| 8th July 2010 |
- Added reviews from American Record Guide to CDs 1, 3, 4, 8 and 9.
- Temporarily (I hope) removed the dividers above the text headings on the CD 2, 7 and 9 pages, since an apparently new bug in WebKit (affecting Safari 5 and other WebKit-based browsers such as Google Chrome) causes these dividers to fail to truncate to the left of the floating review boxes, thus forcing them and their following text down the page, with a huge gap before them. This ruins the page layout. I hope Apple fixes this annoyance soon… I intend to restore the dividers as soon as the bug is fixed.
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| 1st July 2010 |
- Added a new entry to the Recordings table (Stravinsky Pulcinella).
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| 26th June 2010 |
- Added another photo to the About page (Ančerl, Terry, Turnovský) and made a few small layout tweaks.
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| 24th June 2010 |
- Added a couple of photographs to illustrate the story on the About page.
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| 21st June 2010 |
- Added an interesting and entertaining personal recollection, by Geoffrey Terry, about how the recordings came to be made to the About page.
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| 17th June 2010 |
- Added Czech Music Direct’s Czech Music Radio Show, about Orchestral Concert CDs, to the Samples page and added a reference to it on the About page.
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| 11th June 2010 |
- Added review comments about CD6/2009 (MusicWeb International).
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| 7th June 2010 |
- Added a review comment about CD9/2009 (MusicWeb International).
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| 3rd June 2010 |
- Added a couple of new entries to the Recordings table (Szymanowski and Dukas), and corrected a few wrong details (Huddersfield Town Hall added!).
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| 31st May 2010 |
- Added a comment about CD1/2008 from Martin Anderson’s interview with Geoffrey Terry in Fanfare 33:5 to the reviews.
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| 30th May 2010 |
- The offer of free worldwide shipping has now ended. The site has now reverted to the previous shipping charges, as detailed on the Ordering page.
- Added review comments about CD2/2008 (MusicWeb International) and CD7/2009 (private customer feedback).
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| 20th May 2010 |
- The recording date of the concert presented on CD9/2009 has been discovered; updated the various pages of the site to include it.
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| 1st May 2010 |
- Added a couple of review comments about CD1/2008.
- Received another very nice compliment from Robert Kellner, of Bertels Klassik-Ecke in Germany, via private email to Geoffrey Terry: “[Your Web site] is a very professional and informative resource that is a great pleasure to navigate so easily, your webmaster has done a superb job here indeed!”
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| 18th April 2010 |
- Added CD11/2010 to the catalogue.
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| 30th March 2010 |
- Received a lovely compliment via private email from the splendid Dr Howard Oakley (of MacUser magazine fame): “[Y]our website is gorgeous, and a joy to listen to!”
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| 25th March 2010 |
- Added CD10/2010 to the catalogue.
- Reorganised the opening Welcome/News page: the temporary splash about free shipping has been demoted to a single line of body text and the Sampler CD has been moved out of the Latest Releases section to have its own permanent box at the right of the page, where the free-shipping splash was previously.
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| 14th February 2010 |
- Shipping is now free worldwide: updated the Ordering page to reflect this, and added a splash to the opening News page.
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| 11th February 2010 |
- An important improvement: the CD-specific reviews that appear on the Reviews page are now replicated in floating boxes on the CDs’ pages themselves. Non-specific reviews appear on the Sampler CD page.
- Added quotations from Fanfare’s reviews of CDs 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 to the Reviews page. We choose not to quote from the double-review of CDs 1 and 4 for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who reads it.
- Added dividers between the review sections on the Reviews page, since the greatly increased quantity of text was beginning to make the boundaries between reviews unclear.
- On the CD7/2009 page, added composer accreditation for the Czechoslovak National Anthem in the track-listing table, and added similar information to all index pages; added a Škroup entry in the Composer index (replacing the previous Other entry).
- Corrected some strange but insignificant markup errors that had somehow got into the Welcome page.
- Fixed a couple of tiny problems with the opening index page (the one that immediately redirects to the Welcome section).
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| 25th January 2010 |
- Added quotations from MusicWeb International’s review of CD4/2009 to the Reviews page.
