I finally got some time left over for some sequencing and I created this WARM LOOP for now - we’ll see if it evolves into a full length track. Any comments on this? Boring? Good? Bad? Ugly? Nice? =) I’m trying to make up my own mind about it too.

Today I’ve been working on some new trance and creating some new trance drum banks. There are surprisingly few good drum kits out there for dedicated trance in my opinion and it’s a bout time I created a new bank. I’ll probably release the samples on the web site later.

 I have also uploaded all my tracks in the lossless FLAC format to Tunecore, but I haven’t yet paid the fees (about $50) to publish the tracks onto iTunes etc. I am currently investigating how much exposure this will actually give me as I have a feeling that ‘unknown’ artists such as Imphenzia will never see the light of day on a site such as iTunes due to poor functionality for filtering and displaying music etc. I’ll probably still test this method on the album Illusion just to see what the effect is.

Today I received an e-mail from a listener at Soundclick who mentioned TuneCore.com - a site that I’ve just signed up with Imphenzia. This will enable me to get tracks and albums into iTunes and similar sites so it’ll be interesting to see if Imphenzia get get a footprint there. I have yet to create the albums and upload the tracks but I’ll keep you posted. Thanks to Joel from the psy label psypneumatix for this tip! 

Been very busy the past couple of weeks so not much to report on the Imphenzia front. But have a look at this fan-video of State of Confusion meanwhile

Been preoccupied with work related stuff and a total remake of our racing site (www.nordicracing.net) the past week so not much Imphenzia related stuff to report yet.

The Nordic Racing site was created using Joomla 1.5.x - a great and free framework for creating websites with front- and back end. For anyone into wishing to develop a website quickly, I suggest having a look at this (www.joomla.org). The Nordic Racing site are using some really nifty (and also free) plugins, namely;

• Expose Flash Gallery - have a look at the Gallery section of the site, it features this Flash-gallery and it does an amazing job at easily allowing you to create albums, upload images that is automatically resized to desired sizes and adds a copyright text if you wish. The gallery is really smooth with fades and it allows you to play a slideshow as well. The backend is easy to use and batch uploading and renaming images is a doddle.
• Easy Guestbook - have a look at the simple Guestbook section - it features a simple guestbook with protection against spamming using captcha functionality.
• YvComment - simple comment component allowing visitors to post comments to articles etc.

The rest of the contents on the Nordic Racing site is pretty much all included in Joomla. There are also plenty of templates to download and modify to save a tremendeous amount of time. Some people will object to using Joomla calling it “cheating” - but the way I see it - why reinvent the wheel if your main goal is to publish content?

I will, however, still develop the Imphenzia sites totally with my own code for a couple of reasons. First of all, Imphenzia sites feature more custom features than ready made components (e.g. registration, internet highscores, specific music features and purchase options etc.) and secondly because Imphenzia is my true passion and it deserves the attention to customize a site making it unique on the Internet =)

Finally, the title of this post is “Imphenzia on the web” - and it is because I oddly enough found a strange Youtube video with something I don’t quite undestand… A Pokemon Wi-Fi battle? Maybe someone can explain to me what this is all about? I found it by Youtubing “Imphenzia” and it features my remix “The Fallen”.

Yesterday it was thursday and I was stuck doing some work but also racing the ‘thursday race’ in LFS as planned. I qualified 10th on the grid on A-division and had a good race until lap 12 when I flipped onto my roof and out of bounds in the chicane. My team mates in Nordic Racing Group (NRG) did alright although Nicke had a potential podium finish in 3rd place when he ran out of petrol in the last corner to finish 5th instead - what a shame.

Tonight I’ve been out in Stockholm for a few pints. We started off in the “Bull and Bear” pub and then I can’t quite remember where we went, but it was a good night and I had quite a laugh with my mates.

Hopefully this weekend will allow me to work more on muisc, games and the new websites.

Today has not been very Imphenzia-oriented due to other commitments. Been to work and the gym and practiced for the Live For Speed race on thursday (it’s a new ‘Thursday Race’ season starting this week). I race for ‘Nordic Racing Group’ that is proudly sponsored by Imphenzia Now, however, I am creating a few copies of Illusion due to some recent orders so I’ll ship them tomorrow. I see it’s already past 1am as well, hopefully I’ll get more time for Imphenzia tomorrow.

