Dan Ubilla

As a songwriter, I’ve always been amazed at what comes out depending on what’s going on in my life.  When things were going well for me, my friend and bandmates would joke that things needed to get worse or the music would suffer.  They were more right than they might have thought.

Matt Skiba on Alkaline Trio’s new album, This Addiction:

Yeah, I was pretty angst-y and heartbroken when I wrote all of those songs. And I think that has a lot to do with the tone of the record because I hadn’t been in that sort of mind frame for a while. I think a lot of people feel angry and heartbroken about whatever it is they might be going through—politics, relationships, friendships, a cat dying—whatever the case may be. And I had some things go on in my life that just brought me back to that very drunk, very angry and sad young man that I was ten years ago. I never went completely off the deep end but I had some dark times and therefore there is some darkness. Not spooky dark, just sad and angry shit.

The rest of the interview can be found here.

When I threw together the design you see on this very blog, I did it haphazardly and quickly just to get a bit of presentation to frame my entries.  It was always meant to be a dynamic frame, one that I could use as a training ground to various tips and tricks I picked up through my work, both professional and personal.  Looking at the current layout and site hierarchy in more depth, I’ve decided to scratch most of what little you see here and strip down to the bare essentials.  By re-focusing on the content before continuing on with exploring new design techniques, I’ll be able to re-imagine this web space to become not only the design and development playground that I originally intended it to be, but to be a proper gallery of my accomplishments and pursuits.  In breaking things down, I plan on following three tenants and lines of thinking that I’ve come across in the past six months since introducing this site:

* Make Your Mockup in Markup – a fantastic argument to ditch Photoshop and design straight in the browser by Meagan Fisher of Simplebits.
* Walls Come Tumbling Down – the original presentation by Andy Clarke of Stuff and Nonsense that inspired the preceeding article.
* This fabulous idea that allows me the exploration of cutting-edge technologies without forgetting the end user.

In addition to these inspirations, the new site will include a focus on typography and minimalism, both of which should provide a new spotlight on content.

What you’ll see as a visitor will be a constantly changing design as I will be working in the browser, and, for the most part, pushing updates to the live site as quickly as possible.  While this is not the most professional approach, I will consider this site an academic case study and web development playground for the next few months.  For those interested in design and coding, I will be posting periodic updates on the what, why, and how of the developing site.  For those interested in areas of the site, I would ask you to not mind the mess, but the idea is that no proverbial under construction sign is needed, that the site will be functional and accessible at every stage.

Thanks for staying tuned and for your general interest.

Implementing cURL in an XAMPP environment for the first time can cause a quick, early headache. The most common error seen is a simple curl_init() can not be found. Luckily, the solution is most likely simple.   cURL comes included with Apache but not installed, so you have to go in and turn it on yourself.

Open up your php.ini located under the /php directory. The line that needs editing will read: ;extension=php_curl.dll. Simply remove the semi-colon to uncomment the line. Then restart Apache to finish the change!