Was thinking about the approaching yearly site hosting bill and how it’s gonna get paid … thoughts turned to advertising on my site. This is something I really didn’t want to do, but when needs must …

Two main options I’d looked at before were Google and Amazon ads. Google ads I’d had on a site before for 15 months. The site had had 12000 page views in this time, and the returns – a measly £7. Which of course I hadn’t been paid, because it didn’t reach the Google threshhold. So in the end I’d taken the ads off.

Still £7 was better than no pound? or was it? Did it compensate sufficiently for having ads for American insurance companies plastered all over the site?

I thought Google might have improved things by now so I’d have another go with the Adsense contextual ads. Installed them on an old version of my site for IE only, and while some of the ads were reasonably targetted, there were still a lot of quite inappropriate ads being served to a level that I found offensive.

Also to reach ~£200 yearly hosting bill I would need approximately 350,000 page views in the year – a fair target.

So, to Amazon Associates. I’d signed up to this before but never got as far as putting any ads on a site. I thought what I could do was serve the Amazon ads 50% of the time, and Google the other 50%, then I could compare returns over a period of time.

I wanted to do this using front end code rather than backend as my site for historical reasons is composed of a number of different systems. I didn’t want to go through and modify the different backends. By changing the front end code, it could be done in the common stylesheet and javascript.

This meant having the Amazon and Google javascript in the page at the same time, turning off one or other as appropriate with css. Would that work? No. The pages loaded so slowly that I wasn’t going to get any visitors let alone ad referrals.

So it was a straight choice. Google or Amazon? I played around with Amazon’s widgets then started looking at their aStore feature. First I tried building a list of items by inputting their ISBNs. This was very cumbersome and time consuming, and fairly soon I realised a lot of the books that I’d enjoyed were out of print.

For a second trial I tried using a widget tied to Amazon listmania. Again very cumbersome to setup and now limited to 25 items. Also once I’d got it setup, I found that a number of these books weren’t directly available, so setting up an aStore using this list meant that the viewer had to go through to the Amazon store rather than staying on my site as they weren’t in the main catalogue. And when I deleted these out of print items this broke the aStore – when you first went into it it showed the correct ones then clicking through the pages, it started showing ones that had been deleted. Buggy code.

So while I liked the widgets and I liked the way I could tie them to the aStore, I was having difficulties with the selection of products and the bugs. I decided that I just wasn’t buying enough recent books to be able to recommend a reasonable choice to the viewer.

The final options I decided on – were to set the aStore up to be focussed specifically on the photographers category. Most of the returns seemed ok though I didn’t know all these photographers. A fairly narrow subject selection – but this suited my site which is mostly about photography.

Then I used two widgets – a banner for the old part of the site which is now more of a personal site. A small widget on the more portfolio-ish front part of the site. Both widgets are served to IE only, so if you are reading this you know how to view the site without them until I change things again.

On the front of the main site I included a menu link ‘Recommended’. This links to the aStore site within an iframe. Colours are matched to the existing site. Due to page width I didn’t use any of the aStore widgets on this page, so the end result is quite simple and hopefully effective.

So now wait and see if Amazon performs any better than Google did…

Good week for music … two gigs and a free festival in Sheffield …

Regina Spektor played beautifully but it was clear something was wrong. After playing for a couple of hours with only a few smiles to the crowd for their appreciation she spoke. She explained that one of the band members had died recently – the celloist – and that rather than cancelling the tour they had decided to do the rest of the tour in his memory. It explained the mood of the show, and you could see how difficult it was for her to stand up there, but she said ‘playing music was helping’.

Nice shot of Regina

PIL

For PIL I wasn’t sure what to expect, I had spent a year or so at Uni in my twenties listening to their catalog at that time on tapes from the Manchester record library. It had somehow suited the urban scene I found myself in, but was perhaps not to my neighbours taste in the halls of residence. Since then I hadn’t listened to too much, but I was curious to see Mr Lydon perform.

The tickets promised ‘special guests’ and I looked at the array of strange mandolin like instruments on the stage and wondered who it could be. In the end it seemed PIL were the special guests – there was no support. Lydon’s stage act was composed of dancing of sorts to the music and continual aggressive grimacing and posturing. However now and then he would say something and then there would be a burst of humour and the occasional cheeky smile. And at these times he seemed the most accessible. I doubt that this was something he ever attemped to be, and there were times when his presence was quite intimidating.

The music was purely PIL, and often unlike the Pistols songs which he said were so tight they couldn’t be played any differently, he had worked out variations on some of the PIL songs and they were still works in progress. Some of the songs seemed to reprise earlier songs played and the gig had a kind of musical theme running through it, rather than being a collection of greatest hits/tracks. When the lights were low and the music was playing you could sense that PIL in their own way were a dance band and Lydon himself kept moving through the gig. There were points were it was pretty amazing and overpowering – the drums, bass and Lydon’s wail. The song that was in my mind at the end of the gig with a repeated theme of No Surrender – not one I knew from before.

