happen must be feeling. That’s going to stick with you a long time. We’re so used to footage of people in the middle east crying hysterically at the sight of buildings and vehicles that have been blown apart. When it happens in London, it all seems like a bad dream. But it’s the same pain, the same trauma, the same confusion. Maybe we’ll see the pain of bomb-footage from round the world with fresh eyes again after this… who knows.

here’s some eye-witness accounts of what actually happened – the reporting on this has been so mixed, with some news agencies being guilty of the most heinous speculation, like they are hoping it’s going to be a bigger and bigger story. The BBC news web-site remains just about the best place for up-to-date info.

Soundtrack – Kris Delmhorst, ‘Songs For A Hurricane’; Tom Waits, ‘Real Gone’.