So there’s been a lot of playing about with toys. Mostly the ones I bought myself though as I need to get a cable for the mic, I’m finishing up other books before I start the libretto ones and my back has hurt too much to do much cooking (barring a culinary experiment which resulted in an apple-enhanced caramel cake which went down quite well).

So I’ll just slide over the missed days and focus on today. Obviously, I went to the dentist. He says that this should be the last of the deep drilling (thank heavens). Been pretty uncomfy though, but yay for painkillers! And also yay for spectacularly beautiful summer’s day even though it’s only spring! It was so lovely, I decided to walk home instead of catching the bus (which was taking too long and I was also getting bored), so I walked back through the sunshine and the intermittent smell of jasmine, listening to the birds going twit in the hedges and chatting with a friend in Australia via IM. Rather lovely, actually.

Once home I actually didn’t immediately have a nap, as I’d expected. Instead I did some work on my new piece. It’s been a little stuck lately but I managed to prod it forward a little and flesh out some of the earlier parts too.

Then there was tinkering about with Logic Studio. I’m really enjoying using this. Fascinating to discover that the interface basically hasn’t changed since I was using microLogic at uni – 15 years ago! so it’s mostly familiar, and the bits that are less familiar – the audio-editing side of things, isn’t that dissimilar from Pro Tools, so I seem to be picking things up pretty quickly. And I can’t begin to express how much easier and more comfortable it is to work in it, not needing to be tethered to a hardware box at all times. I don’t have to think twice about opening it up for a small sound-file-trimming job. And I’ve discovered some cool stuff – beat mapping to make a MIDI file sound more like it was played by a human than a robot to start with! I borrowed a book from the TVU library yesterday and started working my way through it this afternoon. Finding out some interesting snippets, but I’m hoping I can get away with just borrowing the book and not having to buy it. Would rather spend my birthday Amazon voucher on the Advanced volume

And then when the sun was setting, I got all inspired to grab the iPad and try a little bit of drawing. It’s not great, but it was fun to do and an interesting exercise, messing round with silhouettes and trying to get the sunset colours to blend a bit

But weird or not, I’m taking it on. And starting with…

Yesterday I ended up having a bit of an SEO binge. I explored a few tools, found a couple that might be useful and updated/added/corrected some stuff on caitlinrowley.com to improve its ranking on Google. It’s going to take a little while to seep into the system, of course, but I’m confident I can improve it. What I’m aiming for is to make caitlinrowley.com the top-ranking site on Google for a search on my name. At moment minim-media.com is, which is fine because that was my principal site but now that I’m thinking of closing that one down, I’d like to have caitlinrowley.com up there before I do. It was lots of fun and felt like a big achievement when it was done. Now I just need to make myself not check my stats more than once a day to see what’s going on because there’s no point – Google Analytics only updates once a day. There’s no new data there. No, really…

Today I was stuck at home waiting for someone from DHL to come and take our poorly Roomba away to be fixed again. I’ve been feeling like everything’s a little fragmented in terms of the business development stuff, and lacking a little in direction, so I ended up spending about 3 hours going through various bits and pieces, thinking thoughts and working through worksheets and planning plans, all of which was great, and my ideas have taken another step along the path towards the business being whatever it turns out to be (I blogged about this over at Minimania, so I won’t repeat it here. Is it possible to be a blog-writing addict?), but rather exhausting.

Eventually the Roombaman came and took our digital pet away, whereupon I bolted out to the post office and stood in line for half an hour to send some stuff to Australia. The walk and the wait were great, actually. Really cleared away some cobwebs and made some stuff fall into place. And what I realised was that Raspberry Blue was heading towards the exact same problem that Minim Music & New Media has/had, which is that it didn’t have a clear focus. Splitting the site between the web dev/SEO stuff and the music publishing stuff is detrimental to the development of the business. Not because I can’t do both – I most emphatically can and still think I will – but because the presence of the music stuff undermines my authority as someone who lives and breathes the web. Most people, I suspect, really only have one clear obsessive focus so I think potential clients may find it hard to put their trust in someone who is obviously doing two (apparently) unrelated things at once. So I’ve trimmed out the music stuff and instantly the site feels stronger and more authoritative. I feel less confused about it too and more confident about the prospect of sending people to it. I think the music stuff might need to have a separate site. Whether it needs its own domain name is another point, but I think I’ll focus on the web thing first because that’s what’s going to contribute most to my possibly not needing a dayjob again. Copying is unlikely to develop into anything more than pocket money, I feel.