Lydon still controversial was making statements against the Pope, the protestors outside against his planned gig in Israel and the Conservative/Lib Dem alliance, but for me I wasn’t disappointed – more due to the music than because I’d seen the ‘national treasure’.

Normally the O2 Academy has a curfew of 11, which makes it easy to get the last train back. So I wasn’t watching the clock. PIL overshot by twenty minutes, and after a gasping sprint across town, I found I’d missed the last train … mm .. a £35 taxi for 20 minutes of Lydon’s wail … Luckily there was a late night National Express coach coming through at 12.30am and it got me across to Bradford. And what else – the best curry in the Kashmir!

A smile from Lydon

TRAMLINES

I’d been watching the buildup to Sheffield Tramlines festival on the web. A free inner city festival, it had really the most amazing lineup for a festival of this type, and all for the price of an £11.50 rail ticket. Saturday had had the main acts on such as Blood Red Shoes, but Sunday still had a large number of bands playing across many venues around the city.

I was curious to see how Sheffield had changed in the last 10 years and coming out of the station I was amazed to be in a completely new urban panorama. A new (?) fountain system and wall with water coming over it hid a large part of the block of buildings up the hill to the centre. And the city itself was regenerated with new buildings and the Winter Gardens, which I seen before, but still found a little astonishing in Sheffield. I overheard a couple of grumpy old ladies complaining about Sheffield had had some nice buildings before, but it seemed pretty amazing to me.

I’d hoped for a festival guide when I arrived as I knew many of the venues hadn’t existed when I was in Sheffield, but there was nothing in the station. Up into the centre I came across the first stage outside the City Hall. Some stewards told me where the main stage was on the Devonshire Green, which wasn’t so far away. The City Hall stage ‘Exposed New Music’ was being curated that day by Rolo Tomassi, a Sheffield band that was making it into the music papers regularly but I hadn’t heard. I was a little early, so I wandered round looking for other venues, refamiliarising myself with the city and taking a few photos.

The first band I saw were Joe Carnell and the Book Club, they had similarities to Artic Monkeys and one of the members had been in Milburn another Monkeys related band. They were quite good.

Then Hiem – an electronic band – young local lads but the main singer was an enormous 50? year old guy – it was worth watching – a spectacle and a half. The second song sung by one of the younger guy’s a tale about a Sheffield encounter was pretty funny.

I only saw one other act on the main stage that day – the Mystery Jets, who I thought were pants, and fairly quickly went off to the Exposed stage.

There had been some pretty good bands on there through the day – lots of noise and energy – seeming punk related, but young bands mainly – hardcore I guess. Also it was close to an area of food stalls which had some quite diverse options. In the end I went for an Egyptian stew which was pretty good. Round the back of the city hall was a chill out zone inside where they were showing audio visual displays to people reclined on the carpet who were having a time out. They showed a Vincent Price movie – The Last Man on Earth set to music by some local (?) composers – a seminal zombie movie, after a while the chill in the room was too much and I had to go back out and get a very large cup of coffee to warm up.

I had to leave at ~7 to get the very long train journey back stopping at loads of stations again, but first I saw Rolo Tomassi. The lead singer, a very good looking lady, made sounds quite unlike any I’ve heard from a woman before. There were later complaints about the sound, but I thought it was supposed to be like that. The whole band were chucking themselves around the stage like crazy and I think pretty much the entire crowd was entertained.

The train I picked up in Leeds revealed why the train into Leeds that morning had been so full. Not hordes of young people descending on Leeds Mcdonalds, but the Party in the Park was on that day at Temple Newsam. The train back was lively – lots of buzzing teenagers. I think I got the better deal – Tramlines so much better and worth the trip out of Leeds, though few had been on the train down with me.

Rolo Tomassi:

Hole, Little Fish, Tiffany Page. Manchester Academy

On the door a girl wasn’t being allowed in for being too drunk. Missed Tiffany Page except the last song due to wandering down Rusholme seeing the sights of the curry mile. She was beautiful, but it didn’t sound like my thing – probably a hit on MTV.

Little Fish were entertaining, wasn’t sure if Juju was a skinny guy or a flat chested lady until she spoke. The fast songs were good, she was quite wild. The drummer was pretty good too. At one point she was talking to someone at the front ‘how old are you?’ she said. ’14′. ‘How long have you known Hole?’. ‘Since I was in the womb’.

Hole came on with the new band lead Micko Larkin, bassist Shawn Dailey and drummer Stu Fisher. Micko from the disbanded Larrikin Love. There had been some acrimony from the old band Eric Erlandson and bassist Melissa Auf der Maur about Courtney’s use of the Hole name.

