I’ve also added to each Works page a Facebook Like and Send button. This way, if there’s a particular work you like, you can let your Facebook friends know about it. More social networking integration will be coming this week.

Similarly, I’ve added the same buttons to the NewMusicShelf, so be sure to head over there and let the world know that you like this or that work of mine! If you have something you’d like to say about any of the works, you can also comment/write a review of any work on the NMS.

Also, be prepared for a new announcement, and a BUNCH of backdated blog posts in the coming week. (I’ve created a new Category for them, so you can read everything in one fell swoop!)

I hope you’ve all had a wonderful Labor Day weekend! I’ve spent mine at the beach in Montauk reading David Cutler’s The Savvy Musician, and eating FAR too much.

The only problem was that Nick didn’t have an RSS or Atom feed to subscribe to.

So, I did what any web-obsessed person would do: sent Nick a Tweet asking if he had a feed. This, as I’m standing on the corner of 142nd St & Riverside, overnight bags at my feet, waiting for my boyfriend to pick me up to spend a long weekend at his parents’ house in Montauk. (Rough life, huh?) What would I do without a smartphone, to ask such pressing questions?

It turned out that, no, Nick’s site was sans RSS, despite his blog being prominent on the site. Nick uses Frog CMS (seriously, Nick, dump the Frog – it’s not worth the trouble), which I’d never heard of. As a semi-serious web designer, that was a pretty major red flag. Frog also – let me digress for a moment – hasn’t had a new stable release since April 2009, which tells me that it’s essentially defunct.

Because I’m a glutton for punishment, and I genuinely love helping out my fellow composers, I said, “Let me research this and get back to you.”

By the time we got to Bridgehampton, I had it all planned out in my brain: use PHP to create an XML file from the blog info in his MySQL database, and run a Cron job every hour to update it. Or, in layman’s terms: Use a bunch of acronyms and jargon to do magical things. Then we got to the house, unloaded the cat, had a few drinks and watched some episodes of the Ricky Gervias Show on HBOGo before crashing.

Morning came. Ok, late morning came. Ok, almost noon came, and I rolled out of bed, showered, and sat down with the laptop at the dining room table (i.e., my Montauk office). Several hours of work later, I realized that my initial plan was, in effect, stupid. It wasn’t going to work for reasons that I don’t want to talk about, largely because it’s boring and I’d like to spare your brain cells, Dear Reader.

Fortunately, Nick had sent me the log-on to his site to get things working (mwahahahaha), so I resigned myself to working within the Frog Content Management System to get things done since my original idea wasn’t going to work. *Sigh*

After several more hours, interrupted by giving the cat a bath, nearly drowning in the torrential rains while attempting to get lunch, and making dinner for the family, I finally – at 11pm – and in the past-tense words of Tim Gunn – made it work. You don’t really want to know how, even though it involves none of the XML/Cron/MySQL stuff (though it did involve some PHP, and working with code like “$this->find()”). Fewer acronyms, just as much magic.

So.

If, like me, you want to read Nick’s blog via Google Reader or whatever aggregator you use, you can now.

And the link is: http://nickwritesmusic.com/rss.

Let me tell ya – that’s a lot of work to go to just to be lazy and not have to check in on the blog regularly.

And while we’re at it…

I made a little change to my own blog recently and added a blogroll. Check it out over to the right. Or, if you’re reading this via Google Reader, come on over to the site and check out the stuff I decided is fun enough to read. I’ve got several categories of sites that I link to: the Blogroll is general stuff, including the NewMusicShelf and articles that I “share” via Google Reader; Composers is pretty straight-forward; Fun Stuff is just that; Gay News, self explanatory; and Publishing Blogs gives you a sense of the stuff that I read that makes me so hardcore about self-publishing and being entrepreneurial.

And say hello to my little Twitter feed just below the blogroll.

meditation, which clocks in at 1 minute, is my latest collaboration with poet Mark Statman. I came across this short, slightly dirty poem while leafing through Mark’s manuscripts in his studio at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 2007. This concert, by the way, is celebrating composers who have been in residence at the VCCA, so I felt it appropriate to work with Mark again since that’s where we met.

I’ve been dying to set this poem, and it’s been bouncing around in my head for two years – never quite settling into something that I was happy with. Now I’ve finally found an excuse to make it happen!

In December, Gilda Lyons, the Artistic Director of The Phoenix Concerts, asked me to write a short song for their March concert titled “Music from Mt. San Angelo: a celebration of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts”, and thus was born meditation.

Music from Mt. San Angelo
a celebration of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts
Friday, March 18, 2011 at 8:00PM
Church of Saint Matthew and Saint Timothy
26 West 84th Street, NYC

In March, I decided to drop my Twitter feed from the front page of the site since I hardly use the service anymore. I’m not dumping Twitter completely (I’ve still left a Twitter widget on the sidebar of the blog here), but I felt that a listing of my next performance would be infinitely more useful, especially since the Twitter feed so often mimes this blog, which is represented on the front page, as well.

Less noticeable is a line at the bottom of most entries in the Works and Current/Recent Projects pages that reads “Last Updated:” with the date and time that I last edited that particular entry. I don’t expect the information to change regularly, but I feel as though it’s a nice little indicator to show how recently I’ve tinkered with the information for that particular work or project.

And in a stroke of coding genius (no, not really, though it only took me about an hour to do), I separated the Vocal works into subcategories to avoid confusion between song cycles and individual songs. I even went a step further and separated out Starfish at Pescadero for being a “Song Cycle with Instrumental Ensemble”. I like this little bit of code because it only affects the Vocal works, even though the works.php file controls all of the different groupings together. Probably not terribly exciting to the world at large, but I’m quite pleased with it.

Also, I reworked the photo gallery to look a little nicer. The old gallery was a holdover from DT.com 3.0, and it just didn’t work for me anymore. Each subgallery could only hold 5 photos, which felt very limiting. I’ve kept the subgallery headings, but placed all of the thumbnails on a single page, which allows for easier access to the photos and room for growth within each subgallery. I also find it easier to work with the Lytebox to display the photos, which frees up a lot of space on the page.

I suspect that I’ll be making more changes like this in the coming weeks – it seems natural that the site should continue to evolve.

So far, I’ve written songs for my friends Danny Stone and Joel Conarroe (the latter of whom is having a big birthday bash tonight on the East Side), who turned, respectively, 30 and 75. For Danny, I wrote the 1&12frac; minute “Twilight”, on the short poem of the same name by Walt Whitman. And for Joel’s one-minute song, I used another short Whitman poem, “To a Western Boy”.

Six more to go!

On the one hand, at least no one tried to purchase anything in that time, so no one was inconvenienced (I receive emails of all purchases, and would have been able to have fixed it immediately, so it would only have been a minor inconvenience). On the other hand, nobody even tried to purchase anything during that time! Which left me a) without any idea that there even was a problem, and b) having managed not to have sold a single score in five months!

So now that everything’s working again, buy! buy! buy! Or just donate on the Links page because you love me so much.

The engraved Sibelius file has been sitting on my hard drive for some time, now (over two years!), and sitting with my laptop on a rainy day in Montauk seemed to be the perfect time to post this little musical offering. I made a cover page and a very few minor revisions to the score, and here it is!

Here’s what my diary has to say about the writing of the song: “Ran back to Astoria in the morning and wrote Neri’s song. Decided on an Emily Dickinson poem – ‘It’s all I have to bring to-day’ – and wrote the song in around a half hour. Seventeen bars. It’s catchy and pretty!” There’s something about the pieces that you shake out of your sleeve – they have the real spark of life, and an easy grace that can’t be faked.

Enjoy!