ChasingLilly.net

I told you guys I have a few things lined up to do this summer. The next thing lined up is band-related.

Yes, you all know about Violent Blue. But did you know we now have our own website? Chances are you didn’t, so go check it out at violentblue.net. Having your own website is a big step for bands in today’s digital generation. Thus while the band itself is a big project, another big project for me will be creating/updating the site. Will and I agreed it would be great if each member of the band had his own blog, so I got Will set up with one of his own at violentblue.net/willmccarry. You may notice he only has one short post up, so go comment on and yell at him to start updating it more!

Right now the site is up and functional, though it looks terrible. It was just a custom page I threw together in an hour or two using a [terrible] CMS called concrete5. For now, it’s passable. It has a video of our single, and is also running the RSS feeds of our three blogs under our epic pictures. It’s also running a feed of our latest Tweets, and I’m going to put a box linking to our Facebook Fan Page. So it does work in terms of being a sort-of HUB for our future fans to be socially in touch with us. But don’t worry, the look of the page won’t stay white, weird, and boring for very long. Like I said, concrete5 is, while easy to use and great for beginners, nearly impossible to personalize. So for this site I’m moving away from it, and any other CMS for that reason.

I tested numerous others such as Drupal and Joomla, too. While many people I know use content management systems like concrete5 and Drupal effectively, it just isn’t what I’m going for with the site, even if I wanted to take a more community-driven approach. However, I don’t want to use services like WordPress or Blogger for a home page. While I could even strip a theme down so it has a more basic homepage, I don’t like the non-static feel or annoyingness of blog-driven band pages.

So basically the whole point of all the above writing is to explain why I’ve chosen to build the site from the ground-up by myself and code a crisp, clean, CSS template from scratch. This will be quite a learning experience for me, and I don’t want any of you “smarter” web developers laughing at me as I crawl and cry my way to a cool looking site. Obviously I won’t post the site until it’s completely done, but I will keep updating the process on this blog as it comes along. So it looks like this is the only place you’re gonna get that info which… you probably don’t actually care about. Hahah no matter, I’m the one running this blog, so I decide what gets put up, even if it’s boring and loser-filled.

Happy Trails,

Sam.

We are a very ambitious bunch. We meaning: Will McCarry, Billy Bacci, Jimmy McGrath, and myself. Collectively, we have been part of five separate bands over the last four years, not to mention our own personal side-projects. But all that has finally come together. We have finally settled on the name ‘Violent Blue‘. Not only that, but we also have our first song up over on our Facebook page to prove it! Titled “Polaroid” it’s the first track we’ve released off our upcoming Yeah. Right. EP. Go check it out, become a fan, and give us your thoughts!

Some readers may remember that we were running under the tentative band name “Chasing Lilly” for the past few months. In fact, that’s the reason this site is named what it is (despite being a cool LOST reference, of course). We’ll get the EP out sometime this summer, and expect us to be playing some shows as well. We’ll keep ya posted!

So far we only have a Facebook page, but we’ll be getting a Myspace music page up soon as well. Jimmy was cool enough to make a video for the Polaroid song using pictures from our travels over the past year. Clever… using pictures to show a song titled “Polaroid”… intentional? Probably not. Ah well, check that out below as well:

In other news, we had to make a short educational video this week for Digital Storytelling class using only free-to-use videos from the Prelinger archive on the Internet Archive. We chose the topic of “phishing” and agreed that my group would write a short script and record voice-overs, and I would edit the whole film together. The video below is the culmination of this effort. You’ll notice the voice overs are rather blown out volume-wise, but the bad audio, combined with the guys at times funny-sounding voice I figured were worth keeping and funny by itself. Enjoy:

You may be wondering where my digital story is? You know, that one about me being a character from LOST actually in the show blogging about it? Along with video? Well I’ve run into some big roadblocks with that idea, and may be forced to take up my secondary idea. Don’t worry, it still deals with LOST, just not in the same way. We’ll see, though. Keep watching the blog.



Lastly, we’d like to apologize for not being able to upload last week’s Dark Territory LOST Podcast. For those three of you who listen to it, we are sorry. If it will allow us to without problems, we’ll sill try uploading it. We’ll also have a podcast for this week’s Richard Alpert-centric LOST episode, “Ab Aeterno” (which means “from the beginning” or “from eternity” in Latin). That’s all for now!



Happy Trails,
Sam.