A Day In  A Life - That was the idea when I started the BLOG - to capture what an LA Musician has going on in any given week. Well, this one has been killing me!

In the last 2 posts you can see the ongoing tech dilemma with my iPod and Netbook for track gigs. I ended up having to bail on the iPod I just bought and reloaded all the tracks from an external drive back up. It has been taking way too much time to restructure the files into playlists I can actually use in a live show, so I broke down and set up an appointment at the Apple Store for help before I realized I had a track gig tonight and Saturday day!! I had a false sense of distraction and no worry until the realities hit me. I had taken off Friday night and thought - no worries - I have until NEXT WEEK to have this working.

Last night I realized the dang gig today is a track gig and the last minute gig I just booked for Saturday is too!! I had that appointment scheduled for early this morning but the stress of the issue had me awake much earlier than that. I just started moving the important files into the TRACK folder so I could work and by 9am I was more than half done so I bailed on the appointment. It is 11 am and I have all the track gig stuff in the TRACK folder - I will be able to do the gig now!!!

Of course, none of the other files are straight so I have many more hours of work to do; and I have no idea what iTunes will do when I get it all done and sync the iPod, but I think it will update the iPod to the iTunes! I sure hope so!!

You gotta be saying at this point - What a procrastinator!! Thinks he has a week off from tracks and goes to the beach!! WELL.....

I have been in another hell the past few days. GregVail.com has issues and went offline for most the day yesterday! I have been freaking and driving a dear friend nuts the past few days!

I got an email informing me that the ever lame XO Host for GregVail.com was finally discontinuing the Site Builder program that Greg Vail was originally started on. This is not good news! It has been an overwhelming job concern since I tried and a friend tried to take the site down and fix the HTML to work as static HTML 2 times over the past few years just because of the cost issues.

You see, the service was soooooo old that it was costing me 75 to 100 dollars a month to host on that plan. As web hosting became more affordable, XO never restructured any of those plans and in the old days, 5 gigs of monthly transfer seemed really high! Over the years I started doing more and more traffic and the charged 1 dollar for every 100 megs over! That has averaged over 80+ dollars a month for years now.

When I called XO and asked for told me to get off Site Builder and the rates where much better on newer plans, but that they couldn't do anything about the ridiculous charges. They referred me to there web guys and I was quoted 7500-9000 dollars to have them transfer the site to HTML!!

YES - I LAUGHED.

When I got that dreaded email I was given until September 30 and GregVail.com will die. I made some calls, hooked up a brilliant friend to look into it and he found a program that lifted the entire site and created HTML for every page!! 

DONE IN 2 DAYS!!

Pretty dang excited!! Mark is amazing and I was good to go! Then came the second round of issues.

It appears that the Site Builder weirdness and lame navigation required a Java Redirect at the front of every page to accommodate that vast number of internal page links I have created over the years and others have linked to. All seemed fine until I posted a page on FB and say no information show on the post. I realized that it was only seeing the redirect page and I got worried!

My site has a lot of inbound links and is crawled very often. I pulled up the stats and found Bing and Yahoo had crawled so I di a Greg Vail Search and went to the Cache page to see what they crawled. ARRRRGGGGG!!!!

I saw a frame with NO CONTENT AT ALL!! So I have all the in bound links with weird URLS covered so people can get in the site, and now the search engine rank I have worked on for 11 years is blowing up!

On the phone and plan B is started - Get the redirect on the server side to add the .HTML as a server command and pull the Java redirect pages off the server! Sounded GREAT!!

BUT it blew the file structure, changed all the HTML fixed URLS to not work and the site was a giant 404 message by mid day. As we sorted the problems and Mark hit the new and old host companies a few times, we ended up having to just restore the site so it would work right if you get to it, BUT, now the search engines will all be indexing nothing and dropping the site off into the garbage in the next few days.

The options appear to be - have a site that functions and losses 11 years of search work - or - maintain the search engine work, restructure the whole site, possibly redesign at that point, and start the search mess from scratch.

I am killing the search results right now by leaving it functional since every page will have no words on it according to the search engines. You can see them, but that redirect is killing the site placement.

GregVail.com has been top 10 and number 1 in GOOGLE Search for years! Lets add the newest issue to the mix! If GregVail.com is the highest rank site linking to ALL MY OTHER SITES and the value is reduced to nothing because the search engines think I took all the words off my pages, than all my other sites will loose rank in relationship to the main site destruction.

YES, I can rebuild, but dang this week has been kicking my butt. When I decided to take a mental break from all of it and started producing a Vanessa Birthday Video last night on my main computer - we had worked on a clip for 3 hours without saving!! 3 hours!! It was nearly done and CRASH!!!! I looked at my baby and said, I think daddy has to cry now! She hugged me so sweet that it kept the tear back!

THANK GOD FOR WELL WRITTEN PROGRAMS! I looked up as the program reloaded and it asked - to you want to restore your last file - I HIT YES 10 times and all but the last few commands where back in front of me!

SO - RIGHT NOW - Greg Vail dotcom is live but dieing in the Search Engines. The iTunes on my track gig computer seems fully functional and sorted enough to play the gig today. I have a new iPod that has the old files there for back up today if needed. I have a very busy weekend and it looks like I will survive it now!

GIGs THIS WEEK

Today is Thursday - Aug 26 - Private Function - Grand Opening for a new Medical School.
Friday - Saturday 9pm to 1am - Fantasy Springs Casino lounge with Dean Grech and Hanz Z.
Also Saturday - 11-3 - Long Beach Mercedes Benz Greg Vail and sales Guys public jam.
Sunday - Aug 29 - Saddleback Church - 1 night service at 5PM

Session alert!

Did a Christmas Track with Dean Grech Tuesday! Have a Las Vegas commercial music session Friday am, a big name Christian session (vocal artist) to track Monday day and 2 other sessions calling yesterday and today.

Add to that - this week is the best paying week all year and last week, this week and next week take the cake for a 3 week run too!! Feeling blessed! EVEN IF everything else is blowing up!

Gotta get ready for Ontario now - PEACE OUT.....