I’m trying to theme LMMS to look more like GIMP on my Linux Mint 12 (Mate) desktop with default theme.
…is what GIMP looks like. Here’s how far I’ve got with LMMS:-
So far so good! I now need to locate the rest of the colours to sort all the other stuff out, like rulers and the expanding left menu and it’s bar. Also the main menu.
LMMS is a chocolate factory of delight. Every sample, every effect, every preset and every knob you can turn is a whole new playground waiting to be explored…
Click, drag, drop, move, scroll. We’ve all got used to using a mouse to talk to our PC’s. The command-line interface seems primitive and obsolete sometimes, useful for technical stuff, but not really part of the everyday use of a PC.
Not to me. I love it. I actually think using words and logic is less primitive than pointing at pictures. That’s not the main reason why I like the command line, though.
I also am well aware that command line interfaces are more powerful. I know my way around a Unix shell-script, a DOS command batch file, and a Powershell applet, so I know it’s amazing for automation. That’s not why either!
I remember a conversation with my Gran once. About the difference between radio and television. As a child, she said, she used to sit around the radio with her family and listen to the programs. She said it was better than TV. Her reason why? The picture’s better.
I’ve heard similar things about other media comparisons, too. Do you prefer books because they have “better special effects” than movies? I’m the same.
When I was a kid, there was a kind of computer game based entirely in text.
“You are in the forest,” it would say. “There are exits north, south, east, and west. There is a troll here.” Upon which you would type “Kill dwarf”, or “Go north” or whatever. Sometimes it could get pretty evocative.
“You are in the catacombs. Ghostly voices echo through the walls…” I loved it. When people asked me what was so good about those games, I would smugly reply:
“The graphics are better.”
I still think of those games as a ground-breaking new form of novel, rather than a primitive video game, similar to the books I had which said things like:
“To escape through the window, turn to page 247, to escape through the door, turn to page 12. To wait for the gang to return, turn to page 95.”
The first computers I used seriously were Acorn Electron and Acorn BBC, DOS PC (called IBM compatible in those days) and UNIX. These all had text-based interfaces. Of course, I was right at home in all of them.
Being in a command-line environment was like being lost in the adventure all over again:
“You are in your home directory. You can go ‘up’,'documents’, or ‘misc’. There is a file here.”
The human imagination is a powerful thing. Well, for me, anyway. When I listen to The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio play, I see things in my head that no TV costume expert could do. When I read a book, I’m there. I smell the smells, feel the tensions and live the experience.
In fact, the more you leave to the imagination, the better the experience becomes.
Then DOS became Windows. And the Acorn BBC turned into the Archimedes and A4000 with a mouse and WIMP interface (do the kids still call it that?)
It wasn’t the same. All my imagination of what it “felt” like to be in a directory was gone. Replaced by 8-bit windowpanes and icons. Rubbish. Before, being in my home directory felt like being home. Now it feels like being in a home. Like in the phrase “retirement home”, where everything is impersonal, carries no emotional attachment and is generically decorated.
As a bit of a Linux hobbyist, I understand the command line is more fundamental and powerful than the GUI. As a Windows user, I appreciate Powershell and Command.exe. I also know that Windows and Unix/Linux desktops have come a long way since the 80′s. My personal reasons for loving the command line and shamelessly proselytising it goes beyond power-using and scripting abilities.
The graphics are simply better.
What is SEO, and what can it do for your website? Will it get you to the “top of Google”? Do you need to be the “top of Google”? There is a lot of conflicting information all over the web and in forum posts about what gets you to the first page in Google search results.
First off, SEO does NOT mean “top of Google”. A website without SEO can get good results in Google, while a fully optimised site can be stuck on the bottom of Google’s results. I’ll explain…
The World Wide Web was created for particle physicists to publish the results of their experiments on the internet. But unlike a piece of paper or a simple text file, some of the text could be “hypertext” – magical clickable text that would take you to another web page, somewhere on the internet. Since then, of course, the web has exploded into singing-and-dancing multimedia experiences and web applications, but the world wide web still fulfills the same function it was invented for – publishing information. That information could be your company brochure, your corporate accounts, or your dog’s new puppy photos. It’s still information, and you’re publishing it.
The web quickly became bigger and bigger. To organise it somewhat, people started making web pages that were simply directories of websites. Some of the original web directories are still going, including DMOZ and Yahoo! The first search engines available were in-house ones for searching those directories.