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| 18th January 2010 |
- Added a new comment from Don Hansen about CD1/2008 to the Reviews page.
- Corrected the date of Norman Lebrecht’s comment about CD1/2008 on the Reviews page.
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| 17th January 2010 |
- Added a new comment from Norman Lebrecht about CD2/2008 to the Reviews page.
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| 6th January 2010 |
- Finally got around to creating new header-bar graphics (“Alert!” and error-triangle logo) for the 404 Page not found error page.
- As I have recently set up a couple of email accounts to accompany the site, various references to email addresses have now been updated to reflect this fact. All instances of Geoffrey Terry’s previous Yahoo address have been replaced with Info@OrchestralConcertCDs.com, whereas some contact details for me have been changed to Webmaster@OrchestralConcertCDs.com, though I’ve also retained a couple of instances of Richard@Hallas.net for matters that may be considered personal rather than directly related to this site.
- Added a new contact address for myself on the About page, in my capacity as Webmaster.
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| 8th November 2009 |
- Quoted Norman Lebrecht’s brief review of CD1/2008 on the Reviews page.
- Corrected a couple of 2008 references that should have been 2009 on this Changes page and on the Reviews page.
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| 20th November 2009 |
- Added a quotation from the Editor/Publisher of Audiophile Audition to the Reviews page.
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| 13th November 2009 |
- Added ‘A charged performance’ to the CD7/2009 page.
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| 12th November 2009 |
- Added ‘A tribute to Alexandr (Saša) Večtomov’ to the CD9/2009 page.
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| 9th November 2009 |
- Added CD9/2009 to the catalogue and updated all relevant pages of the site as appropriate.
- Added dagger-footnotes to all CD pages (i.e. CDs 1 to 9) to indicate which tracks are excerpted on the Sampler CD, and provided a direct link to the Sampler CD. Thus, as well as the sound sample for each CD on the CD’s page, there is also a note of which other track can be heard via the site. CD1/2008 is unique in having a total of three excerpts (the extra one being the Novák sample on the site’s opening page).
- Updated the cover of CD5/2009 to reflect reality rather than a pre-release image (terracotta rather than grey background).
- Updated the cover of CD3/2009 to reflect the final release (only minor differences).
- Changed the date (in all relevant places) of the Fairfield Halls, Croydon performances on CD3/2009 from the previous “c. 1972” to the newly-discovered actual date of 24th September 1963.
- Updated and corrected some details on the Recordings page (e.g. In Nature’s Realm was previously entitled “(TBC)”).
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| 8th November 2009 |
- Added quotations from Audiophile Audition’s review of CD5/2009 to the Reviews page.
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| 27th October 2009 |
- Added a quotation from Audiophile Audition’s nice new review of CD1/2008 to the Reviews page.
- Added day and rating information to the previous Audiophile Audition review quotation.
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| 26th October 2009 |
- Added CD8/2009 to the catalogue and updated all relevant pages of the site as appropriate.
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| 25th October 2009 |
- Regenerated the Jan Novák track that plays when the site opens. It should sound much the same as before (the MP3 quality is the same), but I’ve used the newly remastered version of the CD that Geoffrey has just sent me, and it removes an audible mono/stereo glitch that was previously present at around the 1:00 mark. I’ve also taken the opportunity to make the sample about three seconds longer in order to incorporate the little bridge passage that leads into the repeat of the opening music, to take advantage of the fact that this particular track loops. It’s not perfect because there's an unavoidable small gap when the loop happens, and the final note of the clarinet in the scalar bridge passage overlaps with the opening music repeat, and hence has had to be omitted. Nevertheless, I think it’s an improvement on balance.
- Created a new sample track for the CD1/2008 page and added a note that the Novák sample can be heard on the opening News page. Updated the Samples page to reflect this.
- On the Samples page, the index table of samples was less clear than I felt it should be because it was difficult in some cases to differentiate rows within the table. Therefore I’ve added single-pixel row dividers between entries.
- Added a favourable comment from the Editor of the Anton Bruckner Symphony Versions Discography to the Reviews page.
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| 22nd October 2009 |
- Whoops! Prokofiev’s 3rd Piano Concerto is in C major, not C minor! Corrected references on the CD2/2008, CD0/2009 and Samples pages.
