All posts by Helen C

Family, Music

Full house and new music on the home page

The Yellow House is full to capacity this week with a gathering of Clarks from all over the country. We were hoping to have outdoor jam sessions on the patio all week leading up to some big July 4th events this weekend but so far the weather hasn’t co-operated. It’s a good reminder to make the best of what we have to work with.

This week we are featuring new recordings of Wrensong in Fresh Tracks on the home page of the website. Wrensong is the acapella renaissance choral group Dave and I sing in along with Elizabeth Harley, Miriam Langner, Sue Neighbor, Oliver Goodenough, John Severinghaus, Frank Fields and Tyler Harwell.

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Memorial Day

We live across the street from a cemetery. Every spring, the flags appear in preparation for Memorial Day.

It’s an old cemetery. The veterans there mostly fought in the American Revolution and the Civil War. A couple of years ago, when I was out walking one morning, I met two young men putting the flags in place. They were carefully studying each headstone, worried about missing one. We talked for a while and I learned that up until that year they had an older man working with them who knew exactly where all the flags had to be placed.

Shortly after I moved up here, we were walking in deep woods out past Barnard in early summer. There in a small clearing was a small cemetery. It had a forlorn, abandoned appearance and yet the grave of each veteran was marked with a flag. Just like across the street from my house. Just like at Arlington National Cemetery.

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How I spent my three-day weekend (so far)

I’m spending a lot of time this weekend on website redesign. I’ve made huge progress templatizing the new design and finding drop down menus that work (pure CSS, not JavaScript).

Only the home page is active right now. I have about 80 pages to convert to the new template, but once I do, new updates will be a lot faster and easier.

The next big hurdle is finding a good calendar solution for the events. We’ve been embedding the Airset calendar that Dave keeps updated but I find it slow and all around annoying.

I also need to write a lot of copy. The stuff on the home page is old and I need new filler stuff for the music page, etc. Also on each of the over 70 musician pages, I want to add a blurb and links to their sites. It’s a big research project from that point of view, but it’s the least I can do for these people who are so graciously letting us stream their original music.

Luckily it is grey and cool here so I don’t feel like I’m missing out too much staying glued to my Mac.

(PS – the radio and “Fresh Tracks” feature on the new page work so enjoy!)

Update: the new site is live now!