Later came the dedicated Search Engine websites. These are programs that every so often, try out every link on the whole world wide web, and the directories are updated automatically. The first web search engines like Altavista simply counted words. Google, on the other hand, has an near-exact copy of the entire web in it’s databases. Amazing, considering the billions of websites out there…
The creators of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, wanted a search engine that would be relevant to humans. Not merely satisfied with counting words, they included a count of how many links a website had to it from other web pages. At the time, nearly every website had “what’s cool” and “what’s hot” links to their favourite websites. By measuring how many people linked to a website, they could logically guess which websites out there were relevant, or popular, and serve these at the top of their search results.
Ok, a search engine is handy, but those servers and staff aren’t free, so they needed a way to make money off this stuff. So they invented sponsored listings. They made billions. That’s the story of Google. But the point is, they wouldn’t have made those billions if they weren’t a popular search engine – nobody would use them, so nobody would pay them for sponsored ads. On the other hand, they wouldn’t be a popular search engine unless they were were returning results based firmly on what people want.
Unfortunately, a search engine that simply counts words and inbound links can be fooled. It’s possible to create a thousand websites stuffed with words and links to your site. Google’s income is based on producing relevant results, so the people at Google are constantly on the look out for the latest tricks. In some cases, taking those pages out of their results altogether. These tricks are not SEO. If you’re hiring an SEO expert for your company, make sure they don’t engage in that stuff. It might work for a few weeks but then you’re kicked out of Googleland. Don’t bother.
So really, SEO is simply about serving relevant content. Beware of technical “tricks” that will “fool” a search engine into thinking your information is important. Use techniques that will actually make your website important. Optimise your site to the people who will visit your site, and the search engines. I’ll talk about the technical side first. These aren’t SEO tricks that fool a search engine, they are technical design standards that make it easy for search engines to actually find your content.
Google doesn’t care about how nicely designed your site is, or whether you’ve created the ultimate user experience. Google simply reads the text. So, if your content is hidden in a Flash site or on image files, Google won’t see it. Some javascript techniques that serve content are friendly for search engines, some aren’t and make it hard for Google to read. Also, if your PHP files require strange variables sent to them, without a nice link that Google can “click” on, they won’t be served.
A good way to think about it is to imagine Google as a blind person using a text-only braille browser or something, who might be interested in your website. If you want to test your website, check it out on a text-only browser such as Lynx. If you can’t get to the content, or it feels irrelevant, you’re not optimised. Growing your site helps too – a site with new information on it is more relevant than one that’s been the same for a year. That’s not to say that things like Javascript and Ajax can’t be used to make an efficient site, it’s just that you need to be careful which content is served in which way. You don’t really need to optimise a private, logged-in web app (apart from browser checking!) but the site around it with the “About Our Web App” and front page copy etc, should be well written and to the correct technical standards. A web app like a public music database should be optimised. Then everything can be there, waiting in Google for your visitors to find you with.
If your website is large, handled by an incomplete CMS or simply built in a complicated way (using javascript to call PHP variables), then Google might have some difficulty. You might have some pages served by form entry. You might want a mobile site with duplicated copy (which Google hates!). In that case then, you will want to include a sitemap file. This is an XML file with a nice map of your site that Google can follow. To avoid showing duplicate pages, you can also use a robots file. This is a text file that asks Google (and other polite search engines) to please not go to some page or section of your site.
Just make your site to ordinary web standards and it should work.
Google will always make it’s search engine relevant for humans to find the information they’re looking for. So make your information relevant. All the search engine optimisation in the world won’t make a difference to that.
Say you invent a new recipe for baked beans pie. Imagine now, that you break all the SEO rules – you put it in as an image, with no metatags, “alt” text or anything. Now imagine the world goes nuts for your recipe. People love it. They share your address on Facebook, Reddit, and all over the web. What’s going to happen when people search for “baked beans pie” in Google? It’ll be there. At the top, or near the top. If it isn’t at the top of Google, maybe the feature on the “Famous Pies” website will be at the top. Either way, the relevant information made it.
If your site isn’t at the top of Google, look at who is on top. If your online shop sells instant pie, and you search for “instant pie” in Google, or even “delicious pies”, look at the websites at the top. What makes them more relevant? Chances are they have a larger site, with more information, probably a blog with recipe ideas and latest news from the pie industry. If their website is worse than yours with only a crappy picture and a PayPal order form, and they’re still top of Google, it might be a good idea to actually try one of their pies! Maybe yours need more mustard…
Think about what your customers actually want. Give it to them. And don’t try putting lipstick on a pig. A well designed site, with all the best SEO on it will fail if the actual content or product is rubbish.
Also, there are technical things you can do. Put all your content inside proper HTML tags, use a well written Description metatag (so people can read in their Google results), and if the site is large, a small “breadcrumbs” line can be used. A little row of links that tells you you’re in, for example:-
“>shop>mens>trousers>jeans“.
