Just a few more minor tweaks before JakeBouma.com 3.01 is ready to see the light of day. I've worked all night for two nights on it and it's looking good. Expect a launch before Friday.
Recording is also going very well.
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I am working on a new layout/theme for jakebouma.com. Just as designing the current layout was painstaking, so is this one.
Right now I have a two-column theme. The posts are on the left, in a big column, and the other info is located in a skinnier column on the right. For a long time, though, I have wanted to have a three-column theme (like or ) for a couple of reasons. First, I can display more information on the main page without using a single, ridiculously long column and second, I think it looks more professional.
The theme I am currently using originally , and I spent quite a long time tweaking it to my liking. It was pretty difficult and a little frustrating at times, because WordPress themes are written in CSS, a web design language I know almost nothing about (although I am getting better). I still don't have enough CSS and code knowledge to design a theme from scratch, so I am using another "template" theme, tweaking the crap out of it. The final product will look nothing like the original template theme.
The new theme will retain many visual aspects of the current one, such as the lime-green color theme, but it will be nearly a billion times better.
Look for it in the next few days.
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Here are this week's links:
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Work on the album continues.
We have most of the hand drum tracks laid, and Zach Booz has done a wonderful job rocking said drums. And now the reason for the title of this post:
If you head over to my page, you can listen to two sample tracks. The two songs are "Leave the Light On," a brand new song, and the title track, "Dying Stars". The only thing that will be kept from these recordings is the hand drums; everything else will be deleted, re-recorded, and mastered into the mix. I also decided to leave a little bit of an intro to the songs to give it an "in-the-studio" feel. Again, these tracks are nowhere near complete... they are very rough recordings that I just wanted to share.
I would directly link to the mp3s, but if i did, people would get them in their podcast feeds. Let me know what you think.
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I am on an emotional high right now. I spent most of the day and night working with a couple of musicians who will be playing on my album; working out arrangements, jamming, and polishing several songs. The entire album is going to have such a groove to it - I imagine people putting it in and tapping their feet, bobbing their heads. Maybe I am getting ahead of myself.
Also, there is a good chance that the album will have a brand new song on it. I literally just finished it today. It's called "Leave the Light On", and sounds a bit different than any of my other music. A little bit reminiscent of Ryan Cabrera's "On the Way Down". This week I am hitting the studio hard and like I said, I am really excited about the music.
Oh yeah, this is my class for the month. Cool, huh?
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2005, according to Chinese Horoscopes, was the Year of the Rooster. While I appreciate Chinese astrology, I would say that 2005 was instead the Year of the Book. I read more books for personal pleasure in 2005 than any previous year. Here's a list of what I read in 2005, in somewhat chronological order (I may be missing a couple):
Best fiction book of 2005: by Dan Brown
Best non-fiction book of 2005: by Brian McLaren
I will probably read just as many books, if not more, in 2006. A few that I'd like to read:
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