March 1, 2014

Back Up and Running

I want to extend my profound apologies for the downtime the site has experienced through the last week. Although I am terrible about updating this thing, I am adamant about keeping it up and running at all times. As such, this was the exact situation I was trying to avoid last week, but it ended up all going to hell instead.

This entire problem stemmed from me finally moving the domain and hosting to a new registrar. I'd been wanting to do this for a while because while GoDaddy is very reliable, their prices are a bit high and their interface is maddeningly complicated (however, they seem to have recently redesigned it to be more user-friendly); additionally, I am now hosting a second domain through a new registrar and wanted to have both the domains at one registrar for my convenience. So a week ago, I started the process. However, the domain expired just as I started it, so GoDaddy, following their policies, suspended the site and gave a ten-day grace period, hence the downtime. Unfortunately, I made the situation worse because I missed a vital step in the transfer process and was unable to restart it for several days. I hated to do it, but I had no choice but to wait for several days until I was able to get the site up and running again.

Now, after some very long, nail-biting days, I am please and relived to say the waiting is done. I again apologize for this unexpected downtime and hope like heck I never run into a problem like this again. Regardless, I have lots of things planned for the site in the upcoming months, so stay tuned here and check my Twitter and Facebook feeds for more information as it becomes available!

~Dean

May 12, 2013

New Demo Track and Site News

After nearly a year of no updates, I've finally added something new to the site! In the "Demos" section, there is now a new cover I've done of "Being Alive" from the musical "Company". Now that I've finally started to streamline the process for creating these covers, I'm starting to wonder if I should start posting on a monthly basis so that I have a least some content to put up here. I'm leaning strongly towards that possibility, but due to some computer issues, I may not be able to work on another cover for a few weeks (although I have an idea for what I want to do next). However, even if I don't have another cover to upload for a while, I do have something else to post here; I recently found some poems I wrote for a class a while back. While most of them are pretty terrible, there's a few that, with some cleanup and revising, could be pretty decent. Once I have revised them, I'll put them up here.

But I have more to discuss than how frequently I post new items. I am in the planning stages of completely redesigning this websie from the ground up. I know that it seems silly to redesign a site that I update so infrequently, but as my online presence continues to grow, I feel that I need to start branding myself. In the past year, I have begun to create an online media portfolio which, I hope, will make it easier to find a career once I've finished my degrees. While creating the portfolio, I realized that right now is the time to start creating my own brand. I need to tie together my websites, blogs and social media sites so that it's evident they are all part of the same network.

Now, this is not to say I'm unhappy in any way with the way this site looks or runs; frankly, I'm quite pleased. But it doesn't feel all that linked to my other sites. Moreover, because I update infrequently, it looks like a very static site most of the time. So, in addition to rebranding, I want to redesign the site so that even if I'm only updating once a month, it won't look that way; for example, instead of making a newspost about every single thing I update, I'm going to implement a feed with all the recent updates. Now, this likely won't happen for some time; as I already indicated, I'm still in the planning stages. But seeing as I have a light courseload at school this summer, I want to devote time to my creative endeavors. That being said, I will be spending the upcoming months sketching out my ideas for just how to do all this. When the time comes to build and upload the site, I will keep you informed via these newsposts and my social media outlets of my progress.

It's gonna be a crazy ride, but it'll be worth it in the end.

~Dean