It just saves all that clicking and searching…
All the Graphic Design rules apply here too. Colours, space, font and layout should all go towards making your information human-optimised, but that’s a whole other subject.
You’ve made yourself a kick-ass site, it’s been optimised for search engines and still no hits. It’s even got a blog and articles are being written all the time! Still no hits! Why? Maybe nobody knows about it…
There are a million ways to actually market your amazing SEO’ed site that have nothing to do with the actual site’s development or design. Google likes inbound links. You’ll need to make and encourage and beg for as many of those you can. However, don’t be sneaky. Google can only be fooled for so long before it gets angry and throws you to the bottom of the world. So avoid pointless-seeming affiliate schemes, advertising pyramids and all that junk.
Find the people online who like your product. If you sell sports goods, find sports forums. Join as a forum person, not as a spammer. Converse, make friends, give and ask for advice. Lots of forums let you link in your signature. You can shamelessly promote yourself everywhere without being spammy this way. Say somebody goes on the forum and says, “My feet hurt when I run” and you know all about pronating and supanating and all that jazz, so you say “You should buy McDinkin’s corrective running shoes. Our customers go nuts for them. You can find them in your local sports shops or online. Don’t buy the blue ones, they smell! I know, I’m a sports shop owner…”
And quietly sitting there in your post signature is a link to your shop. Suddenly you look like an expert, your advice is relevant and you’re more likely to be bought from than if you just say “buy our corrective running shoes! £99 a pair – Free delivery!!!”
You can see the difference. The first way is relevant, the second is spammy. So people like your post, it becomes popular, people link to it, and it slides a little bit up Google for searches such as “running shoes” and “sports equipment”.
You could then take the opportunity to write a blog post for your site, giving advice on all sorts of running shoes stuff you’re knowledgeable in. You can add to your forum “I wrote up an explanation in a bit more details, take a look… [link]“
Marketing itself is a whole other subject than SEO. SEO is a set of techniques that help search engines assess your relevance to the world. You will still need to use all the other marketing techniques to hand, such as ad campaigns, posters, and sponsorship. Not every website even needs to be “top of Google”. Treating your customers well and expanding through word-of-mouth is still viable and incredibly effective, even in a world of viral video camaigns and instant e-commerce. If your business is based around a person-to-person model, such as design or therapy, you’ll find you get recommended if you give a bit extra.
It’s a good idea to focus on your web statistics, available from Google Analytics. This will tell you what’s popular on your site, and what people are searching for. Say you’re a digital artist. You take a few photos of textures like wood and stone, and put them up on your site. If your analytics say people are finding you by searching for “stone textures” then you might want to add some more, or a downloadable Zip pack – this way, the relevance of your site increases to the world.
Make your site relevant and accessible to humans, with well written content and effective graphic work. Design it so it talks to Google well, with meta-tags, sitemap XML and proper semantic markup. Grow it with a blog or CMS, giving good advice and letting your fans know about new products and competitions. That’s it really. That’s all SEO is. Anything else is marketing:-
To market your site, spread the word around the web (and of course, the real world!), being relevant and friendly, not in-your-face and spammy. Run an ad campaign. Watch how people find your site. Adapt accordingly, with articles and features. Facebook and Twitter help, as well as the industry-specific social networks such as Deviantart, Linkdin, and Flickr. Put your services on Craigslist and Gumtree. Radio plugs, press releases, fly-posting, leaflets on car winscreens, cold-calling, door-to-door… You know what to do!
And, most importantly, have a great product at the other end…
My favourite kind of software is freeware. My favourite freeware is community driven open source software. My favourite open source software is libre software, also known as Free Software.
Saying that, my favourite kinds of Free, Libre, Open Source software (also called FLOSS) is that kind that works on the “Big Three” operating systems, Windows, OS/X, and Linux. When I stop working with other operating systems, I’ll just be a GNU/Linux head. Until that day comes, I like the fact that the software I use can be installed on any computer I find working, anywhere!
So take advantage as I give you some fun software to play with. Nothing gives you a feel for music like actually mucking around with it, and you can be sure that what I’m giving you here should work on your computer. I’ll also list some other fun stuff to get your teeth into…
These software products are available for Windows, OS/X and Linux. They are all free to download. If you’re just learning music (with the pages on my blog, for instance!) and you don’t have an instrument, start with a simple synth. If you have a “real” instrument, you can start messing about with recording software.
Get the following software and start mucking about with it. Some of it works right out of the box, others you might have to go online and look for solutions.
This is one of my favourites. For the technically minded, VMPK is a virtual midi controller with pitch-bend. For the absolute noob, VMPK is a funky musical instrument that you can play with a mouse or your PC’s keyboard.
