I don’t know about the other Undead, but the whole thing of working on songs on Pages isn’t really working for me….and maybe not for you, either since it seems like we’ve moved away from that in actual practice as Marty and I e-mail about Sidewalk and Ronnie and I about Waiting and White Water…and all three of us about Cartoon Ninja Girls. Collabing on Pages instead of Posts makes a certain kind of sense because it keeps the discussion between us Undead. OTOH, when I hit the Monkey I can’t tell at a glance if there’s been new activity on a song; I have to click every project page and the Ongoing Projects page. The RSS feed won’t tell me if a Page has been edited. It’s just awkward to have to hit the Monkey just to find out if someone has new tracks up…which is why I suspect we’re e-mailing more instead. If every one of us doesn’t look at every Page every day, we might miss something. E-mail is faster, gets a faster response: you know the person got the message.
(BTW, I’ve tried to start a discussion on the Ongoing Projects page, but haven’t gotten a response…would it be better for me to move that to a Post?)
I’m wondering if we maybe should move the song discussion to Posts. I could copy/paste what’s been written so far to a Post for each title and we could subscribe to the feed (or just glance at Recent Comments) to see responses. I don’t think having open comments would cause too much confusion and kibbitzing from bystanders; afterall they can’t hear the songs until it’s finished. Or we could just take it all to e-mail. Either way I could archive the Pages we’ve done until the songs are finished then rewrite them with notes on the completed song.
Thoughts anyone? Is this “Pages thing” working for you?
So, what does everyone think of the new theme? I like the way it looks, but like every theme, it seems to have it’s own quirks. I just noticed that it doesn’t say who posted what, which is a bit of a problem on a group blog like this. I may end up changing it again. There are only 9 themes that allow a custom header—and not all of those have a customizable sidebar. Shall I keep it or go back to the drawing board (aka the admin area)?
I can’t believe it, but my last comment ended up in the spam filter and had to be “despammed” to be posted. I’m the site owner. I was logged in. I’ve posted comments before. No options in the admin area have been changed. I am so hurt, so insulted. My own website thinks I’m a spammer! What’s the world coming to??! Dissed by the Undead Monkey!
I thought I’d start a little discussion on point of view. I wondered if Ronnie thought it strange that the storyline I imagined for “Incandescent Life” was of a guy as the narrative voice. No doubt there are feminists out there who are incensed that I could/would write songs from a male viewpoint. Listen up: A good writer can write from any viewpoint. I’ve written songs in which the narrator is male, but I’ve also written songs that are absolutely solidly from a female viewpoint. Sometimes I hear a female voice singing and sometimes I hear a male voice. It depends on the song and the song’s story. Some songs I’ve written could be sung by either male or female without altering the meaning of the song. I don’t want to be confined to writing “women’s” songs. I don’t want any restrictions on my imagination, the stories I’m allowed to tell, or the viewpoint from which I tell them.
(Though Ronnie will no doubt be relieved that I won’t ask him to sing any of my “girl” songs. )
Now I’m starting to think about how we’re going to use this Undead site. Ronnie’s idea of having a page for each song we’re working on sounds good to me, but OTOH that means we are going to have a lot of pages stacked up in the nav bar at the top. Of course, eventually songs will be finished and could be moved to a Download page (with links to files on archive.org under the Attrbi-NoDeriv-NonCommercial CC license). Also, I may be able to neaten things up because some themes will not show subpages on upper nav tabs. I’m going to designate the Ninja Girls to be a subpage of Ongoing Projects and see how that looks. (Makes sense, ya know.)
If we don’t want the Pages we make for ongoing projects to be visible to the public, but want to be able for us Undead to view them and edit them, then when we make the Pages, click “Save” instead of “Publish”. The pages can then be accessed by us from the Manage–> Pages screen; Viewed or Edited. (I think Ninja Girls could be reverted to unpublished/Saved by changing the Post Status to Draft, then clicking Save.) What do you think? Make pages listing files we are working on visible, or just Save them so they are only accessible to us?
Right now we’re using this site to communicate and coordinate. Here’s the question: is this site—right now—just for the Undead Monkeys, or should we be writing it and organizing it for the gazillion unknown Undead fans? There are Privacy options for wordpress blogs. The options are:
I would like my blog to appear in search engines like Google and Sphere, and in public listings around WordPress.com.
What I selected when I set this up was the middle option. I’m not sure if “normal visitors” includes people tag-surfing within WordPress.com or using the “Next” buttom to blog surf in wordpress.com. (I’ve asked but not gotten an answer for that.) If we’re going to use the Undead Monkey blog as a base of operations for collaborating, then should we upgrade the privacy level so that it’s only visible to us? At least temporarily? Or should we use the blog as a “band site”, and clean it up by deleting some of our “organizational” posts?—and change the privacy option to allow indexing by search engines? (Let the whole world in.)