Since making music was not to be today - I continued to develop the web sites (I actually did quite a bit earlier today as well). The “my account” page is more or less finished so you can update your details now, reset password, change e-mail address and so forth.

I then found my self redeveloping a feature no less than three times hence the title of this blog entry.

Lost Password?
First I created a feature called “Lost Password” which meant that by clicking this feature and entering your e-mail address you should receive your username and password to your registered e-mail address… Great! Once nearly completing this feature, I realised that since I “encrypt” the passwords in the database using MD5 - I won’t be able to send the password through e-mail as I can’t ever find out what it is, I (and the program) only see 32 hexadecimal characters which is of no use.

Reset Password?
I then reprogrammed this feature and called it “Reset Password” which means that by entering the e-mail address like previously, the password will be reset to a random password and sent to the registered e-mail address… Great! But then someone can just be evil and run about resetting peoples password for no reason, so that was a waste of time.

Confirmed Password Reset!
Now - I am finally creating the final (?) piece of code for this type of function which is a reset password feature but it won’t actually reset the password straight away. Rather it will send an e-mail to the registered user and ask HIM/HER to click on a link that will ask you to enter and confirm a new password.

Obviously the third attempt at this feature is the best one so why I didn’t think of this to begin with is anyones guess.

 I think this function is one of the last “boring” one before I move on to news, about, music pages and so forth. I think there will be plenty of time to develop during this coming week due to the weather being rubbish. We’ve had no snow all winter here and NOW it decides to come? I will also make some music as I have a remix request pending of a track from a girl in NYC - I have to get it sorted asap.

After over a week of solid work put into the new web sites I launched up the sequencer today to see if I could get anywhere with a potential track and all I came up with was this: mp3 file.

Not too happy with that and I’ve learned something over the years, if it doesn’t click straight away and inspiration comes flowing once you start working on a track - just leave it for the time being. It isn’t possible to imagine creativity and it has to come naturally. I’ll close down the sequencer for tonight and head off for the gym. I’ll be listening to some trance during my gym session so maybe I get some ideas there, you never know.

It’s been  a long time since I’ve spent so many hours on something producing such a small visible result. First of all I had to learn all about protecting PHP code and form fields that are inserted into the database when logging in with mysql_real_escape_string and the joys of some servers having magic_quotes_gpc enabled and when stripslashes should and shouldn’t be used. I’ve finally protected the code enough from malicious visitors - I don’t want to end up like the old imphenzia forums once were if you remember those days. Since I already developed the login / logout / remember me features of the new sites yesterday, the 4 hours I spent on just protecting the code was just plain boring - but not wasted as the result is good and I learned something very useful.

Originally I used a javascript called “Live Validation” to verify the contents of form fields as you type in them and the result was quite cool - what it didn’t support, however, was verifying on the fly that a username already existed or if invalid characters were entered. A friend of mine advised me about AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and this is something I find very exciting (sadly enough!). What AJAX enabled me to do (amongst a million other things) is to verify if a username exists in the database as a user is typing into the form field. If the user enters a username while registering that already exists, the web page will warn you that the name is taken - this all without submitting the form or using the tedious back button etc. Now then you might think - why waste so much time on learning this stuff as I may never have a huge amount of registered users on imphenzia.com - but my reply is that learning this stuff is extremely useful as fast and intelligent websites is the future.

I found out that when troubleshooting javascripts, FireFox with the extension ‘firebug‘ is very useful for debugging when things go wrong. Firebug will display error messages and scripts neatly and in my case the AJAX feed that is returned. At the same time, I must admit that I very much prefer IE as a browser - mainly because it renders web pages much nicer and - and also because so many sites look incorrect in FireFox… and if you are a true FireFox fan you will probably explode now and say that all these sites look horrible because they were incorrectly developed, the fact is that they still look horrible regardless of who’s fault it is hence me prefering IE

Well, I still have some work left to do with the validation method tomorrow and the easter weekend is nearly over. Once validation is finally taken care of I can move on to more fun stuff on the site such as the music section.