Eric as founder member had said she couldn’t use the name without his involvement. Melissa was concerned about the impact on the legacy of the original band that a new lineup might have. Courtney had tweeted it was her band and her name and she was gonna use it.

So with the name Hole for the Nobody’s Daughter tour and on the new album it seemed she had won the argument.

The set list:

Pretty On The Inside / Sympathy For The Devil (Rolling Stones) , Skinny Little Bitch, Miss World, Take This Longing (Leonard Cohen), Violet, Letter To God, For Once In Your Life, Gold Dust Woman (Fleetwood Mac), Pacific Coast Highway, How Dirty Girls Get Clean, Asking For It (stopped), Boys On The Radio (acoustic part), Best Sunday Dress, Malibu, Asking For It, Play With Fire (Rolling Stones), Celebrity Skin.

Encore: Doll Parts, 13 (Big Star), Jennifer’s Body (acoustic)

Things got going on Skinny Little Bitch then Miss World, Courtney was looking pretty straight, no sign of ‘the kook’ – she was wearing dungarees and a white shirt, and things were going to plan. The band were playing well – the new lineup making a good sound. There were some covers being thrown in and some lesser known songs but there were plenty of the big tunes to keep the crowd happy – it was pretty compelling.

Then halfway down the set things stopped, there were a couple of restart attempts but something serious was up. It turned out the lead amp had packed up. Courtney was going to go off, but with a curfew of 11 the crowd were really unhappy. She was saying ‘it isn’t my fault’ – but then had the idea to do some acoustic numbers. She asked the front row what they wanted to hear, some rejected she couldn’t play them acoustic – but the gig continued for quite a few songs making it up as they went along till the amp was sorted. It really changed the character of the gig – the way they were able to wing it through was excellent – and Courtney’s voice is so strong together with the one acoustic it sounded really good. The first song they struggled a bit – Courtney couldn’t remember all the words and Micko didn’t know it so well but they got through it without too much trouble – then after that it just got better.

There was enough of pre Celebrity Skin to keep me happy and some of the current album was sounding pretty good. She got a couple of girls up for 2 of the songs which was funny. The first was quite good, the second just stood there looking beautiful.

She said ‘this is one of weirdest gigs and you made it that way’ and ‘its either the best show you ever went to or the worst’ – I liked it like that myself.

She mentioned Billy Corgan and the songs he’d written for her, and played ‘the one good song she’d written for him.’ Some of the big songs the crowd were amazing and the singing was great – never really seen that kind of audience participation in Manchester before.

She made some comments about the Glasgow show (nasty review) how she’d given it so much, and ‘shall I give it all here and nothing for Birmingham?’ of course it was nothing. She was talking about her time in the North when younger and kept doing this terrible scouse accent which was pretty entertaining.

A great gig with a few not so good songs but it didn’t really matter. Big Star’s 13 was the best cover – I know it from Dando’s great version.

The top deck of the bus back to Manchester centre mayhem, I felt very old sat at the back amidst all the chaos but it was fun.

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The Strange Boys, The Hipshakes and The Pablos

Thursday night, and with the memory of my last during the week gig in my mind I decided I would get to the gig later rather than far too early and deciding to go home after the support and a couple of beers.

So with doors opening 7.30-10 I decided to get there 8ish assuming the last band would be finished by 10 in time for a swift train ride home, tucked up in bed by 10.30 (???).

The plan was going well got to the Brudenell 8.15 after a more or less direct taxi up from the station, but going in – the room was completely empty. With 3 bands on I wondered how this was going to work? Very short sets? Through to the desk and a board told me the Strange Boys would be on 9.45pm … 15 minute set? I don’t think so…

So out I went out to check out the local street life. Not wandered too far on the streets round there before. A red brick terrace district of Leeds – not the richest part of town but no one was looking at me like they were going to kill me, so after a swift Tyskie in the Hyde Park I headed down the street with the most shops. A row of uninspiring fast food outlets … none took my fancy, then on the corner of the street I came to the Hyde Park Cinema … mm isn’t that in Headingley … the jigsaw puzzle of Leeds districts was slowly slotting into place – not seen the cinema for 20 years.

Across the road I spied a cleaner looking joint, and in for a pre gig donner … no bad effects … and even a table to eat at. The assistant seemed to relish in asking customers which option for the food they wanted in the fastest dialogue imaginable – like Speedy Gonzales. Outside I passed a queue for the cashpoint – must have been thirty people waiting … they’re not short of a bob or two those Leeds students.

After a couple of years in the backwoods of the Aire valley, this student life hanging around Hyde Park – drinking, rollies, pakoras, bands, chatting with the ladies in the early evening air – what a life these slackers have…

But back to the Brudenull. Still early when I got back the first band had started – playing blues style rock, they were ok, not a bad kickoff and a good enough listen while I queued at the bar.

