Finally!

They're finally securing the border! Oh wait...

Volunteer webmastering part 1

I volunteer with my son's Cub Scout Pack as webmaster, which is a good fit for me since I am a total nerd. Anyways, I wanted to get them off the Yahoo groups (yuck!), so I started looking for a webhost for our own website. After some thought, I came up with a list of required features:

• Login security - obviously parents would not want everybody knowing their kids' names & addresses.
• Event scheduling - another obvious one, since Scouts have lots of things going on - Pack meetings, campouts, etc.
• Messaging or announcements - something to help people communicate with each other, that could take the place of the Yahoo group emails.
• Roster - an authoritative list of members.
• Storage for files & photos.

I found several options, and after comparing them, I decided to go with MyPack (Advanced option). It has the above features and more, like email lists, event filtering by den, etc. The email list feature is worth the price alone.
By the way, lots of sites claim to have email lists, but to use them, you have to log into the website and send your email from a special page. Often, you have to be an administrator to be able to send an email. That's not an email list.
A true email list is when I can open gmail, type everybody@domain.com, and it goes to everybody I want it to. Also important: all members of the email list should be able to send emails to the list. Anyways, that's a great feature. That plus the Announcements feature effectively took the place of the Yahoo groups, and I was finally able to wean them off of that. Woohoo!

iTunes genres

For the past few years, I have been working to rebuild my music collection in iTunes. By that I mean getting pretty much everything that I have ever enjoyed (which runs the gamut from avant-garde to thrash, from folk to electronic, from classic rock to classical, and everything in-between). During this time, I discovered smart playlists, and I set to work on building genre playlists, so I could get a good random mix when I'm out and about. What I found was that the built-in genres were too broad (it just doesn't sound right when Ministry is followed by Yes imho). So, after some experimentation, I found a set of genres that seems to work, and I built my playlists around them. Here is a quick sampling of the genres that my Metal Hits playlist picks up for example:

• Extreme Metal (Living Sacrifice, Megadeth, Tourniquet, etc.)
• Grunge Metal (Alice In Chains, Rose, Soundgarden, etc.)
• Industrial Metal (Brainchild, KMFDM, Ministry, etc.)
• Progressive Metal (Believer, Iron Maiden, Saviour Machine, etc.)
• Heavy Metal (everything else, like Black Sabbath, Stavesacre, Stryper, etc.)

Then I have other playlists, like Progressive (picks up progressive rock & metal), and Industrial (picks up industrial electronic & metal), etc. This allows songs to show up on multiple smart genre playlists. It's still a work in progress, but it seems to be working well enough for now.