fouldsy.com

Since this is pretty much just my personal blog, it doesn’t get all that much attention apart from some of the computing stuff I’ve written. So, was pretty surprised to see around 300-400 hits per day recently. Driving up to Gateshead to get some more tattoo work done (pictures in a few days when it starts to heal…), I was listening to Radio 1 and now it makes sense why I’ve suddenly been getting so many hits.

I don’t have anything on Noel Gallagher back in the Live Lounge in 2003, though I did get bruised ribs from being right at the front of an Oasis gig in front of Noel in 2003 if that counts! Sorry folks, can’t help you with the competition on Radio 1, but rest assured I’ll be entering anyways to get him to play in my living room :p

But, rather than leaving you to go home empty handed, check out this post I wrote about some live acoustic sets did for ‘The Interface’ podcast a couple of weeks back. And, of course, for more awesome rock music, check out TPN Rock – one of the biggest + best music podcasts out there (which I just happen to co-host!).

Following the excitement of live tracks from Noel Gallagher, the Q-Review podcast popped up in iTunes today kicking off with Damien Rice’s latest album, 9. I loved ‘O’ and ‘B-sides’ and play a lot of the tracks on the guitar, so had really been looking forward to the new album.

It’s out in Ireland today and the UK on Monday, so guess what I’ll be scraping the piggy-bank for?! Damien is also performing on Later with Jools Holland (yey, back on TV tonight!) on 10th November and with Jo Wiley in the live lounge on 24th November, so again, keeps me happy as his live tracks are usually excellent too! I’ve also got a copy of the Live Lounge CD on order too, which is very weird for me since I rarely purchase big-name CD’s with doing so much with unsigned bands, but when I really like a band or artist it’s time to grab the wallet!

And thanks for those that have been in touch supporting my move over to The Podcast Network. I’ve really enjoyed producing TPN Rock this week – reckon it’s pushed me on a bit and feel a lot more comfortable + natural on the mic. Never had problems before with the Unsigned Rock Podcast, but now what I’m doing is getting heard by a pretty big audience, it’s certainly spurred me on

Oasis still knock out some awesome tracks, and have long been one of my favourite bands. Noel Gallagher, especially, has been a major influence in my own guitar stuff. Live stuff from Noel is always top quality, and even though it’s hosted by AOL they’ve just brought out The Interface podcast with him doing three acoustic tracks and an interview – ‘It’s Good (To Be Free)’, ‘Whatever’ and ‘Slide Away’ in what they call a “Live and Un-Liamed” performance! Grab the enhanced version if you’re running iTunes to check out some of the photos as well. His interview is cool too and worth listening to.

Alongside Radiohead live in 2003, best gig I’ve been to was Oasis back in 2002 – plastered against the barriers right at the front of the arena in front of Noel and his stack of amps, regularly getting soaked by the hoses the arena staff + security kept rolling out since it was middle of the summer and just a tad warm! One of the loudest gigs I’ve been to, as it happens…

Am I a happy boy today or what?! Those that can dredge the memories will remember I met up with Ewan Spence in Edinburgh at the end of June at The Des Moines Riot’s gig, and finally we can reveal what’s been going on behind the scenes!

The Unsigned Rock Podcast has been going strong with 43 shows now, and TPN Rock, produced by Ewan, has long been a favourite podcast I listen to. Not only that, it’s one of the best rock podcasts out there! Realising that two heads are better than one, and twice the music can’t really go wrong, I’ve moved across to host TPN Rock alongside Ewan! My part stays pretty much the same – two shows a week of the best in new, independent and unsigned rock music, and Ewan continues producing a further two shows on a Tuesday + Friday. That’s 4 (count em!) shows a week of the best rock music on the Internet!

The Podcast Network deliver over 60 top-quality podcasts, quite a few of which I regularly listen to, and to be working on one of the major podcast networks out there is pretty cool! It also gives the bands + artists I get played on the podcast a lot more exposure than producing the show on my own, and that’s only going to benefit them more!

So, go check out TPN Rock: Rock the Week In and let me know what you think!

For those that follow the Unsigned Rock Podcast, you’ll know there might just be something new + exciting happening next week. I’m certainly pretty excited about it as has been a while coming, but is shaping up to be really good!

It’s getting a bit of attention elsewhere with Ewan Spence mentioning it, so you’ll have to check out the podcast on Monday (such as grabbing the shows via iTunes) to see what the all the fun is

With the current hosting plan with Lycos due to expire at the end of October, have been looking around at other webhosts. There’s quite a few sites I run elsewhere, and seems silly to pay for various different hosting plans, but most are fairly limited in terms of number of domains which can be managed from them. UK hosting companies suck. Plus, with moving to the US sometime soon (God I’ll be happy when I don’t have to keep saying ‘sometime soon’…), I wanted to run things from a US-based server.

