Taking the plunge

Just because I don’t have enough to do, I’m taking on the Creative Pact challenge. Yup, that’s it. Not content with the 50 + tasks on my to-do list, I’m deciding to go forth and take up a new challenge. Except that actually it’s an old challenge combined with a new challenge. And it’s something that’s been on my to-do list for rather longer than it ought. 3 years at least, in fact. So I figure the time has come to do something about it.

So what is this thing, I hear you clamour? Well, you’ll be amazed to hear that it’s a website. Wow. That shook you, didn’t it? But not just any website. It’s bugged me for a while (see the thing about 3 years) that my minim-media.com site is such a mish-mash of stuff – music, publication, webstuff, writing, blog, photography – most of which don’t really belong on a business site, and mostly they just serve to take focus away from the music stuff, so I’m rethinking it all and want to build a site that’s music-focused (but not exclusively) and which will be a better forum for random me-stuff too: sort of a digital exploration of caitlin-the-composer covering all the various bits that actually go into my music. The new challenge is that I want to use this project to learn more about HTML5 and CSS3.

So my Creative Pact is that I’ll do a bit of work every day for the month of September (advance warning now that I’ll be in Paris for a week later in the month, so posting may not happen every day but I’ll try to at least do the work every day) with the goal of sending the site live on 30 September. That’s the plan.

Because work on this may cover a number of categories and overlap with some other stuff (design, art, music, etc.) I’ll tag each post on here that’s related to the pact with creativepact2010 so they can be easily perused as a group (because no doubt I’ll still be baking and walking and composing in between, so it could get muddled otherwise).

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Discovered a composer group

Very excited! I was hoping to find a composer group in London and this one does – it sounds – pretty much what I want: meetups to talk through new works and problems and occasional special events focusing on a particular topic. Yay!

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Sent two scores off to Germany

For consideration for the Borealis Festival in Norway in March – they wanted solo pieces of less than a minute long, and as I almost seem to specialise in the miniature, it wasn’t too hard to find something – even though I only found the call at about 10pm and the deadline was today. Thank heavens for email submission! So I’ve sent Egg the Eighth (one of the 2 by 4 two-part inventions) and the second Whitman song off to them – with the Festival so soon, I guess I won’t have long to wait to see if they like them!

A bonus with this is that I get to strike another thing off my 2010 goals list. Woot!

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First steps towards producing a CD

Emailed a pianist friend to see if he’s interested in helping me create a CD of my piano music. Exciting!

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Thoughts on a website

Began to pull together some ideas (again) about how I want to tackle my new website. I’ve started this a couple of times but this feels meatier and more like it has a chance of making it to the coding phase.

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Did a bit more on my new portfolio site

Got the CSS3 rounded corners happening! plus a few additions. I think I need to streamline the jQuery a bit and the whole design may yet change, but I’m quite pleased with progress, overall.

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Playing round with Tumblr

I’ve heard a lot about Tumblr floating round on the internet and it sounded quite interesting as a place for accumulating all one’s assorted randomness in one place. I’m not sure what the potential audience for it would be. I suspect it might be more useful as a way for me to keep an eye on how dull I’m being, but chi.mp didn’t turn out to be particularly interesting or useful and I’m still not sure what I’m going to do with that. Tumblr seems to cover more ground and results in more of a native feel when combining streams from various services, so we’ll see. http://caitlinrowley.tumblr.com.

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Received and watched the first cut of the film about me

The one the Creative Spaces project filmed at the Tate and my “studio” (ahem) back in December. I actually sound like a Proper Artist. Feeling pretty good about myself now

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Completed my online portfolio

Well, phase 1 anyway. The next phase is to work on putting actual code in there, not just screensnaps.

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Did some more work on my online portfolio

Nearly there now. Just need to test in IE6, review the content and upload.

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