Out of synch...

I don't know how many of you noticed it, but recently my homepage alionsonny.com is out of synch with this blog. Usually (until the beginning of the year), news which were posted here appeared almost immediately on alionsonny.com, at least to some extent. Also, new videos, music etc. could be found on the homepage with a bit of delay. The reason for this more or less long period of non-synchronicity is now also responsible for the fact that alionsonny.com is "frozen" since January 8th.

Why is it? For this I need to get a little bit into the "technical" details. alionsonny.com runs not on one of those well-known content management systems, which are quite popular amongst those who either have no time or desire to create their own website. And there is nothing to say against that. "Then why are you doing all the work yourself?" An answer to this can be still read in VERY old posts on this blog. I have used such a system for quite a time, namely the well known and very popular Joomla. At this time the website has been hacked so many times that it really was not funny anymore.  "And your great system is unhackable?". No, most probably not. Nothing is unhackable. But the well known CMSs all have one thing in common: They are very well known ;). A hacker or a so-called hacker crew usually has no desire to deal with a self-made CMS and puzzle out possible vulnerabilities if a so-called exploit for a known CMS allows the hacking of thousands of websites. This is exactly the same as with the viruses and trojans, which exist mainly for the most widely used operating system in the world. Monocultures are vulnerable. But please: Refrain from any OS flamewar here ;). And the other reason for my homemade CMS is that it's fun.

Ok, and the current version of my homepage has been hastily stitched together in spring 2013. It should work and be just finished. Here I have put the main focus on that the site visitors can visit my website and I have not only somewhat neglected myself, the guy who has to file in all the data. This caused the fact, that the procedure of filing in news, music and videos was quite complicated. I spare you the unnecessary details ;).

Earlier this year, this really got on my nerves and I decided to no longer update the homepage for a time and instead to build a convenient so-called admin backend, which makes the whole process a lot easier for me. And that's what I'm doing currently. If you see this text on my home page, at least the updating of plain text news is already done. The filing in of new videos and music will be the next step. So have some patience and maybe subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog. A simple bookmark is of course also a solution. Soon everything will be up again and a fix for some already reported "imperfections" is already on it's way.

Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new!

Now it is finally done. The new website is here; not 100% perfect, but quite ok. Some folks allready gave me feedback and of cause the reactions on the new site differ. Of cause, the site has been shrunken down. In the process of "professionalizing" of my work, I prefer easy understandable structures. The old alionsonny.com simply contained too much not really neccessary information. Just an example: Who is interested in an endless list of song titles and the corresponding exact dates of release? Ok I am, but I do not really think you are. Another example? How are fractal images and Raytracing experiments exactly connected to the musicproject alionsonny? Right: In no way!

What I simply recognized throughout the whole process of transformation from a "everything for free fun project" to a professional music project was, that my website was allways a mix between a private homepage and a professional musicians homepage. I tried my best to eliminate the first part now. If I have the time someday to run a private funhomepage again, I have the domain wolther.de for that ;). And even if some folks are complaining now about "losing the cool & easy private touch of the site" and missing (I think unneccessary) information, I think the new site is much cleaner and structured and more suiting it's actual purpose. So stop whining. To say it with the Bible: "old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new", and it is great that way!

The site is far from being perfect. The layout sometimes freaks, especially on some Browsers. The more investigative guys amongst you will also have recognized, that not all possibilities to provoke errors on the site lead to a corresponding error message. But in general the site is safe, otherwise the few hours would have been enough time for my "russian hacker friends" to turn the site into a Viagra selling page. They are quite quick at this and they seem to love to try hacking my website.

The functionality of the site has been now reduced to the absolute minimum, to get the site online very quick. If you are missing one or the other thing, you will most probably find it back in a improved version during the next weeks. So please refrain from AT THIS TIME sending me loads of reports about missing stuff. Most probably I am allready at the job to bring it back. I plan a gigantic improvement regarding to the interactivity of the site. You will get a newsletter again and also a personal section called "MyAlionmind" or so, which will be, for example, very helpfull during sweepstakes etc.