- Added quotations from MusicWeb International’s review of CD7/2009 to the Reviews page.
- Removed double attributions from the first two CD reviews on the Reviews page. Now the two separate paragraph quotations share a single attribution at the bottom, just as with the newly-added CD7/2009 entry.
- Supplied missing title and venue info for the Suk Fairy Tale entry on the Recordings page.
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| 3rd October 2009 |
- Added a quotation from Audiophile Audition’s review of CD3/2009 to the Reviews page.
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| 15th September 2009 |
- Added an introductory sentence to the Sampler CD page.
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| 13th September 2009 |
- Shock, horror! A visitor found a broken link on the Samples page! This caused me to (a) fix the link and (b) install a custom 404 error page, to handle any similar future problems more gracefully.
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| 10th September 2009 |
- Minor fixes and corrections, including the removal of an outdated ‘for sale by’ info box on CD6/2009, which has been on sale officially for some time. Geoffrey also finally got the PayPal buttons working properly again, after unwanted amounts of sales tax had mysteriously started being added to all the CDs. I hope this hasn’t killed any sales, but unfortunately it happened just at the time when we got a lot of new visitors from Martin Hansen’s interview article with me at RISCOScode, so it probably did.
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| 7th September 2009 |
- Added a very nice comment from George Schatzkamer, a satisfied customer, to the Reviews page.
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| 3rd September 2009 |
- Added a downloadable Sampler CD to the site.
- Indexed the new CD into the catalogue pages as though it were a regular release, with the exception of the chronological index.
- Added new entries to the composer, artist, orchestra and venue indices to accommodate the last two tracks of the Sampler CD, which currently represent as-yet-unreleased material.
- Removed the ‘new’ badge from all CDs except the Sampler in the overview and complete index pages.
- Corrected a small mistake (keyword metadata) in the CD6/2009 page.
- Updated a few small details in the Recordings page.
- Added a reference to the Sampler CD in the Samples page.
- Changed the opening News page to announce the release of the Sampler CD, removing the five previous cover-only entries for CDs 3 to 7.
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| 10th August 2009 |
- Today the hosting company was changed from VodaHost to JustHost, and there was a very brief outage while the site was re-uploaded to the new server.
- Added extracts from a review of CD3/2009 to the Reviews page.
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| 9th July 2009 |
- New cover graphic created for CD5/2009 to reflect the changed design.
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| 7th July 2009 |
- Successfully worked around an annoying problem that caused WebKit-based browsers (notably Safari) sometimes to fail to draw the wooden (and shadowed) background part of the menu until the page was updated in some way (perhaps by scrolling it or opening a menu over it). Now, I hope it’ll always appear on the initial load. The only apparent down-side to this change is that the site now works even less well in IE 5 on the Mac; but since that obsolete browser isn’t supported anyway, and isn’t capable of rendering the site in a usable manner, that’s hardly important.
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| 5th July 2009 |
- Added an entry for the Bruckner Discography on the Links page.
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| 2nd July 2009 |
- Added a new top-level page called Recordings to the Information section of the menu system, which of course also required the creation of a new menu button.
- The purpose of the new page is to list the complete set of recordings that will ultimately be issued on CD, and link to the appropriate CD pages for those recordings that have already been released. Future issues are shown in grey; those that have been released are coloured in. Some details are a little sketchy at present, but the table will be updated as appropriate in due course. For the moment it provides a pretty complete overview of what’s available for release.
- The new page appears in the Information section because, strictly speaking, it isn’t part of the catalogue. In due course, once every recording in the table has been issued, it will indeed provide a summary index of the catalogue, and at that stage may possibly change sections. However, for the moment at least, it is provided for the purposes of information, to give an idea of what’s to come as well as permitting works to be looked up in an alternative way from the regular catalogue indices.
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| 21st June 2009 |
- A logistical problem with CD6/2009 means that it must be temporarily withheld; CD page updated to indicate a release date of 1st August.
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| 19th June 2009 |
- Added an entry (with logo) for the FRMS on the Links page.
- Arranged the Links page contents into alphabetical order.
