About this site
Hi, I'm Mark James, also known as Spenny I'm the caretaker of this website and I'd like to tell you who, what, why and when... Untidy Music was originally intended as a dumping ground for musical ideas and tips, tricks and wotsits.
Over the past few months though it has expanded and it became obvious to me that I needed to tidy it up. As with most things I see everyting in wide vistas, sometimes I need to narrow my view.
This is easier said than done.
Because I'm a musician, a songwriter and a guitarist I tend to clutter and scatter. I decided that it was time to get all things correct and tidied up.
So I've decided to move all my guitar tuition files and articles onto this site, centralize and cut down on my workload, maintaining too many websites slows me down and confuses issues. Potentially that could make this site more cluttered and untidy but hopefully with the new crisp design it should be easier to navigate...
It's Untidy Music - an Untidy Site created by an Untidymind for Untidyminds...
'Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.' -Maya Angelou
How this site was designed
This site was created using Artiseer,
'Artisteer is the first and only Web design automation product that instantly creates fantastic looking, unique website templates and blog themes.'
The back bone of the website though is wordpress itself and the plugins I've used which I'll list below.
I've also used Dreamweaver, Filezilla and Photoshop to hack the the website into something more along the lines of what I wanted. That said I'm an amateur web site designer so if you see something hooky bare that in mind.
Untidy Mind is my seperate blog on wordpress, a depository for information that I use on a regular basis.
Other Software
Guitar Pro, Powertabs, & Sonar and Reaper
Using these packages I've been able to create the artwork for the tutorials. Guitar Pro is an exceelent program for learning how to play guitar but I tend to use PowerTabs much more when creating my screen shots of tab. Sonar and Reaper are the two DAW programs I use the most and also use for tutorials on this site. Sonar Producer edition is in my opinion the absolute dogs wotsits, and even thoughI love Reaper, Sonar just pips it.
Cakewalk SONAR 8.5 Producer | Dolphin Music
Plugins
Below are a list of the wordpress plugins that are currently being used on this site
1. Awesome mp3 player that can be customized to fit in with the look and feel of your site, also helps to hide your mp3 file from view.
2. If you're looking for a donation plugin for your blog then why not try the wordpress Buy Me A Beer plugin
3. Use social networking to promote your blog. This plugin makes it easier to tag your articles or posts with Delicious, Twitter, Facebook etc
4. Update your Twitter account with your posts as and when you write or edit them
Special Mentions
Need a sitemap for your website. The folowing link has a free service to create your sitemap.
This site is hosted by the really reliable and cost effecttive Hostgator. I've used a few web hosts over the years and this is the best I've used so far. Downtime is as far as I can tell non existent. Huge hosting and sql database capabilities, all at an affordable price.