VMPK running on Windows XP
It’s a nice piano, capable of chords. Don’t expect it to do more than three notes at once if you’re controlling it with the keyboard, but you can do more with the mouse. This is simply a limitation of your PC’s keyboard. I don’t know how it would work on a multi-touch screen, but I bet it’s fun!
It’s fine for learning to mess about with music, for trying out chords and tunes. Play with the pitch-bend…
To set up VMPK you need to install it, and hook it up to a synth. If you’re on Windows, you should already have the Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth installed. That’s got a decent bunch of simple starter instruments to play with. If you’re on Linux or OS/X, you can install QSynth. QSynth is a midi synth. You will need instrument patches, or SoundFont (SF2) files installed. You can pick some free ones up at ZenVoid’s free patch site.
Once you’ve had a plinkle around on your piano, and found your way around, you might want to start composing, or noting down your musical ideas. You don’t need to spend two years learning all the dots and squiggles of music notation just yet. Aria Maestosa is a free midi editor, based around the concept of a piano-roll. Again, you’ll need a software synth like QSynth if you want to play stuff back as you’re composing, but you can also just edit a file, export to midi and stick it right on your phone as a midi ringtone.
Maestosa gives you musical score, guitar tab and piano-roll as inputs, so it’s great for learning music from tab or score.
If you’re learning on a real instrument, like a piano or guitar, you’ll do well with some recording software. A cheap, simple PC mic can be plenty to start with, but if you want to take recording seriously you should invest in an external soundcard and a decent microphone. For learning and noting down your musical ideas, a PC mic is fine. Experiment with the mic, trying it out in different places to get the best sound.
Audacity is a multitrack recording studio. It’s seriously simple. Record a track, record another, and if they don’t match up, click and drag. Perfect. Audacity also comes with a bunch of mastering effects, like reverb and wa-wa. It enables you to slow down or speed up a tune without changing the pitch, and transpose whole tunes without altering the tempo. Audacity can generate white noise, click tracks and simple sine waves, so it’s possible to create a whole tune using all of Audacity’s effects and sounds, although that would be very time consuming (good to get to know your effects, though!)
Once you get used to recording in general, you might find it easier to work with my next bit of software.
Audacity on XP
Another recording program, Traverso is super fast and, once you get the hang of the keyboard controls, very efficient. It’s also colourful and pleasant to work with. Between Traverso and Audacity, you’ll have a top-notch recording and mastering suite with all the bells and whistles. The only limitations will be your hardware, skills, and imagination. Which will all improve over time anyway, if you take it seriously!
Traverso Digital Audio Workstation (or DAW) employs all sorts of tricks to keep your CPU from being overworked while mixing tracks, and can burn CD’s. Effects can be applied to groups of tracks. Even if you’re only learning to sing, it’s great to be able to hear back your stuff and mix and master it. Try singing the different parts of a barbershop tune to get practise…
I’m featuring sample trackers because I like ‘em. Tracking has been around for a long time. Early video game music was mostly tracker-based. But what is this stuff? Why is it cool?
Tracking started in the 80′s and is still done by highly acclaimed contemporary recording artists. You take a sample of a musical instrument, say a violin. You make it loopable. You program the tracker to play it back on the beat, at a certain volume. You can make other notes in the scale by playing your sample faster or slower. That’s it, really. Oh yes, and you program the things in Hexadecimal notation.
Ok, it’s a learning curve, but worth it. Some of the modern trackers can handle VST plugins and work with midi, plus what they lack in graphical interface they make up for in efficiency. Once you get the hang of it, check out Jeskola Buzz and Buzztard to see how crazy trackers can get!
Hex isn’t that difficult when you get the hang of it…
The first tracker I’m going to mention is Milky Tracker. This is a great place to start learning. It’s a clone of Fast Tracker II, an old DOS tracker. There is a huge community of FT2 users and a great mix of YouTube videos with tracker music. Tracker song files are called Modules, and contain all the samples and the commands of when and how to play the samples. Download some FT2 and MilkyTracker MOD files and see what it’s capable of!
Schism Tracker is a free clone of Impulse Tracker from the 90′s. It’s a bit more modern than Milky Tracker, but not by much. An advantage of using old but updated software like this is that it runs like a dream. Unlike the larger audio workstations, Schism won’t take up much RAM or CPU. Schism comes with a few effects to get your music sounding more professional. Check out YouTube for songs and tutorials. Or better yet, download an IT file (Schism works best with old Impulse Tracker songs) and play it, or mess around with it to see how it works.
Schism Tracker Running on WinXP
It’s good to play an instrument. It would be great if there were an instrument you could practise all the time, that needed no hands and you could play in the shower. Luckily, most humans have an instrument like this built in. Singing is probably the best thing you can do to get yourself familiar with harmonies and scales and immersing yourself in music that you love. Having fun making loud noises is what humans do, so have fun and make loud noises!
