History of this
website and some updates
(or where'd it go and why'd it come back again?)
Just for fun, I have added a link to what remains of
the old website below. This is not the original version, that has long
entered the great website in the sky, but it is the second version from
around 2002. Amazing to see how small it was. BTW there are A LOT of
broken links, etc. It's certainly not worth my time fixing them, good
to see this old thing though after all these years!
Tom - Oakland
California June 27 2009
This website was originally launched, in the early days of the internet, in the heady (pre bubble burst) days of early 2000. Looking back, I'm just amazed that I got this launched at all back then. Web space then was, comparatively, very very expensive - and I wanted to use up loads of space with MP3 files! Worse, I only had a dial up connection, and I had to load up 300mb total of webspace on that! It kept failing just as it was about to complete. I can still picture the little graphic on Frontpage express that used to come up when you uploaded files, I can still remember the system generated password I had to enter over, and over again! So the original website was created painstakingly slowly, in a morass of technical difficulties (wasn't Windows 98 just the worst , OS?). So having put a huge amount of time and energy into creating the original, I found it really difficult to update the site - just the sight of the Frontpage Express icon made me feel sick!
Either the price of the webserver, went up, or I was economising (I can't remember which) but I took some of the MP3's down and slimmed down the site in around April 2001.
In the early days, when it was first launched, the site really did it's job nicely. Part of my motivation was to see if anyone who was involved in making this music would get in touch. I did really well - I heard from Chez Holmes of the Crucified Brains, Davie Brown and Mark Nicol of the Ghost Train and one of the guitarists out of the Twist (sorry mate I have temporarily forgotten your name!). I even heard from that old giant of the Kirkcaldy Music Scene - Bill Gimix. His initial mail was to enquire (a touch forcibly) where the Gimix were? Bill and I exchanged a number of mails as I explained who I was and why he might remember me and that the issue was that I didn't have any Gimix material to upload. Bill then did remember me and seemed to spend ages trying to locate some material. He kept sending me mails that said "I can't open the '80's time capsule". So I'm still looking for Gimix material. He did send me that nice pic of himself that is on the Gimix page on the new site.
The website seemed to sit about a bit in it's slimmed down form after mid 2001 and seemed to be largely ignored, so I took it down around mid 2002. I kept the website material on a disc and largely forgot all about it.
So a huge amount has happened since mid 2002. I have moved countries and now live in Northern California. As a piece of really strange coincidence that proves there must be a Kirkcaldy Bands connection in everything, I just realized that the former drummer of the Ghost Train seems to live up the road from me, in San Francisco! The Kirkcaldy Bands concept was more or less forgotten about in all the excitement of moving countries. However, I recently got interested again in having a web presence. I checked into it and was amazed by how cheap and easy it is now, like multiple times the amount of web space for a fraction of the cost. I should know about Moore's law, as I work in the tech industry, but somehow I didn't think of that. A sufficient amount of time has now gone by since those dim days in early 2000 when I made the original site, to make me want to tackle this again.
So I decided to take a weekend off doing anything else and tackle this. I didn't want this to take the hours and hours that the creation of the original site took - so I wanted to blitz the re-creation of the site in two days. OK so it's now 7pm on Sunday and I have not quite finished, but I have made a lot of progress! I hope to wrap this up next weekend. I now have DSL and a number of Apple computers, so I hope this re-creation won't be the trauma that the creation of the original site was. I also think there is some kind of healthy maximum period you should spend wallowing around in your own past (we are in the present after all), so the thought of a concentrated period of re-creation appealed to me - I could get this done and then move on again. Although the contrary side of me does enjoy the absurdity of locking myself into an apartment for a whole weekend and entering back into the world of Kirkcaldy in the '80's whilst the rest of California is at the beach or the park on this lovely April weekend.
I was just tackling to Ian this afternoon and he was at Cameron (of "Crucified Brains", "All Days Fade", "The Amused", and "Darlingheart" fame)'s wedding two weeks ago. He mentioned that he met Derek (bass player of "The Twist" and "Who Cares?") and Derek was asking whatever happened to the old website, so maybe this is the right time. Derek also mentioned that he may have the long lost decent "Who Cares?" live tape from the Windsor Hotel - that'd be a find after eighteen years!
At the moment, most of the material on the new site is just a re-hash of the stuff that was on the old. I have added some new pictures of the Crucified Brains, one set that Mark Carr e-mailed me some years ago, another batch I was able to recover from negatives (Chez having kept the prints many years ago). I have added some new notes for the MP3's of the Crucified Brains and the Surgical Wars. I've also taken a brave decision and have uploaded all the Surgical Wars material I had available on MP3. Space on the old server meant I never would have considered this more dodgy material in the past.
Sadly, when I archived the MP3's I removed from the site in 2001, I must have done something with the files, but 6 years on, I can't remember what! So some of the files that were on the old site will need to be re-created from the source material. This is maybe not a bad thing, as we can mess about a bit with modern technology and see if we improve some of the more damaged original sound quality. So there are some pretty big gaps in the collection at the moment, particularly the whole of the "Stupefied" tape. These gaps will hopefully be filled in the coming months.
However, there are now also chances of new additions to the roster of bands. Ian has some new material of bands that were not represented at all on the old website, bands like Days of 29 and the Blazing Apostles. I'm also hoping that a fresh new URL and the massive expansion of the internet with wikipedia and myspace, will cause this site to get much more notice than it did before - maybe even finally uncover some really great material that's been lying gathering dust since the Clubhouse was the Dutch Mill.
As I'm not an ace website designer, I'm stuck using a template driven website creation tool. I'm finding simple web creation software is too limiting for me, but the professional software is too difficult for me to work - so so this is somewhat of an uneasy compromise - website design wise. I decided to largely dispense with the old structure of separate folders for pics, posters, flyers etc., and have consolidated as much as I can on the page belonging to the relevant band. This makes for a more simple file structure and I'm hoping there is not too much dial up still out there, so there is less need to worry now about slow pages.
The big difference seems to be now - the internet has gone mainstream in the time this website has been away. So Kirkcaldy Bands sticks its head above the Firewall, sniffs the air, and see's how life has changed since 2002! Even from a quick google search (now there's a thing, google was not even invented in 2002!) I have found a band called the Blazing Apostles - don't think it's the same one as I remember!
Tom Reid - San Jose, California, April 1st 2007.