ChasingLilly.net

Bandcamp.com. It’s the new rage. All the music peoples are doing it. I recently changed the rather boring/lame/stagnant violentblue.net band website to redirect to our Violent Blue bandcamp site. Bandcamp is pretty cool. It’s free (for 200 downloads), has a really clean layout, and is really easy to get setup. You can see the homepage below.

Violent Blue homepage

So bandcamp sets up your account by album and then by song. You can set prices (all ours are free), setup creative commons rights, lyrics, artwork, etc. Will and Billy also recently got their bandcamps setup. Will was able to put up his wonder-making albumian intro into album-world, In Flight. Billy put up some old stuff and a new single, Almost Reversed (which is awesome).

I’ll be working on a different main violentblue.net site, likely just a hub where you can choose between our bandcamp, blogs, and various forms of communication. But for now bandcamp is where it b at!

Go check out our stuff at violentblue.bandcamp.com or just violentblue.net, either way! We only put three songs up at the moment, but all our stuff is free, and we love feedback!

Don't Fall Asleep download

Happy Trails,
Samwise.

I’ve been helping some people with their blogs lately. The three I’m specifically mentioning here are Will, Billy, and my mom.

Will really liked my LOST theme I did here for my blog, so I told him a while back that I’d make him a Fringe theme for his blog. He’s a bit of a “fair-weather blogger” (all credit and royalties for that just-coined phrase you can give to me personally), but lately he’s been pretty good about posting. He posted his lengthy review of the LOST video game, Via Domus (Will’s right, it’s so terrible), some stuff about McGrimmys, and even some of his favorite videos. With all this text flowing forth from his fingers, I figured it was time to upgrade his theme. You can go check it out at http://www.violentblue.net/willmccarry/! It’s pretty snazzy, and is obviously Fringe-based.

A portion of Will's theme

My mom was having problems putting up posts. She got a fancy new iPad for Christmas and has since been blogging from it about her experiences at work at Hancock Fabric. Some pretty interesting and funny stuff happens there, so go check it out. Thankfully I got her blog all sorted out! You can check her blog out at http://renerodgers.wordpress.com/.

Of my friends I pestered to blog, Billy was my last holdout. I even hacked him up his own awesomely/obnoxiously cool theme to try and coax him into posting. After nearly a year, he finally called me yesterday and asked me for his user info! Horray! He put up his first post today and he tells me he has a few more he’s cooking up, so go check his “Blog of Wonders” out at http://www.violentblue.net/billybacci/

Happy Trails,
Sam.

Just a few days ago I set up a blog for my good friend Billy Bacci. He’s in our band Violent Blue, so I set up his blog on the violentblue.net domain we got. You can go check it out at violentblue.net/billybacci. It’s actually a pretty simple modification of the Silent Film theme you can find on wordpress.org.

The original theme

It’s pretty funny and cool looking in my opinion, and it got Will McCarry jealous as to why I “made a cooler theme for Billy than for me! Mine just has a weird cat thing in the header!” That combined with my previous mention of how I wanted to hack some other themes got me actually wanting to do it. So I am.

I’m currently making a Star Trek theme and a theme for Fringe. I decided (after much intense debate) that I’m going to give the Fringe theme to Will. I mean, really, he can have the Fringe theme, I have the LOST theme, and LOST is better. So anyways I’m basing the Fringe theme off a pretty popular theme right now entitled Aqua Blue, and the Star Trek theme off a theme I’ve previously used entitled Inanis Glass.

Aqua Blue for Fringe	Inanis Glass for Star Trek

I see exactly what I want to make each of them, though I have a feeling both of these themes are gonna be kinda hard/confusing to make. I also don’t know exactly how I want to go about implementing the theme, because I kinda want to keep the LOST theme up. If there were a way to select a theme at the homepage or something, that might work. Though that might involve making separate blog directories, and then I’d have to worry about RSS feeds and page views and links matching up and other stuff… blehh we’ll see, I’m only just now starting to work on them. I’ll keep ya updated!



Happy Trails and Namaste,
Sam.

PS – If you’re wondering what happened to that home page project I had going a while ago, well… it’s still being worked out. Once I get some serious free time from homework and classes I’ll be able to really sit down and start dat der coding for it.

My best bud Will McCarry is just now releasing his long-awaited debut solo album, In Flight. He’s been working on it for quite a while, and it really shows. It’s an awesome selection of songs, and you should all definitely pick it up. Yours truly even makes an appearance on at least one song. Right now the only way to get the whole album is from him, though I’m working with him on a way to put it up online for free. Maybe I’ll even host it here on ChasingLilly.net! You can, however, check out some of the songs at either his Facebook Fan Page or his Myspace. And while you’re over on Facebook, be sure to become a fan!

In preparation for the album, our quite good friends Mel Kobran and Nathaniel Tonelli worked on an album cover for the CD. You can see the finished back cover/cover (respectively) for the album below. They did a really great job, and Mel did a great job putting it all together in Photoshop. All the elements are real, from the hand drawn planes to the coffee stain (which is actually an orange juice stain, but who needs to know?). As always, click to enlarge and by doing so, enjoy.

While they worked on the cover, I simultaneously worked on designing the inside of the album booklet. I finally finished yesterday at 4 AM, and figured I could share a few of the pages with you. But I won’t share them all, some surprises should be left for when you get your hands on a copy of the album!

In Flight booklet pages 1 & 2

In Flight booklet pages 5 & 6

I think it turned out quite well, but then again I am a bit biased. So far the response has been positive, though, so that’s a good sign. Regardless it was a lot of fun branching out into the design of album art. The awesome photos from the booklet were taken by Mel as well. She’s a photography major at VCU, so go over to her flickr or some place and support her. Another friend of mine, Billy Bacci, is also releasing an album soon (he claims next week) and has asked me to do something for him. I can smell another late-night-team-album-art-creating venture coming! Where’s my album? It’s coming…

So go pick up a copy of In Flight from Will, and I’ll keep everyone else updated on where they can download a copy of the album on the interwebz. Soon, very soon. In fact by tomorrow. No joke. I know, it’s crazy how much I’m suddenly blogging. And yes, I realize I’m just having a conversation with myself at the computer.



Happy Trails,
Sam.