Did you ever play SingStar on the Playstation? Well UltraStar Deluxe is pretty much a free tribute to that program. For the uninitiated, it’s a karaoke game that scores you on the pitch and rhythm of your playing. I know, it’s just for fun, but well, it is fun…
As you get better at music, you’ll want to start tackling large tunes. Maestosa, above, is a good way to start, but if you’d like to be musically literate, you should check out some software that will help you compose complicated songs.
This is a very sophisticated notation editor. It comes with the FluidSynth installed with it, so you just run it and play. MuseScore can import midi files to help you learn to read and write music, or it can help you compose when you get the hang of that side of things for yourself. MuseScore can export to midi and to PDF, so you can download a midi file and get the sheet music in front of you while you play along, or you can change the notes around and save.
MuseScore on Windows XP
This is very specific, and basic software that you probably won’t need, but if you want to self-publish your music, or get orchestras to play it, you’ll want your sheet music to look nice. That’s all Lilypond does. Makes good looking PDF’s of sheet music. Following their editing language, you’ll be able to create professional looking sheet music and tablature. Everything is taken care of, from the music fonts to the spacing, with all the nuances of modern music (and a lot of historical music) can be expressed. You can export MuseScore files in Lilypond format, but it doesn’t hurt to learn their editing language when you start writing music for yourself.
If the technicalities of writing complicated pieces is still a long way off, you might want to just note down the chords and basic melody you like to jam around, like a Jazz lead-sheet. That’s what Impro-Visor‘s for. It’s good for guitar solos and for mapping out song structures, even if you’re not into Jazz. A lot of composers use lead sheets to lay out their initial ideas. Anyway, if you’re into jamming around, it can be a great way to write your songs down.
Maybe it’s guitar you’re learning. TuxGuitar gives you a clear interface with score and tab editor, with multitracking capabilities. Now you can save and share all your riffs and solos. The interface is a little bit cleaner than Maestosa, and not as complex as MuseScore, so if you’re just starting out with guitar, it’s less of a hassle to get going with.
Music theory these days doesn’t just include scales, harmony, melody and rhythm and all that stuff. Nowadays we have beatmatching, crossfading, scratching and all that malarkey. Learning to DJ is one of the best ways of getting familiar with the structure of songs, expecially dance tunes.
Mixxx is a free, open source mixing program. Because Mixxx works with midi DJ controllers so if you get good at mixing tunes, you’ll want to buy yourself one. Although i knew a wedding DJ who only worked from laptop. If he had any requests he didn’t have in his collection, he’d be straight onto iTunes, and the song would be seamlessly mixed in with the set. So you don’t need a controller. For greater control for things like scratching, and purely for performance purposes or convenience, a controller is the best option. On top of that, get a good external soundcard and you have all you need to play banging raves…
There is better, more sophisticated Free Software out there. Most of it’s for GNU/Linux systems. Ardour and Rosegarden are pure Linux, as is MusE. although OS/X users can use Ardour, I am told. So I strongly suggest you start with a good distribution of Linux and try out what’s on offer. LMMS is a very sophisticated music station, but is only really built for Windows and Linux. But then you Apple people have GarageBand so why complain? Of course, there are some amazing non-free software titles out there, but I’m not bothered about them. With one little exception…
Say you’re into tracking, and are familiar with the interface, but you want a top-notch professional sounding piece of software and you don’t want to pay? If you’re on Windows, dowload Jeskola Buzz. It’s freeware, just not open source. Lots of open source plugins have been made for it though, like synths and effects, so it’s freely expandable. Also, there is a Free Software clone call Buzztard which, if you use only the open source plugins with Buzz, is more or less compatible. So I’m including it here as a sort of grey area piece because I love it so much, and songs you make on it have the potential to be cross-platform. If you’re considering shifting to GNU/Linux and can’t wait until then to get stuck in then Buzz is your best bet.
If you’re not into tracking, and are used to pianos and pianorolls, LMMS is not as expandable or sophisticated, but still a beautiful piece of kit. Look for LADSPA plugins (like VST, only free from restrictions) to expand it with, although it comes with a staggering amount of samples and synth presets loaded. Some cool demo songs too.
That’s my recommendations for beginner musicians to start with. It doesn’t matter what kind of PC you use, you should still be able to start composing music that you’ll like. All the software is free to download, so there’s nothing stopping you!
Music is easy. There, I said it. I don’t care what anyone says, it just is. I don’t have any special talent, but I enjoy music. You don’t need any special talent. You’re human, music is one of those things we have an instinct for. So, to prove it, I’m posting up tutorials.
