RattleHead Records - The Sound of Rhode Island

RattleHead News

Welcome to RattleHead 8.0!


	Released: 07.10.07
	Source: rattlehead
	Author: Chief Ferret
	Original source link

The RattleHead website has been completely redesigned and mutated to meet future challenges. Version 8 marks almost 10 years online and growing with the needs of the local music scene. This re-design has been a monumental effort, and it has left the Chief Ferret completely exhausted. He may need a vacation before the Summer is through.

There are quite a few fundamental enhancements to the new site, the most noteworthy being:

FLASH/HTML

Those of you that are Flash designers know how confining it is to work with. You're building your own drop down menus, you're constantly confined to that little box your movie sits in, and even if you add the pre-made Flash components they only add 200k to the size of your movie. It makes it hard for people to link to pages, and sometimes the server interaction in the background makes it difficult to get a feel for what exactly is going on. So the first big thing we did is convert the site into an HTML format.

SCREEN SIZE

There is always a battle amongst designers about screen size. It used to be that most monitors were 600x800, so designers optimized their work for that screen size. But now most monitors are 1024x720 and higher, so we decided to spread out a bit and take up the extra space. Everything seems bigger about the new site because everything is bigger.

AUDIO

Over the next year, audio incoming into the RattleHead libraries will increase by a factor of 20. Soon there will be so many audio files, no one will know what to do with them. that's why the RattleHead library capacity has been enhanced. Libraries can now be linked and the offline materials can be requested from wherever they reside. Because of this, we can now offer different kinds of audio: singles, full sets, random cuts from raw streams at a venue... plus some other amazing things we have planned.

WORDZ

Yes, the infamous "wordz" section has been resurrected. Long a staple of the RattleHead site since the mid 90s, the Wordz section disappeared while we were building our news site, The In On The What. But after a few years of struggling with it, we eventually dropped it. RattleHead 8.0 welcomes The Wordz back to the site. There is also a new feature, with band mailings being added to the offerings.

Those are just a few of the changes.

There's also a lot of things not working, either. The series of changes we made resulted in a cascade of changes to over eight other systems that interact with RattleHead. The library requests are temporarily offline, for example, and the performer control panel ain't doing jack for some reason. So please pardon our appearance while we're remodeling.

RattleHead would like to thank everyone who helped in the beta testing of the new site, as well as everyone who was patient with the old one slowly breaking down while we were working on it. Things are still messy in places, and you'll see all kinds of things getting adjusted over the next few weeks. The job is never done, and this is only the beginning.

	other items in this group
	The 2008 Providence Invasion is ON! 04.21.08 by chief ferret (rattlehead)
		Registration is now open for the SEVENTH Providence Invasion! D-Day is always the Thursday after Memorial Day, and this year its May 29th! If you're a musician in RI you need to be a part of it. Check the link above for more info.
	Welcome to RattleHead 8.0! 07.10.07 by Chief Ferret (rattlehead)
		The RattleHead website has been completely redesigned and mutated to meet future challenges. Version 8 marks almost 10 years online and growing with the needs of the local music scene. This re-design has been a monumental effort, and it has left the Chief Ferret completely exhausted. He may need a vacation before the Summer is through.
	Making the Band Making You an Idiot 01.01.05 by ferret (rattlehead)
		Definitely check out Making the Band. It's an ABC show about creating a "Backstreet (backdoor?) Boys" kind of band. The plot: a record exec picks 8 guys from a talent search, hires the music publishers to get them music, records them, pushes their album and they sell a few million. We get to watch them, Real-World-style as they go through the "trials and tribulations of becoming pop stars."
	The Truth About the Cranston West ISE 05.03.01 by ferret (rattlehead)
		The following was written five hours following the Cranston East/West Competition of the Institute for Sonic Evolution in 2001 held on 05.03.01. It has not been altered in any way since then and we preserve it here as our formal record of what occurred that evening.
	Why You Will Soon Pay More Than Once for the Music You Buy 01.01.00 by ferret (rattlehead)
		The following questions and answers are being presented as a public service of RattleHead Records, to help people understand the New World Order as it is being created by the Universal Artists Group. The questions below seem irrelevant only because it is not the current reality; but sometime in the very near future, if these people remain unchallenged, it will be the reality.
	EFF Manifesto on Digital Freedom and the Audio Revolution 05.27.99 by EFF (EFF)
		There is a large grassroots community online standing up to resist the village-idiot mentality of the major record labels and their hired henchmen, the RIAA. One of the foremost in this fight is the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In 1999, they released the following "manifesto" to the press and we have reprinted it's contents below. Note the date and notice a)how on the mark they were about what they were anticipating and b)how much worse it's gotten since then.
	How to Kill the Rhode Island Music Scene in Four Easy Steps 06.01.98 by ferret (rattlehead)
		It's 1983. Start with one good club scene: nationally reputable clubs, national acts on weekends, the area's largest rock station playing local music at lunchtime everyday.
	Why Metallica Sucks Ass 01.01.98 by ferret (rattlehead)
		Okay, I admit it, I never was a Metallica fan. And being a guitarist, this has always caused me problems... I don't know how many other guitarists have exclaimed in disbelief, "you don't like Metallica?!" (As if such a thing just wasn't possible.)