Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Progress at the alionsonny webshop - complete redising of alionsonny.com

Yes, it all takes a bit longer than I expected. First I had not thought about some things and had to find solutions for a variety of obstacles, relating specifically the synchronization of the main site and shop. I honestly admit that I had thought of some things not at all so far, such as a safe way to use a single database for both sites. Now everything is conceptually clear and must "only" be implemented.

I wanted to build the shop
based on the PHP class library of alionsonny.com so far. Why reinvent the wheel? When I was at the point of letting the shop take shape, I noticed that in the PHP-class collection, from the alionsonny.com over the years a lot of redundant code garbage has accumulated . This would ultimately lead to delays and confusion over and over again and make the whole anything but efficient.

For this reason I decided to make a blatant cut and redesign the class library based on my present knowledge and remove remnants of earlier days rigorously. This will make the code a lot more efficient, manageable and better. For this purpose it is necessary, to review each and every bit of code, just to see where it makes sense to make changes. Most likely a large part of the whole stuff will be kicked into trash and reprogrammed.

And while we are at reworking the classes for the shop, why not also give alionsonny.com a complete overhaul?
Good idea! I have long thought about giving alionsonny.com a nicer appearance. Also, the CSS is pretty loaded with artifacts of past days and years and rather confusing. So that's just when you add something new all the time. At some point, quite simply a whole lot of stuff is inside, which is no longer either used or is redundant. So I will take a close look at just about everything from HTML to PHP code, CSS style sheets to the graphics and rework it.

Visitors to alionsonny.com I can reassure: It is not an "open-heart surgery.", because the whole thing is just too extensive. Instead, I will tinker with all the changes first here on my local development environment and then upload. So you'll most likely see nothing of the whole thing until I've finished it all. Then, one day, you will visit the site again and BOOOM: Everything will be new, nicer and better;)

Sunday, August 21, 2011

The adventure of getting my free downloads off the web

Yes, it's done! There should be no free downloads of my music available online anymore. Well maybe, I missed one or the other, but I don't care. Der majority, especially the many songs I uploaded to various music upload sites myself, is gone. Some pages offered the possibility to convert the free downloads into pay-downloads and I did this wherever possible. But most of those sites want a quite big fee and because I do not accept anything below 50 cent as my share, the downloads are quite expensive there. So you better buy the downloads directly from me, because that's the cheapest way for you to get alionsonny music.

Like said, there's now no music of me available for free on the web. Try it yourself: A Google search for "alionsonny free download" just results in dead links, error messages or fakes. And here it is time for a serious warning: PLEASE do not download any EXE-files from websites, where they promise you free alionsonny music downloads! There's a russian company, which has dozens if not hundreds of websites under different names scattered across the web. And behind the "music download link", there's in fact a EXE-file. I tested it and my malwarescanner screamed in pain. So don't be fooled by folks telling you that it is a "free accesstool" which gives you access to free downloads. Well, actually I would not feel very sorry for people who are NOW trying to get my music for free and catch trojans, virusses etc., but I'm not as evil as you may think. But now you have bben warned and it is your own fault if you still try it.

Well, it was quite an adventure to get all those downloads off the web. As an example I want to name former site called Garageband. I uploaded some music there from 2004 to, I think so, 2006. Then I somehow forgot about it. While running thru my music upload bookmarks I ran across that old thing again. Garageband somehow got sold meanwhile to a site called ILike and I like again was somehow merged with Myspace. On all sites I tried to at least keep the possibility for people to stream (listen to) the music and only take down the ability to download for free. But at that former Garageband and now ILike site I had no choice. Because the admin tool was only half functional, I had to delete all the songs there completely. Well after that I would have liked to get rid of the now completely useless ILike account. But to my surprise the "Delete Account" link took me to the page of Myspace where I could delete my Myspace account. And at this stage I didn't want to do that. But soon after, that should change. So I was at the Myspace account administration page and thought, that it would be a great idea to deactivate the free downloads of songs I had uploaded to Myspace. But to my surprise, Myspace no longer has the possibility to make songs available for streaming only. If you upload music to Myspace, you are forced to give it all away for free. I didn't find that very funny, especially as Myspace NEVER informed me about this serious change. So I simply canceled my Myspace account while I was at deleting stupid useless shit. And I hoped that the stupid useless ILike page (powered by Myspace Music) would now also vanish automatically, but it still was there after my Myspace page was allready toast. So I put a heavy rant on the page instead of my artist biography and uploaded a "Fuck You"-finger as the artist picture. So I hope that if some day somebody respomsible stumbles across this Web 2.0 ruin, he will kill that useless account.

But that was just the most prominent case of a Web 2.0 ruin or abandonned website. On countless sites the only thing I could do was just take down all stuff, because the sites had become abandonned, not longer administrated website ruins, where the admintools have been taken over by kiddie hackers, who have their, sometimes cruel, fun there. Some of the sites were hijacked and wrecked so much, that they distributed trojans, virusses and other flavors of malware in big discount family packs. Good if you only go on such pages well prepared with security features enabled. Still I let my virusscanner do a full system scan after it all.