Don’t think you can learn music? That’s probably because somebody tried to “teach” you. Let me explain.
When I was in school, we had music lessons. The way they taught us went like this. They put up a bunch of musical notation, and made us memorise the names of the symbols. Crotchets, quavers and all that. Then, they tried to teach us the treble clef.
Once we were sufficiently scared and confused, they let us loose on glockenspiels. If we bashed around on them randomly, we were told to stop.
Having then sucked out all the fun from having a noisy thing to play with, they then tried to teach us nursery rhymes from musical scores. Get real, I was thirteen, and into Aerosmith!
Learning English was different. What happened? I don’t remember much of that, but I’ll bet nobody sat me down in front of an alphabet, and made me construct words from them before I could speak!
No. What happened, I discovered I could make noises. I played around for months, making random sounds and trying to copy what I heard. When I hit upon a word, I was rewarded with praise.
Fast forward a little, and now almost fully proficient with speaking English, was able to progress to reading English. Having said the word “dog” over and over, it made complete sense that the letters d-o-g put together make that word.
A little while later, I learned to make those letters myself. Another human child joins the ranks of the literate!
I just thought I’d mention, in my final exams, I passed English. I failed music.
Later on, I left school, and taught myself to play music. I bought myself a harmonica and played with it. I bought myself a guitar and learned a few chords and a couple of scales. I bought myself a computer and filled it with music software. Jazzware midi, Hammerhead Rhythm Station, ReBirth RB-338, ModPlug tracker, Jeskola Buzz – all the really good freeware!
I discovered that all the music theory they were trying to teach me in school suddenly made sense. After I had learned to speak the language of music, I was now able to learn to read and write music.
So that’s it really. I hope to teach you first, how to play with music, how to speak it as a language and have fun with it, then I hope to teach you how to read it, and finally how to write it.
I’ll start with microtunes. They’re just really short tunes (like the Windows login tune, or that bit at the end of the Simpsons, or a power-up in a video game!) before moving on to short songs.
You’ll need a musical instrument. One with a piano-style keyboard. Alternatively a music software with piano-roll input for programming.
It’s better to have a keyboard instrument for learning music, but if you want to get a guitar, harmonica or penny whistle etc, you’ll find it all helps. My lesson things are based around a keyboard, as is music notation, so it’s a good place to start playing around.
In my next post I’ll outline some free software you can use, but owning a real, live instrument is cool too. Cheap “toy” keyboards are available from places like Argos, also melodicas are pretty good, cheap instruments. Craigslist and Gumtree are always offering free pianos if you have the van, manpower and space to put it, and don’t forget to check the pawn shops like CashConverters for keyboards and other cheap instruments!
It doesn’t matter what kind of music you like listening to, either. The more you mess about with music in general, the better you’ll get.
In 1984, Richard Stallman decided he wanted the world to have a free operating system. Since he was working on Unix at the time, he decided to clone Unix completely from scratch. Working with a small team of hackers, he set about recreating every piece of a working system, calling it GNU, or GNU’s Not Unix (a recursive algorithm). Most of it was complete by the 90′s but the central piece, the operating system base, or kernel, was still in development.
In 1991 the system became complete with the addition of Linus Torvalds’ kernel, known as Linux. Since then, the GNU/Linux operating system has exploded round the world, being used in servers, supercomputers, mainframes and home PC’s, in a bewildering array of distributions, such as Red Hat Linux, Debian GNU/Linux, Slackware, as well as the hundreds, perhaps thousands of spin-offs and independants, such as Linux From Scratch.
Since the Linux kernel exists, and is Free and Open Source software, the philosophy of the GNU project has been realised. The result is a mix of Free Software ideals and Open Source development. An operating system that anyone can use on their PC, without charge and without restriction, and for companies and individuals alike.
Because many of these distributions follow the Free Software guidelines, there is no longer a need for an actual GNU operating system as such. I’d like to pay tribute to the GNU OS, and get a little graphic design practise along the way.
I am imagining here that the GNU OS is a complete, self-contained distribution, packaged in a modern way, keeping a little historic context and harking back to the 80′s a little in it’s design. That’s why I chose a combination of beige and brown. (I normally hate to see these colours together, but I thought I’d like to “date” the design somewhat, as if the product has been going since the 80′s with the original colour schemes and logos to the extent that our pretend customer base has grown accustomed to this. It’s not often I get to engage a “trousers of time” effect in my graphic design, so I thought it would be fun.
The GNU logo itself has been updated a few times, but the original scribble is still full of life and personality, so I thought I’d feature it as ambient design, and focus on the SVG logo as the main centrepiece.
