*3/31/2001
Song update is small: The Roscommon Reel, and a recording of the Tar Road to Sligo on the Noah Herbison Laughing Whistle. Also, re-transcribed the Muffin Man, so I could make MIDI for it.
The following is a big explanation about the recent problems with the website, and what I'm doing to ensure it hopefully doesn't happen ever again!
It's always something isn it? My hosting site lost it's ISP connection, AGAIN. I have brought the website home, and am running it from my home office. I'm running a cable modem, so in theory, downloads should be even faster than where I was before. However, I don't have a static IP address, so I have to use a neat little service from a company called DynIP (
www.dynip.com) to autodetect my ip address and forward my users accordingly. Currently, I'm on their 30-day free trial, which makes my website address tinwhistler.dynip.com.
To get www.tinwhistler.com to forward to tinwhistler.dynip.com I have to use Register.com's IP forwarding, which doesn't seem to be the greatest, as it only parses and forwards to the root domain, and ignores any directory structure. Thus www.tinwhistlercom, www.tinwhistler.com/music and www.tinwhistler.com/music/songname.asp all point to the same location by the time Register.com is done forwarding them. It also has that stupid banner ad for Register.com at the bottom.
GRR!
However, all is not lost. Before the 30-day trial is up, I intend on purchasing DynIP's domain forwarding plan, which will mean that any links to www.tinwhistler.com will work exactly as they should. All of this would not be necessary if I could have DSL at my house…but the house's phone wiring is not up to snuff. In any case, since this service is going to now run me several hundred dollars a year, I will be exploring ways to recoup some of that cost. I am still committed ABSOLUTELY to having no banner ads. They make me sick. I will probably try to figure out some neat T-shirt designs or resort to public begging using the Amazon or Paypal donation services. I promise to keep the impact on the site minimal. In any case, if any of you fine folk have any other ideas, I'm open to hearing them. I'm not interested in hearing any ideas that involve porn or banner ads! (grin)
*3/15/2001
Well, I went to update the website a few days ago, and found that the site was totally down. After getting the web server home, I thought it was simply a power supply problem, but I was mistaken. Evidently when south Texas had it's big storm a few days ago, the server got spiked, and lost about 2/3 of it's internal components, including the hard drive with the OS. I finally got everything fixed and back in place today.
As for the song update, we have: The Mason's Apron, The Water is Wide with MP3 on D and low D, Purphy's Jig and The Monaghan Jig.
*3/2/2001
Hey folks, I've come to the conclusion that trying to put up songs every Friday is just not going to work while my boy is still a newborn. For those of you who've had kids, you know the routine…one parent watches/holds/feeds while the other parent does something important like eats, showers, or sleeps.
I'm taking a break this weekend to go to the North Texas Irish Festival in Dallas to see some killer musicians and hear some great music, and I've been preparing for that in addition to doing the daddy thing.
I'm still committed to bringing songs to the webpage, but I don't know how often the updates will happen. The point here: I'm not giving up the page by a long shot…it's just going to be slow going for a bit. I still have hundreds of pieces of traditional music that really need archiving, and I think it's important work, so don't count me out! I've put up nearly a hundred and twenty songs in the last half-year, and I want to keep growing. But some weeks it's only going to be one song (or none, though I'll try to keep that to a minimum). Some weeks it may be a half dozen. Because of that, I am abandoning the Friday update schedule, and I'll just add songs and update the what's new page immediately after I find time to notate or record new music, or whenever I have any other page addition. Just check the What's New periodically, and you'll see what I've added!
Thanks in advance for your understanding and patience!
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