Each beer was slow coming though the bar wasn’t busy – the Brudenell staff weren’t in a hurry … only about 4 staff on, two on each side, on the gig side more of a queue, so for the second beer I went around the other side, but here one of the guys seemed to be more interested in moving glasses around than serving people. A young guy, maybe the organiser, was printing posters, and underneath the bar a small black and white dog looked on a little sadly.

The second band up were very different. A two piece punk band, young guys – a singer/guitarist and a drummer. They made a hell of a racket for two guys. The singers voice was really loud and harsh – so much so he asked for the vocal to be turned down. But I’d liked it more loud, maybe they turned it too quiet. The songs were very short bursts of madness, the drummer thrashing around … good effort. They weren’t getting much applause, maybe coz they were so different to the other two bands, playing to the wrong audience?

The Strange Boys when they came on in contrast needed a strong vocal – but coz it had been turned down, the singers voice was lost for the first 4-5 songs. Bit disappointing really, but after a while they got it turned back up, and then some of the songs were real good. They didn’t seem so strange, only one guitarist maybe, I guess the singers vocals are a little weird. Their sound kind of 60s sleazy blues with the vocal being the key part … some good tracks but after 3/4 hr I hopped it for the last train … three good bands for £6, who’s complaining…

The Kashmiri taxi driver said I was the first job he had had for 4 hours. He pretended it was so long since he parked his car he couldn’t remember where it was. He was asking how full the gig was – pretty full – so more work for him later. Seemed a bit out of the way the taxi rank and another two just round the corner. He discussed Kashmir with me on the short trip back to the station – they felt abandoned – they had nothing ‘only mountains’, no oil that the world wanted. Sad really because the one thing they had – tourism was being spoiled by the tensions created he felt by governments rather than the people. He hadn’t been back for four years but was hoping to go next year.

Frank Turner … great gig at the Leeds Met, after the response at y-not for who the best artist had been, figured I’d check him out. Not disappointed – he has a lot of great songs, the audience participation was amazing – some of the loudest singing in a hall I heard. He made little dashes around the stage playing guitar and singing … v good!!!

Don’t think he is ‘wasted’ in this mode of singing at all, but then I don’t know his hardcore yet. His Outdoor Type isn’t a patch on Mr Dando’s though.

Regina is coming …

Photographs from the Scottish Borders taken after a period of large scale flooding following several weeks of heavy snow.

Beaches

Woodland

Stiff Little Fingers in Leeds – seen em a few times but just can’t say no. The chance to hear one of my all time fave songs as a boy – At the Edge is too much.

Supported by Penetration – I didn’t know this band. Perhaps a little before my time, and I didn’t recognize any of the songs not even their main ‘hit’. Still a couple of songs were pretty good – she seemed to spend most of the gig trying to fit the slightly too large mic in a stand it wasn’t designed to fit.

Don’t think the phrase ‘turn things up a notch’ did justice to Stiff Little Fingers entrance. Jake, knocking on, but still with his amazing voice, and his band of ‘ringers’? – a youthful looking drummer , bass guitarist with tons of energy (original lineup?), and second guitarist who was a bit hard to make out under his base ball cap and played it a bit more low key. The sound they put together was fantastic and the audience went from standing there watching with Penetration to a fair bit of interaction – even a bit of crowd surfing at one point.

Ian McCallum guitar, Ali McMordie bass, Jake Burns, Steve Grantley drums, 2010

Songs like Barbed Wire Love, Suspect Device, Tin Soldier, At the Edge, Wasted Life, Nobodys Hero, Alternative Ulster, Doesn’t Make it All Right were played brilliantly – the reason this hall was packed with guys in their forties was fulfilled – a band they had loved when young and just had to see one more time.

Between songs Jake was telling little anecdotes, how songs came about, how they had affected the bands career, playing a few songs he knew weren’t such crowd pleasers, but just coz he liked them. They also played a track ‘Liars Club’ about Blair and Bush that was written at that time which was pretty good.

I didn’t have a problem with it not being the full original lineup – this band were making such a great noise, and had such energy, they were great to watch. The bass player and drummer were putting so much into it, I was thinking they were much younger. For me – the most memorable SLF gig I saw – they played better than I ever remember, and Jake seemed to think that it was a good gig, saying the crowd was one of the best.

Set list here

friend gets new iphone out … ‘oh no the world is obsessed with iphone’s’ i say … he puts it away … go into pub, he gets it out again ‘let me show you …’, I butt in – ‘show me something that isn’t a toy’ … he thinks, then … ‘it’s all toy’ … ‘ok show me something that you can do with it that you cant do with anything else’ – looks confused and says nothing. Has given iphone to his staff ‘ok so what business benefits are there from giving all your staff iphones?’ … ‘none’ … sigh … now I feel mean