So, I opened up a hosting plan with GoDaddy which although some people have had problems with, most of my domains are managed by them without issues and it’s always the case that you only hear the negatives. I’ve never talked about webhosts when they’ve ‘just worked’. The new server lets me manage multiple domains as separate sites which is nice, but it meant any domains already handled with GoDaddy automatically had their DNS entries changed to tie in with the new hosting plan. Normally, I wouldn’t argue – one less thing for me to. But, effectively it took 3 of my sites offline and displayed a nice ‘website under construction’ page

Just about getting the Unsigned Rock Podcast back up + running, but rather than being able to plan a slow migration, it’s a bit more frantic now! Have got holding pages up on the other sites now, so fingers crossed it will all be sorted in the next couple of hours. I won’t move fouldsy.com justyet, thankfully both domain + hosting is managed by Lycos so this carries on and lets me move everything across, bring it all online, and test before making the switch! Also means e-mail runs as normal, so bear with me – I’ve already refers in from other sits wondering what’s happening

Having played Ambershift’s track ‘Chinatown’ back on the Unsigned Rock Podcast #27, the guys invited me through to their gig at Bar Pure, Sunderland last night. Was a really good gig, and a decent turn out for a mid-week gig too. The sound gear Bar Pure was running was pretty crap – I’m convinced either they were running the mic cables across a mains power strip or their power amp was about to blow! But, the guys sounded spot-on and went down really well.

I also got a wicked interview with Ambershift recorded before the gig, albeit in very bizarre circumstances of the bar’s kitchen, as well as couple of live tracks from their set last night. Dave + Kieron also dropped me a copy of an exclusive track – ’15 Stone and 6′. This hasn’t been heard outside of their live stuff recently, and likely to be on their new album (release party Friday 25th August at The Cluny, Newcastle – I blagged free tickets last night!).

Check out the Unsigned Rock Podcast #29 to listen to the interview, live tracks, and exclusive new track!

Another competition over on the Unsigned Rock Podcast is for your chance to win a copy of The Eisenhowers latest album ‘Almost Half Undressed’ – simply send me an e-mail to unsignedrockpodcast@gmail.com with the subject line of ‘Give me free album’ or drop me through your details on the contact page.

There’s 3 copies of this excellent album to give away, and I’ll be running this competition for a couple of weeks so give it a try! Check out the last couple of podcasts for some of their tracks – failing that, check out their website for more info on the band, and you can also purchase the album directly.

Having been using the MacBook for a month or so, I’ve been getting itchy fingers with not being able to tinker as much as when running Linux. In a way, this might explain why I haven’t had anything crash, lock-up or re-act erratically…

But, with more + more music getting dumped onto the fairly paltry 60Gb hard drive (I’ve got a Seagate 250Gb USB HDD now too ), I was keen to save a bit of space. Enter Monolingual. This nifty little app certainly takes it time to accomplish what you tell it to do, but it’s worth it! It lets you remove any un-necessary language packs, keyboard layouts and architecture builds. Removing the language packs alone saved me over 2.5Gb, and the PPC architecture data a further 800Mb or so. That’s still not a bad saving though! All helps, I suppose. I’ve already tidied up iPhoto which at first I found chunky, but quite like now, and using smart albums is quite nice to automatically update things as photos are added/deleted/updated.

Another cool little app I’ve started using is Vienna RSS reader. I just haven’t been able to find anything decent to handle reading all my RSS feeds which is why I’ve using Gregarius almost all the time (yes, I know, the plugin never happened as I was simply using a bookmarklet to quickly handle things!), as Thunderbird just couldn’t cut it. But, Vienna is very nice indeed, and I like the smart articles idea again which lets you collect all unread articles together which again automatically updates as you read/delete/tag them.

Finally, thanks to Feedburner which provide the RSS feeds for both fouldsy.com and my podcast, the Unsigned Rock Podcast is currently sitting prettily on the front page of feedburner.com! They posted some comments I made a couple of months back just as I was starting the podcast on their Feedburner Buzz blog (direct link to my buzz bit!) which has been drawing in an awful lot of traffic. I think it’s pretty cool, as the Unsigned Rock Podcast is starting to draw quite a bit of attention actually – expect some big news soon!

Although I’ve ran various websites for a number of years, none have ever been bandwidth intensive. This blog probably pushes things more than any of my previous sites going back 8/9 years, but only because I try to jazz things up with images in blog entries, and have a couple of hundred photos in my photo gallery.

Running the Unsigned Rock Podcast for what, 10 days, has shattered my low-bandwidth idea! You take a 30Mb podcast, get 50 people downloading it within 24 hours, and 10Gb a month quickly disappears. So, I have moved the media content delivery across to Libsyn, which seems to be working very well.

It does pose some interesting questions though. I have a domain registered through GoDaddy, web hosting provided by Lycos, and media content delivery handled by Libsyn. Sometime soon there’s got to be an all-in-one solution. Libsyn provide a half-decent blog, but is limited in additional themes and plugins. Most webhosts do provide different plans (I’m on a fairly basic plan) to grab more bandwidth and diskspace, but they don’t provide the same kind of load balancing as the Libsyn network.

With it becoming more + more common for people to want to store photos, audio + video on their own webspace, are we going to see content delivery networks merging with the traditional webhosts? Suppose there’s always going to be those that simply want basic webspace to host a few pages without all the bells + whistles, but the the trend over the last 6 months or so seems to be pushing to more bandwidth-intensive sites. Hence all the debate over internet neutrality.