So big, big thoughts drifting about and more plans being made and I feel like things are coming together enough to tentatively say that the Raspberry Blue site will be live before I have my root canal done on the 24th of March. I think it’s well doable. Let’s hope I’m right…

Oh, and I’ve listened through to the violin piece with the changes I made yesterday and yes, I think it’s essentially finished. I have, however, in the course of tweaking it towards its final form, done a lot of octave switches and added in some extra double-stops, so I need to do a careful check to make sure the double and triple stops actually are really playable and that I don’t have to tweak them back in some way. Also need to work out how to make Finale play back some of the minutiae of the notation so I can produce a relatively real-sounding MIDI version without needing to approach ProTools. PT, frankly, has me a bit scared after having apparently caused the collapse of my backup drive, and I don’t have any drives any more that don’t have stuff on them already! Seriously contemplating switching to Logic.

First up is Scriptina, the curly one I’m using for the site name (although I think I’ll leave this as an image so that where the webfonts don’t work at least the site won’t be totally plain), which I’ve used as a webfont for the headings in the right-hand column. I don’t know that this will be used anywhere else much on the site, but I think it gives the homepage a bit more of a sense of occasion. It’s not a very easy font to read though, which is why I’m not using it for the content headings.

The second font I’m using is Bebas, which is on the navigation headings and for the blog post title. I like the feel of this – makes the whole nav feel kind of 50s/60s businessy but I’m having some problems with it with spacing between words. Between characters seems OK, but it’s not really leaving enough of a gap between words for it to be clear where one ends and the next begins. Not sure if there’s a fix for this in CSS. If there isn’t I may go hunting for another font along similar lines.

I’ve also dug up a PHP class which apparently will pull tweets in from a user’s timeline, so I’m hoping to be able to pull the last 3 tweets from my @caitlinrowley account to go on the homepage. I’ve not really used anything like this before, so not sure if I’ll be able to get it working for the launch, but I guess I’ve got to try. It doesn’t look too hard to implement. And I’m about to save down some reading about whether it’s possible to import a WordPress blog post into a normal unconnected PHP page (because the blog is separate, for the time being at least) so I don’t have to manually update the homepage every time I post something.

I’m likely to be a bit quiet here over the next week as I’ll be in Paris and I’m not sure what the wireless situation will be like, or even if I’ll be able to find enough time to get some solid work done on this, but I’ll have the iPad with me and will write posts in the WordPress app, ready to post when I get access to the internet. Crossing fingers I won’t have to spend a whole 7 days without access….

So this afternoon after my physio appointment, and craving a little sweetness after the agony of having her remove a TON of tension from my feet and calves (apparently I store tension in my feet. My masseuse says I store tension in my shoulders. My osteopath says I store it in my back. The scary thing is that I think they might all be right!) why not give them a go?

I was quite surprised to find that Rose Levy Beranbaum actually doesn’t have cinnamon rolls in her inimitable The Bread Bible – shock! horror!! – but Nigella Lawson came to the rescue with the Norwegian Cinnamon Rolls in How to Be a Domestic Goddess. And they were surprisingly easy, really. I mean, bread is a lot easier than a lot of people think, but this was super-simple. And with a limited rising time (25 minutes, then 15 minutes) the whole thing was actually pretty fast to produce. The main surprise was just how sticky the dough was. Nigella talks about “kneading” it, but really it’s a case of prodding at it and wondering how the hell you’re going to get enough off your fingers later to actually be able to cook! But the result was well worth it and with the judicious application of plenty of flour when rolling out, it all worked a treat.

I do suspect I may need an oven thermometer though as the tops burned quite quickly. Not totally charred, but darker than preferred, and definitely darker than the ‘slightly caught edges’ Nigella indicated may happen. But the inside was quite perfect – light and buttery and not too sweet. Scarily moreish. I have packed up most of them and deposited them in the freezer to prevent instant snacking…

Oh and I cleared a hole in my to-do list too – no more overdues!!