Well, but in the end only one thing really counts: Mission accomplished. Now I can really start building the webshop for you.

Friday, August 19, 2011

Finally: A new alionsonny musicvideo!

Yes friends, it is done. After a whole year, or maybe a bit more, there is finally a new alionsonny musicvideo And we take a big leap from "Meditation" One to "Meditation Nine". STOP: That doesn't mean that the parts 2 to 8 of the Alion Meditations series will be forever without a video. It just did fit so well this time. Enough words for now. Let the sounds and the images do the talk. Enjoy my new video:

Saturday, August 13, 2011

AlionLive Episode 3 - Bikeride City of Hamburg is now complete and online!

Yes, it is done! Roughly three weeks after I filmed the whole thing, now all 8 parts (rughly 2 hours) are edited and uploaded. Why it all took that long is explained in the aftermath, which is this time "just a bit" more detailled. Again it was much fun to film it all and edit it. I hope you have at least as much fun watching it. There will be no new AlionLive for quite a time now, because the weather doesn't fit and I have to make some music again. And then my musicshop must be finnished. Much fun with AlionLive Episode 3!

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

News & what's happening?

Some of you may have noticed that something is going on again here. 2 days ago, the 4th part of episode 3 of AlionLive was uploaded on Youtube. Finally I know how many parts it will be, because, thanks to the now fully functional work computer, I managed to edit, cut and subtitle all the stuff finally. After all it will be seven parts, so there are three still missing. Two of those are edited and rendered and one of them will be uploaded today. For the senventh and last part I have to record an aftermath. I will do this tonight and upload it on the day after tomorrow.
Why did that all take so long? The attentive readers of this Blog and friends on Facebook and Twitter maybe know, that the days around my birthday up to now were a time of bad luck for me. First there was that total faillure of my maincomputer, then I had some personal / private issues and in the end, about a week ago, a harddisk blew off, which fortunately had nothing valuable on it, but was neccessary for video editing etc. Well, not very great, but now everything works again as it is supposed to do.
Some of you asked, when the webshop for buying music will be ready. Answer: I'm working at it and it will take as long as it takes. I came across obstacles, and I have to learn some new stuff, to get it all done. So please have a bit of patience. Then everything will work great in the end, because: Planning and thoughtfull realization is better than sluggish stuff which doesn't work in the end.
What else? Not just the AlionLive stuff is close to be finnished. Also, after a looong time, a brandnew alionsonny musicvideo will be released soon. Apropos alionsonny: That's where we are at one of the biggest changes soon to come. Formerly I released many kinds/genres of music under the name of alionsonny. That caused more problems than it did solve. First, because most music upload sites require to enter a genre for an artist. This was until now impossible. So I had to chose "Miscellaneous", if possible. That was, for example, not possible on Reverbnation, were I have chosen "Reggae". If I choose "Miscellaneuos", people who search for Reggae will not find my music or at least have a hard time to do so. If I choose "Reggae", people complain that I have chosen the wrong genre, once I release, for example an orchestral sountrack track or a Techno track. Another, but quite simmilar problem is, that if a listener found some music he liked by me and I release music of another genre he most probably says "Hey, your songs so far were great, but I hate that new stuff!".
The solution is incredibly simple: I simply become many. Since quite a time, I release Pop-Techno music I do with friends under the name "Willma Poppen Project" or short "Willma Poppen". I will simply do the same for all styles of music I create. Under the name alionsonny, only Reggae, reggaelike and Crossover stuff will be released, because that's what alionsonny mostly is known for. All the other music, like Techno, Electronica, Soundtrack etc. etc. will be released under new project names with own wesites etc. So everybody can pick his flavor and completely concentrate on that project without being distracted by "alien" music. Let me know what you think about it!
Ok, that's it so far!

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

All music is available for listening again!

It is done! Unfortunately Archive.org deleted all my music from their Servers, instead of disabling downloads only, as I told you in the last blog posting. Now I found a quick and efficient solution to make the songs available for listening again. Since 2004 I use Soundclick.com. No free downloads are available there now, but Soundclick offers songplayers for single songs and also for my complete song catalogue embeddable into websites. On the music summary page I now embedded a player containing my whole backcatalogue of 163 songs. You can listen all songs in one list there. Additionally all 163 songs are available for listening from my songlist on alionsonny.com now.
On Soundclick you can also buy songdownloads for 0.75 US Dollars of which 0.52 US Cents go to my account. I want to offer songdownloads in my own shop for 0.50 US Cents or 0.50 Euro Cents in the future. But if you do not want or cannot wait you can now buy them on Soundclick, as it will take some time until my own shop will be available.