Things By Mike

As I’ve mentioned a few times, a good friend of mine manages the band Second Impulse from Baltimore, Maryland and I handle their website. I personally think they’re an excellent band that just needs some help in the promotional department. For the most part they’ve done very little to market themselves online. With so many outlets for unsigned bands now, it only makes sense to establish a better internet presence. My friend and I are working on that with them. It’s a slow process but our goal is to help them expand their fan base well beyond the borders of their home state.

That’s where you come in. If you enjoy hard rock music full of great melodies and memorable choruses you can sing along to, I hope you’ll consider checking out the band. Below is a video taken from one of their recent live gigs. The sound guy kinda failed and boosted the drums far too much, but it’s still a decent recording. The band hopes to soon have a gig professionally recorded and mastered. Once that happens, we’ll definitely be putting it online.

Second Impulse can also be found on several sites around the web including Facebook. Just recently Microsoft added Last.fm functionality to the XBOX 360 which means you can also log into Live on your XBOX, load up Last.fm and find Second Impulse there as well. There are currently six songs available to listen to in their entirety.

Okay, so it’s not really Neil Young, it’s Jimmy Fallon. Regardless, this is probably the greatest rendition of the Fresh Prince theme I’ve heard.

So as I mentioned a couple posts back, I recently spent a couple weeks taking the layout I created for the Second Impulse website and making it work with WordPress. Though I’ve used WordPress for quite a while, I’d never actually created a completely custom theme. In the past I’d dabbled with attempting to do it, but always found most tutorials to not be very helpful. For one reason or another they never seemed to make perfect sense to me, so I’d just abandon my attempts at theme creation. Finally I’ve found some resources that make sense.

• Themes 101 by Brassblogs – For me this is the best tutorial I’ve found to date which covers how to create a WordPress theme from an already finished html layout. The information is very straight forward, well written and easy to follow. If you have a great design you’ve put together in Photoshop and Dreamweaver (or something similar) but are struggling with making it all work in WordPress, try this tutorial.
• Guide to the NextGen Gallery – One of the most important plugins I use on the Second Impulse website is the NextGen gallery. Across the bottom of every page are random thumbnails which when clicked pop up lightboxed photos of the band. Vuthy’s tips helped me quite a lot in making it all work how I wanted it to.
• Exporting and Importing WordPress – With the Second Impulse site I decided to test it all locally using xampp, which allows you to run a test webserver on your own PC via Apache. While I am pretty familiar with what’s required to move a local test site to a live web server (in my cast HostGator’s servers), it didn’t hurt to have a refresher since it had been a while. Nick also has an excellent tutorial regarding WordPress theme creation as well.