mark.beihoffer.com

Although I already have quite a few websites, I wanted to create a new site under mark.beihoffer.com, and decided to take the plunge and give Habari a whirl instead of using the typical WordPress installation I've grown accustomed to. So far, it's been treating me pretty well and I'm excited to have the opportunity to delve into the internals one of these days. I'm hoping to make a custom theme of my own soonly, as well as check out the guide to writing your own Habari plug-ins.

The site you're currently reading, mark.beihoffer.com, is hopefully where I will be organizing a directory of all the other activity I'm involved in on the web, from my LinkedIn profile to my PerlMonks account to my portfolio of sites I've created, and more.

I did go ahead and launch the Jack Merlot & the Urban Matadors website today. That's the site I'm most excited about right now - it's for the band I'm forming with my cousin Nick Christensen and a few other peeps we know from around town. So far, we're tentatively a four-piece with an upright bass player, two guitarists, a violin player, and a bunch of project studio gear I barely know how to use.

Also, we all sing. So there might be some Trip-Shakespeare-esque four-part harmonies, or maybe it's more like CSNY if you're into that sort of thing. I've been concentrating on writing songs that have two, three, and sometimes more vocal parts lately in my songwriting, and it's been really fun, although I have to admit that singing backup harmonies for yourself (what with the state of multi-tracking with Audacity these days and everything) is still just a little unsettling.

I've been writing music for almost twenty years now, and I've got to admit that music has been a big part of my life, and it's gotten me through some pretty tough times in the past. I'd love to get into a real recording studio at some point rather than doing everything with the project studio, but that costs money and I'm on a budget.

Anyway, so I used a basic WordPress installation on JackMerlot.com to organize the music on the back-end, and it's working like a champ so far. I think I put the Revolution Pro Music theme on the site and then further customized the code in a number of ways to make it more suitable for what we're trying to do.

Right now there are about twenty songs with lyrics, tabs, mp3's, and other interesting tidbits, supplemented by some of our artwork and now with a shiny new logo. In the future you can probably look forward to some bio pages about the band members, some blog posts about audio production, recording, producing, and what-have-you, and some blog posts about live gigs, songwriting, and various other aspects of what it's like to be Jack Merlot. (Or have to put up with Jack Merlot because you're in his goddamned band.)

Go download Sayonara Willow Tree, it's new and it's free and it's got myself singing backup vocals for, uh... myself.

Yay!

- Mark Beihoffer
a.k.a. Jack Merlot