Archive for the ‘Thoughts’ Category

You what?

Friday, February 5th, 2010

One of the joys of running a website is discovering all the different ways people find of trying to subvert it.

In particular, since the advent of the google search engine and the way it uses links to rank search results, having links pointing at your website is highly desirable.

Which means that, if you have a website and you see a blog like the abc blog which allows comments, it’s very tempting to leave an innocuous comment – like “great blog” or “nice work” … and a link to your own website.

In fact the vast majority of comments that get left on the abc blog look like this. Mostly the link is hidden away under the name of the user although sometimes its included in the comment.

Some are pretty blatant – like this one:

I like the layout of your website. Check out the graphics on my site at [deleted]

Or how about this one:

When different student are willing to read about the essay order they could essay buy related to this good post. Because the essay outline creating has to be a really serious stuff.

which contained links to an essay-writing service for students. [Though would you buy a used essay from someone who writes like that?]

Others are just complimentary:

Love the blog you have here! I find that information really interesting. :)

Or:

I have seen some crappy posts but this one really impresses me. Good work!

Some try to bamboozle – how about this one:

Solid blog. I got a lot of good info. I’ve been keeping an eye on this technology for awhile. It’s fascinating how it keeps varying, yet some of the core elements stay the same. Have you seen much change since Google made their most recent acquisition in the domain?

Fascinating.

And some are just off-topic entirely:

This is a great article. I have now left the rat race, never to look back. You’re right that the only way to make any decent money is by running your own business!

And finally, just as I was about to publish this article when, with immaculate timing, the following comment appeared:

I enjoyed the article and thanks recompense posting such valuable poop at verge on wits of all of us to conclude from, I sort out up it both valuable and communicative and I blueprint to grill it as again as I can.

Which says it all, I think.

Anyway, it keeps me amused deleting them and it’s not as if I’ve got anything better to do with my time.

And the point of this post – well, just to share some of these delights with genuine readers. And to say that, I’d love to have some more comments on the blog – I don’t even mind if it links to your own music related site – but if you do leave one, please mention abc somewhere in the comment.

Thank you!

Chris

This is a great article. I have now left the rat race, never to look back. You?re right that the only way to make any decent money is by running your own business!

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Merry Christmas

Monday, December 21st, 2009

Well, it’s been some time since I last blogged – nearly three months. Eek!

Partly, it’s because I’ve been very busy at work, writing the lectures for a new course on 3D graphics.

I’ve also been busy rehearsing and recording with my new band Angles (with Cliff Stapleton & Richard Jones) and playing with my new G bagpipes – a lovely sweet-sounding set from Sean Jones.

For anyone who’s around in Kent, Gloucestershire or Brighton, Angles have got three gigs coming up in January – my first chance to play the pipes in public.

So – not much time to work on the abc website.

However, there have been a few things going on behind the scenes so this is just a quick update – exactly six months since the website was relaunched.

First of all, the tune search has been growing all the while – I’ve just updated it today and it now includes over 53,000 tunes. I’ve also done quite a lot of work on the crawler (that searches for abc files across the web) and I think it’s much more robust now – though not much to see from the user point of view.

Secondly, I created an abc facebook page a week or so ago. Not much activity there yet, but I’m hoping people will drop by and say hi.

There is also a (long overdue) move in-hand to formally adopt an updated abc standard – check the forums for details.

Finally, although I haven’t had time to start it yet, I’ve got plans for a whole series of blog articles – watch this space.

Apart from that things are ticking along well. The crashes I was getting early on have not reoccurred so I’m confident my fix worked.

What’s more, the website has had over 54,000 visitors since the relaunch!

Looking at the logs, it’s clear that some of that is just passing traffic – perhaps arriving via a google search, taking a quick look around and leaving soon after. However, there are steady stream of returning visitors who spend a considerable time on the site, with an average of 12.5 pages viewed per visitor!

Anyway, watch out for more improvements in the New Year.

Merry Christmas!

Chris

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Just back …

Sunday, August 9th, 2009

… from that wonderful institution of the UK folk scene, Sidmouth Folk Week.

Had an absolutely splendid time (despite the rain), although I was only there half the week.

Utterly exhausted now though, especially after Thursday’s marathon – did a concert with Meridian, dashed up to the Bulverton to play for the end of a dance workshop and then dashed back into town for a three and a half hour ceilidh with Climax at the Blackmore Gardens – ten hours of playing and / or soundchecks!

So what has this got to do with abc notation?

Well nothing much, apart from the fact that I met several people who had heard the radio programme (and had a quick chat with Johnny Adams who founded the Village Music Project and was also interviewed).

What surprised me most is the number of people who didn’t know about the programme but happened to have Radio 4 on at the time it went out. Loads of them!

Truly, Radio 4 is the voice of the people.

Chris

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Urban myths

Monday, June 29th, 2009

Popped over to mudcat yesterday to announce the new website.

Within a few hours there was a reply from Joe Offer saying that he didn’t realise I had invented abc, and then a reply to that saying:

Chris Walshaw invented abc when he was on holiday in France, encountered some French musicians with interesting tunes, and lacked manuscript paper to write them down. So he just wrote the names of the notes along with a multiplier for the length as necessary, and a bit of header information required to read the rest. Later, faced with a pile of scraps of paper with tunes written in text he wrote the first version of abc2mtex as a way of converting this material to conventional musical notation.

At first I thought  – no, that’s nonsense, I was in Bath at the time (no, not the bath a la Archimedes, but Bath the Georgian city where I was a student) and wrote the tunes out in a fledgling abc notation to take abroad with me.

(Admittedly, a few years later I did collect a load of tunes in France, but I did it with a tape recorder like anyone else … and then transcribed them into abc.)

So then I checked the history page, which has been on the abc site for ages.

And guess what …  it could easily be misinterpreted to tell the new version (obviously the page isn’t as clear as I thought).

And actually … I rather like the new version.

So … believe which version you prefer. That’s what urban myths are for.

Chris

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LOTRO

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

Well, I kind of expected I might get to hear about new abc collections and software by relaunching the site, but I hadn’t anticipated LOTRO.

Apparently,  LOTRO (Lord of the Rings Online) is a multiplayer online role-playing game that has adopted abc notation for music making by the players.

I was alerted to it by one of the first replies to my poll on people’s favourite abc software.

And it turns out that there are thousands of abc tunes compiled by LOTRO players – including pop and rock classics (from Abba to ZZ Top) and classical pieces from Bach, Beethoven and others.

Some of them are quantized midi files (i.e. probably played in on a midi keyboard and then converted to abc) which means they don’t always have bar lines. Also, if the quantizing hasn’t worked perfectly, you get some very odd note lengths (I saw one abc note with the length 45/8!).

Nonetheless, it’s a fascinating (and welcome) development for abc notation and one which I would never have guessed at.

Now, where did I put my lute …

Chris

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