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| 10th June 2009 |
- I just remembered that I hadn’t updated the print stylesheet when I updated the collapsing-index system used on four of the index pages, with the result that the Composer, Artist, Orchestra and Venue index pages would no longer print out correctly. I’ve made the necessary changes to fix this, so printing now works as intended again.
- Received a lovely compliment from Martin Hansen (via Facebook), which I record here as a personal ego-boost: “That’s an impressively slick and tasteful site, Richard. [...] I really like the C inside the O logo too [...]” Very gratifying.
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| 9th June 2009 |
- Replaced the cover image for CD3 for the last time, and removed its launch date as it is now approved and available.
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| 7th June 2009 |
- A massive improvement! Totally revised the four ‘index by’ pages with collapsing indices. The first version of the collapsing index system hid the CD entries below the titles and revealed them when the titles were hovered over. Expanding and collapsing the entries disturbed the vertical scroll position of the page and was generally rather hit-and-miss, in that it was rather too easy to hide or reveal things accidentally. It was also rather difficult to access results towards the bottom of the list. This previous system has now been scrapped in favour of a much superior one that reveals the results in a large column to the right of the page area, to the right of the index titles. This no longer has any effect on the page scrolling, the results are easier to see, and the whole thing is far easier to navigate. I always had reservations about my initial, rather experimental system, but I’m very much happier with the replacement. The new system also works (admittedly with limited success) on the iPhone’s Mobile Safari browser.
- Added a ‘Chronology’ title to the date index and other one-word titles to the other ‘index by’ pages to make their purpose easier to spot without the need to look at the menu pointer or window title.
- In all of the ‘index by’ pages, the individual entries can appear at a standard height that accommodates ‘everything’ or a slightly less tall version for listings that don’t need the full height. The composer index page was previously the only page to use short entries because none of the CD entries in that set of listings required the full standard height. Now, though, I have optimised all the listing pages (including the chronology) to use short or standard listings on a per-section basis. This has meant that the number of short entries has increased greatly (they’re now in the large majority). The main thing is that each collapsing section should be internally consistent; all entries should be the same height within each section. The use of the shorter form within each section means that the entries are more efficient because they require less screen height.
- Replaced the cover image for CD3 (and amended its launch date) at the request of Peter Katin.
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| 5th June 2009 |
- Finally fixed the one remaining IE7 annoyance: removed an unwanted gap between the last menu item and the shading at the top of the ‘wooden panel’ below the menu. IE7 was the only browser to put a gap here (excepting IE8 in IE7 compatibility mode), due to a bug which I’ve worked around at last.
- Swapped the order of the menu footer (which provides the menu’s wooden background) and the menu itself, so that the footer comes first. This allows the NetSurf browser (version 2.1 tested) to display the menu nearly correctly, whereas previously it slapped the wooden background graphic over all the buttons, so that nothing could be seen. This site is now usable (though far from perfect) in NetSurf, which is good because NetSurf is the only native browser that can even make an attempt at rendering this site for users of RISC OS computers.
- Improved the ‘favicon’ site icon to have transparency and thus look more circular in various situations.
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| 30th May 2009 |
Maintenance update:
- Recreated all the CD entries in the index pages, plus those in the News and Reviews pages. I had stretched the rules of HTML with my initial versions of these listing, and although they seemed to work fine in all the major browsers, it turned out that the technically invalid HTML upset some browsers in unexpected ways. IE7 had minor problems (though IE6 and IE8 were OK), but, most importantly, Firefox behaved extremely strangely. It worked perfectly with my local files on my own system, but rendered the same pages unpredictably when they were online. (Reloading would correct the problem, but it was totally inexplicable.) This was an unacceptable situation, so I spent some time devising an alternative way of creating the CD index links with entirely valid HTML. I had wanted to do this anyway, as using invalid HTML went against my instincts. The Mac browser iCab proved particularly helpful in validating the pages.
- Expanded the site info on the About page to add details about fonts and links, and, now that the site code is all fully validated, included logos for Valid XHTML, Valid CSS and Let iCab smile.
- Added this Change Log page.
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| 25th May 2009 |
8:00pm: Launch of this new Orchestral Concert CDs site!
CDs 3 to 7 (inclusive) are listed as the latest releases. |