For the text on the box, I used a nice generic sans font called Liberation. This is a “free software” licensed alternative to the MS and Mac fonts, familiar to people using GNU/Linux or other Free Software, such as the GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP.
Anyway, a few perspective transforms later (GIMP should have a proper “perspective” tool with actual perspective formulae, not the headache-inducing transform that’s called “perspective”! Also, while you’re at it, GIMP devs (and I know you trawl the internet looking for blogs with good ideas!) how about a “path” transform where you can path round a bitmap area and bezier it as well as pulling nodes around?), here is the final box!
This is the final box, with reflections and a few gradients slapped all over it.
If you have any comments or improvement ideas, I’d love to hear them 
Take care now…
I’m trying to add another admin to my Facebook page. Everything seemed fine until I hit a Captcha. Screen after screen went by, until I finally got this one and gave up.
What's that for?
Although, apparently, even though the Captcha said no, my friend still seems to be added!
This is some sort of Facebook bug, which was declared fixed under some terms, but later re-opened as another bug. The problem is with adding a Like Box. Facebook seems to be increasingly broken all the time.
Vent over…
…for now
I made another one, because I liked the blue boat icon.
These are Tango icons made into wallpapers. I chose to crop instead of stretching the sides out…
Reminds me of "Scene from Moby Dick" at the Simpsons' house
these are image-x-generic.svg if you fancy Googling around…
I was looking for wallpapers for my GNU/Linux Mint(Gnome) 9 LTS desktop. I happened to notice that the default image icon was really nice so I wanted to make a wallpaper.
Here it is. It’s 1440×900 and it’s been stretched in Inkscape and cropped to fit my screen. I’ve also removed the framing and shine to make it a regular image.
Here’s the original icon:
nice
I would love to credit the creator of this iconic icon, but I don’t know who it was. Big thanks to the Gnome Art Team for the tasty SVG.
That tree is just too nice for just an icon
So it’s looking nice on my desktop so far
Why do all good screenshots have to feature a transparent terminal?
If you know of any nice icons that would make good wallpapers, let me know!
Ok, I was in a hurry. Couldn’t find anywhere the icons were located in the short time, so I had to improvise
1. Put generic image file on desktop (try an XCF if it keeps thumbnailing!)
2. Stretch icon (right click)
3. Screenshot
4. Crop and save (GIMP) as JPG file
5. Open browser to Google Images
6. Click and drag image into search box (Aha! SVG in Wikipedia…)
7. Download and Edit in Inkscape
A bit convoluted, but it worked.
It’s tough starting a business. Everything costs money. A good web designer can set you back a good few hundred quid. But being online is important to businesses, and although it can be a trend these days for people to put their Facebook page on their business cards, but somehow having a proper website with your own web address just looks more professional.
Although my partner, Kirsty, is an excellent web designer, since I’ve joined Tangled Frog full time, I’m taking a stab at the consultancy side of things. To give myself a good grounding in the options available to small businesses setting out on the web, I decided I wouldn’t pay a penny on my harmonica lessons marketing.
The first steps online for a company, small business or freelancer is usually with one of the social sites. If you’re a photographer, it’ll be Flickr. If you’re a musician or in a band, there’s MySpace, Soundclick, Jango etc. If you would like to be a journalist or have a lot of news, you can use a WordPress or Blogger site, or have a Facebook page. It’s a simple matter then of buying a domain name separately and pointing it at your Flickr or Facebook.
If and when you get your own real website, don’t stop using your social sites – anywhere on the web that you exist is good for business. In fact, keeping your Twitter fresh and your Facebook page updated is all incredibly vital marketing. Plus, with YouTube and Soundclick around, you can keep all your videos, tunes and graphics on somebody elses site and link to them all from your “real” site.
Domain names aren’t free. Most of the time when you get offered a free domain name it comes with something else, like a hosting account. There are a few exceptions – It is possible to have a truly free-of-charge genuine domain name without paying for them. They all have limitations, though.
Some are scams. Some aren’t scams as such, but are scammy anyway – such as pyramid referrals etc. Some are based round obscure foreign countries who allow registration from other countries. If you don’t mind a Yourname.co.zz or something, this can be fine. It’s unclear who actually OWNS the license to these names, or if you end up not being able to transfer and paying through the nose for the use of the address for subsequent years. I’d have to sign up for that, and I don’t like signing up to things online – there’s too much spam in the world. But I diverge…
The best I’ve seen so far is a strange conglomerate organisation called Get British Business Online. There may be other similar schemes in your country, but I don’t live there. GBBO is a partnering up of Google, Yola, and other sponsors. You get a Google Sites style website – not very customisable but plenty of not-bad templates out there. They even give you emails so you can be me@mycompany.co.uk which you can access through Gmail.