At what point do we go public? Should we be more public than we are? Do we just want our friends and families dropping in, or do we want everyone and their dog commenting? I’m comfortable with the privacy level now because we’re just getting organized and I don’t want a lot of scrutiny and kibbitzing by strangers while we’re still figuring things out. What do you guys think? Is the middle privacy option the one we want now? Would you want to change it in the future?
Marty Keil has joined the Undead. Even without yet playing a note he’s had an impact by cleaning up and adding to the graphics in the header and sidebar. Thanks Hock! Looking forward to your musical contributions, too! Since Ronnie is already working on some stuff, the two of you need to get together via e-mail, send files, etc. to make sure you’re not duplicating effort. And for goodness sake’s, Ronnie, send Hock your scratch vocal for “Incandescent” instead of mine. The fewer people who hear my caterwauling, the better.
…is that there isn’t a standard header image size and I have to redo/resize the header whenever I change themes. I went ahead and changed themes though, because there were too many weird little quirks in the other theme. Unfortunately, custom header images aren’t possible for every theme, so I’m probably going to migrate from one to another until I find one (or they add one) that really works for this site.
For the moment I’m going with Ronnie’s image, though I still feel like the face needs some work. Possibly one of the other Undead Monkeys have better graphics skills than I do and can take this image or one of the pervious versions of it and gussy it up a bit more.
Now that the monkey has a face…and a new theme, maybe we can get on with doing more music now. Or recruiting more people to work on the music. I’ve sent an e-mail off to Buzz letting him know about the Undead here in the hope that he will pitch in on some songs here.
I think we need to spell-out (to some extent) what can’t be done with the music we put up here because I read the term “CC license” bandied around on the web as meaning “free, do anything with it” when in actuality there is only one CC license that “gives away the candy store”. The Attribution-Noncommericial-NoDerivs CC 2.5 license we’ll be using reserves all rights to the artists. What this license says is that people can download the music, enjoy it, even pass it around, but they cannot screw with it (remix, sample, record their own versions), they cannot use it or distribute it in any way that might be considered commercial, and they have to keep the artists name(s) and CC license info attached to the file.
Only us Undead Monkeys can mangle or sell our music.
I do think we need to work out in advance some idea about how we would handle things if one (or all) of us Undead Monkeys want to release any of the music commercially at some point in the unforseeable future (we may be Undead, but we aren’t omniscient ). I mean, this is the sort of stuff that traditionally causes fights, ruins friendships and breaks up bands. Undead Monkey is probably going to be a loose collective of people and not everyone is going to be active on every project—and not everyone will be equally active on each project. (I’m probably going to be musically the weakest member of the band and as such contribute less to songs than other people.) So, how do we want to address the “what if”s” of commercial release? Should we even give this any thought now…or just wait and see if the Undead Monkey produces anything worth considering for commercial release?
Undead merch! We've now got t-shirts in a variety of styles with the "Moonlight Banana" artwork. Grab a sticker, too! Check it out at the Undead Monkey shop.
Credits
Music: Full credits for individual songs can be found on the page for each song. Credits for miscellaneous (seasonal) Undead pieces can be found on the Download page. All Undead audio is licensed under the CC 2.5 attrib-noncommercial-no derivs license. This is a "don't screw with the music" license. Respect the rights of the Undead.
Images: Undead artwork by Gymshoes. All rights reserved.
It’s just awkward to have to hit the Monkey just to find out if someone has new tracks up…which is why I suspect we’re e-mailing more instead. If every one of us doesn’t look at every Page every day, we might miss something. E-mail is faster, gets a faster response: you know the person got the message.
I may end up changing it again. There are only 9 themes that allow a custom header—and not all of those have a customizable sidebar. 
I wondered if Ronnie thought it strange that the storyline I imagined for “Incandescent Life” was of a guy as the narrative voice. No doubt there are feminists out there who are incensed that I could/would write songs from a male viewpoint. 
Since Ronnie is already working on some stuff, the two of you need to get together via e-mail, send files, etc. to make sure you’re not duplicating effort. And for goodness sake’s, Ronnie, send Hock your scratch vocal for “Incandescent” instead of mine. The fewer people who hear my caterwauling, the better. 
Undead Monkey is probably going to be a loose collective of people and not everyone is going to be active on every project—and not everyone will be equally active on each project. (I’m probably going to be musically the weakest member of the band and as such contribute less to songs than other people.) So, how do we want to address the “what if”s” of commercial release? Should we even give this any thought now…or just wait and see if the Undead Monkey produces anything worth considering for commercial release?