Ok, so far the news. Have fun on the new alionsonny.com. I will now create a new alionsonny track. About time ;)

State of emergency is starting today!

Yes, today I will get my lazy ass up and give all my project sites (alionsonny.com, alionsonny.de and everything under alionmind.com) a hefty update. It is time to wipe away all the amateurish away. Too much is still reminding of the hobbyist times when I gave away everything for free and to change the overall design of the websites to something more professional.

This will, most probably, become a tough ride for you as the website users. I cannot imagine the whole process to be free of any accidents. So stay tuned and excuse the one or the other "side-effect" of me working on the sites. If the homepage is not available, you will still get news via Facebook and Twitter. If something should not work for a longer time, and you think I forgot to fix something, don't hesitate to contact me via mail. E-Mail will allways work ;)

What to expect? My main goal now is to make it easier and more accessible to buy albums, to be able to listen to music and get the latest news without being distracting by unneccessary stuff.The websites and also the blogs will get a more uniform and pleasant look & feel and I want to create more possibilities of interaction between you and me. I will ask you about your opinion about some of my ideas during the time I am working at the whole thing. For examle somebody had the idea of an alionmind records forum. What do you think about that? Would you participate actively in such a forum?`Well, personally I think, that this all works with the Facebook Fansites allready.

Well, I will now start to work. So during the next hours, it is more than just possible, that instead of the websites, you will see a boring "under construction" message. I will keep you updated.

Updates and work at alionsonny.com

First I want to apologize to the visitors and users of alionsonny.com for som inconviniences, which occured during the past weeks. Somehow the songlist was not updated correctly, and because of that my entry for the Leah Rosier Remix Contest aswell as my Teddybears cover "Punkrocker" did not appear. Somehow that had to do with some databasetable and I don't want to bore you with technical details. This should be fixed now. I took the opportunity to work a bit further at the website. Since quite a time there are some not so nice problems with the site, which are actually quite serious security leaks in conclusion with our all the time beloved hackers. I am not talking about real and serious hackers here, but rather about so called script kiddies who feel very cool, if they manage it to break into a private website and fuck something up. So I fixed some fat problems connected to the main database core classes, which caused at least some ugly PHP error messages.
Ok, and during the next weeks I will fix some minor problems, which for example fuck up the CSS regularly. And I will extend the website. Yes, right: There wil be NEW STUFF on alionsonny.com. I seriously think about implementing optional registration for user accounts, to supply, for example a newsletter for REAL fans. Let me surprise you!
I'll close this posting with apologies upfront for any inconviniences which may occur as result of the work at alionsonny.com. It is no "work at the open heart of the site", because I have a quite good development environment here, which allows me to test the modules before I put them online. But minor errors and bugs are allways possible. I ask you explicitly, to send me mails if you come across stuff which doesn't work or look like it should over a longer period of time. That way I eventually get to know about errors which I did not notice. Thanks in advance for your patience and help!

Why is nothing happening here? Where's the music?

No, dear friends of my music, dear listeners, I am not lost without trace and of cause I have not given up making music. As my true fans know, I am quite versatile and do loads of different stuff. And amongst all that I am a programmer / software developer and currently I am on that path again. I am working at an old dream of mine, my fractal generator AlionFractal. Only a few folks know about the first version of that software which I made, for several reasons, only available to a assorted group of people. Now I am working hard on version 2 of AlionFractal, the first official version. I am having loads of fun working at that project and so I simply didn't find the time to work at new music. Of cause I am working at some songs from time to time, but it was not enough to publish a song. Well, currently I am approaching a milestone in my software projects development, and once that milestone is reached, I'll for sure publish some new music. So you really don't have to wait very long for a new release. If you want to read about my progress at my software project, just visit my software development blog (currently ONLY IN GERMAN), by following this link.