my Steal Your Space book

After being down for approximately 3 years, Deadstein.com, the official website of Deadstein is back up and running. We have been on the Internet since the mid 90s and we’ve been blogging about our adventures ever since. I developed issues with the programming of the website several years ago and my web host took my site down saying it was causing problems on their servers. I wasn’t into figuring out a solution at the time but rather found an alternative, WordPress.com. I migrated our Deadstein blogging to WordPress for the past three years and have about 180 posts on WordPress.

WordPress has served us well. It’s easy, it’s been easy to maintain, it’s me keep up with my blogging since it makes it so painless to actually do a posting week in and week out.

Earlier this year I honed my Internet development skills by resurrecting my work website, MCMUA.com and that got me the chops, the skills and finally the impetus to get Deadstein.com back up and running.

With the release of the Jerry Garcia songbook version 8 over the previous few weeks, I now have new versions of all the individual PDFs of each individual song that make up the bulk of the book. I knew I wanted a good way to post those PDFs somewhere on the web to make it easy to retrieve them. Additionally I recently got Google+ going for Deadstein and I wanted to provide a link to it on our blog website and somehow that’s related to the final push that got me to put a website up.

In a couple hours I took a simple template of a simple website design and put in some elements I knew I would like for the Deadstein’s website. I also took some of the old database elements from the old site and incorporated them into the pages. We have so much history as a band and so much content for a website that it was just waiting to be plucked and featured on a new website.

I was able to get the random picture generation going and now that looks real nice and pretty up on the front page. I also brought back an old favorite of Kevin’s, “Today in Deadstein” with random generated pictures based on those actual posts. I was also able to connect the rss feed from the “my Steal Your Space book” blog nicely to fit right onto the homepage. It’s intertwined within it all; updating the website automatically as the blog gets updated. This is pretty cool. I really like that.

Likewise, I have a Twitter feed that also updates with the Deadstein’s current Twitter feeds going down the page.
One of the things are really like about the new webpage is the ability to bring in the old jams database, as well as old school HTML jam listing into one location. It works pretty well at this point so it’s great to be a will to go back and reminisce and read about all those old jams, those old arguments, those old meals and those old people that were the life and times of Deadstein.

Finally, I was able to incorporate all the new PDFs I’ve made of each song. In addition I have an automatically generating songs page so you could look at all the songs and select one to view. That and this is all rudimentary at this point and all to be improved as I get another couple of hours to actually do these changes. And I am looking forward to it. And one last thing, this one’s for Kevin, every time you open the homepage; located right under the songs picklist is a randomly generated song from the song database. This is something Kevin has always been asking for. We do do it through the iPhone random shuffle which is in essence the same thing and a little faster and better, but the random song generator is a real plus I am sure in Kevin’s book.

This was just a quick little posting about the new Deadstein.com revitalization project as it’s up it’s running and it’s working and I am looking for bigger, better and bolder things in the near future. There are a lot of capabilities of my hands now with the simplified website and I expect big things.