There aren’t many downsides to GBBO. You are completely restricted to one of their templates. The templates aren’t bad but it does mean you can’t always have things your way. Also, some of the templates are actually terrible and completely unsuited to your business. It will probably take a bit of effort getting it sorted. Usually Google’s people are great at sorting things for you if you ask.
You also have the GBBO logo on your site. Not very prominently, but it still looks a bit naff. The great thing about this is that you actually own the license for your address. If you find a better scheme with nicer templates you can go with them and you only need to repoint your free domain name at your new site (after a couple of months, anyway!)
Ok, there’s actually tons of free hosts out there. There’s also tons of free host comparison sites. What the web needs, perhaps, is a free hosting comparison site comparison site. You will be limited by pageload speeds, or random downtimes, forced ads and low bandwidth and diskspace. You probably won’t be able to have any databases online or run any server scripts like mailouts.
For small, first sites there are a few good ones. Read forums and find out what people say about their free hosting packages. I personally like 000webhost.com They’re great for first websites, and we recommend them to some clients on extremely small budgets. They actually do have database and server scripting capabilities, too! Maybe a bit slow sometimes, and not much disk space, but like I said earlier, if you keep all your stuff on external sites such as Soundclick or YouTube, you can just host the links and not worry about the extra load of videos and music on your site. Setting up a template can be a bit buggy, but I found a free template and tweaked it. Obviously, I’m a web designer and know my way around HTML a bit, so it was cheating, but I tried opening it up in Kompozer, a free WYSIWYG web editor and found I could edit paragraphs and headings without needing to access the code at all.
Which brings me to …
Design is probably the most expensive thing to get. Hosting is handled by huge datacentres who resell all their space as “cloud” – shared servers, virtual servers, dedicated servers etc. Heavily automated and efficiently run. Domain names aren’t very expensive at all, for a .co.uk it can be as little as £5 for two years. Again it’s all handled by huge servers with efficient automation and backup infrastructure.
Design, on the other hand is more difficult to automate. Unless you have a problem, your hosting company or domain registrar won’t even know you exist, but it’s not the same. Every original design needs a real human designer.
Good thing, then that the internet has thousands upon thousands of free templates created as a labour of love by real designers. The chances are you’ll probably find one that fits you mostly and some of the designs are just jaw-dropping. If you’ve paid for a hosting package, there’s probably a web builder somewhere in their client area, so that would be the first place to look. If you’ve got free hosting, look for free templates to download and tweak to your fit. Amazing! Where’s the catch?
A website is just for is publishing your data – what your services are, how much, your favourite biscuit, contact details etc. – and therefore could just be put up in plain text. Design makes no difference to search engines. Some technical documents online are just plain text with no styles at all, so you just need to zoom or resize your browser to get it just right for your reading comfort.
So what are the reasons we have design on the web (or anywhere)? Well it makes you look unique. That’s it. Is that important? Oh yes. We’re psychologically hard-wired to use vision in our judgement of one thing from another, and marketing people know that. What makes you unique, or your company “stand out” is expressed through your design. When you want to come across as friendly, you’ll use warm, bright colours. When you want to look like you mean business, you can use cool blues or stark black (if you’re dead posh and sell diamonds or something).
So even if the design is amazing, even if the template itself is an artistic wonder of universal love and fits your company perfectly, it’s just not unique. Anyone could use the same template and look just like you. Even your competition. Which isn’t unlikely – if you’re a gardener, say, you’ll want a gardeny kind of template. If you’re a musician, you might want something glossy and musical looking, so the chances of somebody looking just like you is increased.
If you’re REALLY lucky, you might just find some kicking designer nearly finished college and on a portfolio building mission. Maybe, just maybe, he would be willing to offer you a design for free. If that happens, go for it.
There are also proprietory web builders like Weebly – again, you’re restricted to their hosting, but their package is actually amazing. Very difficult to tweak to your own liking if you need extra functionality, but a beginner can have a site online with no trouble at all. Just be warned – you’re not unique, and if you need to move host, you’ll have to start again completely from scratch.
Really, it’s not too difficult to get online for free. It’s a bit like the Fast/Good/Cheap food triangle – you’ll rarely get everything you want.
My advice is just common sense. Get what you need, but make sure it’s expandable. Go with a simple text only site, or a simple template and build on it when business picks up rather than tying yourself to a web building package. As soon as you have the money, source a good designer to brand your company well.
In fact the free-est option would be to learn graphic design, web building and handle it all yourself. If you’re just starting it would be a good thing to get stuck into it all yourself, but as you get busier you will find it being a hassle. You might want to employ or outsource to free up some time.
Well, what do you want for nothing? Rubber biscuit?
