Kenny Carlile

Last Friday, I launched my first Drupal website: ScooterDad.com. I've been wanting to create a site for parents and kids who are new to freestyle scootering and competitions for a while now. There are some resources for scootering online, but none of them are targeted at beginners and people new to the sport. My family has learned a lot in the last year and I thought it would be nice to share that information with other people so they don't have to make all the same mistakes we did.

We won't be trying to compete with the other scooter news outlets, but rather we will provide a different angle on information that they don't typically cover, such as tutorials, instructions, and what to expect in certain situations. There is a whole unspoken culture in the scooter community that you have to learn, so hopefully ScooterDad.com can help convey that to beginners and parents.

If you or your kid are taking the leap into the world of freestyle scootering, check out ScooterDad.com! Thanks!

When I was 17, my jazz choir teacher introduced me to the Jim Dunlop Jazz III guitar pick (in black, incidentally). From then on, I was hooked. When I wasn't strumming or swinging my whole arm for Texas bluesy goodness, I had a black or red Jazz III in my hand. It was especially great for jazz as I could hybrid pick for comping…that was before I even know what hybrid picking was.

Fast forward a nearly a decade and a half.

I've been a fan of Eric Johnson for many years and I knew that he played Jazz IIIs as well, although he only likes red. I like red or black, just to mix it up. Anyway, a little while ago, Jim Dunlop introduces the Eric Johnson Classic Jazz III pick to fulfill Eric's preference for the older Jazz IIIs that had a slightly different finish. These new versions are not only less glossy for better grip, but they are also slightly larger than the more modern Jazz IIIs.

I recently bought a pack of the new Eric Johnson Classic Jazz III picks at my local guitar center on a whim to see how different they are. WOW! I was really impressed. The slightly bigger feel is hardly visible, but it feels significant. Also, the embossed lettering on the pick is thinner and more raised. The modified lettering in combination with the duller finish gives the pick a sandpaper-like feeling that is just right for grip without being annoying.

My only complaint with the modern Jazz IIIs were that they would sometimes slip because they are so small, but these new (old…reissue?) Classic Jazz IIIs are just about perfect. Eric Johnson knows his stuff. Go pick up a pack today and see how they improved on the best pick!

While I'm waiting for my new Fender American Nashville B-Bender Telecaster to arrive (someday…), I'm drooling over all the gear I want to add to my guitar rig, specifically, pedals. Am I gigging right now? No, not at all. However, I can't help but always be striving for the best possible and most ideal setup. Why? Because it's fun and I hope to someday get back to playing with a band even if I'm just a hobbyist for now.

Current Setup

[Guitar] -> Vox V847 wah (modded for true-bypass) -> Boss TU-2 tuner -> Keeley Compressor (2 knob) -> Ibanez TS-808 (reissue) overdrive -> Fulltone OCD overdrive -> Keeley Katana clean boost ->Dunlop Uni-Vibe with UV1-FC foot controller -> Visual Sound H2O chorus and echo -> Ernie Ball VP Jr. passive volume -> Fender '65 Twin Reverb (reissue) amp

The items I've marked in bold are the ones that I'm perfectly happy with. I don't see any need to replace those items. I might like to put the TU-2 and the TS-808 in true-bypass loops, but other than that, I don't have any issues with them.

Wah

I like my Vox V847 quite a bit, especially since I modded it to include a true-bypass switch. It's a huge step above the CryBaby I used to have, but it just doesn't have the sweep I wish it had. …and then the new hotness walked in: the Fulltone Clyde Deluxe wah.

This naughty little girl has a selector for 3 different voices: Wacked, Jimi, and Shaft. The only setting it's missing is "adult film", although I think the Shaft setting would pass for that. It also has an input gain knob, although I'm not sure how much I'd use this, to be honest. I'm sure it would be fun to play with, but I haven't been a fan of the idea of gain in or before the wah, at least in the past.

Like all of the other items on this wish list, the Fulltone Clyde Deluxe wah would be completely unnecessary and totally awesome! It's also $250, unfortunately.

Fuzz

I've wanted a fuzz pedal for a while now, which has been a change for me. For years, I didn't like fuzz pedals. They just sounded like chainsaws to me. Over the last few years, I've come to realize that, if voiced properly and used correctly, they can be used for that Eric Johnson-esque lead violin sound. I like to have several different levels of gain stages in my pedalboard and I think the Keeley Fuzz Head would be the perfect pedal to round out the upper end of my drive/distortion spectrum.

From the demos I've heard and from what the Pro Guitar Shop salesman has told me, the Fuzz Head falls into this "violin lead" tone category, which is just what I'm looking for. The sound characteristics, the tweakability (including the silicone/germanium switch), and the Keeley name are enough to sell me on this one. This pedal will ravage my wallet for $189-$209, depending on sales at the time.

Sorry, Pro Guitar Shop. You don't carry Keeley and you don't have a demo video.

Modulation

I like my Uni-Vibe a lot, but it takes up a lot of space since it's two pedals, especially since the controller ends up sitting off-board. The Fulltone Mini Deja Vibe 2 would be an awesome replacement for my Uni-Vibe in that it has many of the same controls, except that it's in one unit and the sound quality is better. The extended rate control has me very intrigued as I have always felt like the range of speed adjustment on my Uni-Vibe's controller seemed short.

I really like being able to adjust the rate with my foot while playing, so this rules out a lot of pedals that I would otherwise consider, such as the Voodoo Lab Micro Vibe. For $250, I can kick my Uni-Vibe into my pedal storage unit and keep the swirling action going!

Delay

Here's where it gets tricky. I've got a Danelectro Fab Echo (just for fun, but it doesn't sound good enough), a Line 6 Echo Park (lots of options, but too digital), and a Visual Sound H2O (echo and chorus…decent on both, but neither is great), so trying to justify another delay seems kinda silly. But wait, it gets worse…I don't want a single delay. I want two more! For my rig, I need a pedal that can handle short slapback delay and something that can handle longer, warmer echoes. I don't really love any of my current pedals for these sounds. They are okay, but not amazing. I want amazing.

For short slapback, I want the Way Huge Aqua Puss MkII. This is supposed to be the pedal for slapback echo and short delay. It only goes up to 300ms, so I can't use it for my longer echoes, but Brad Paisley uses one, so what better endorsement can I ask for? Yeah, I know…John Mayer uses one too. I'm hoping having one of these won't turn me into a shallow womanizer. I can pick up an Aqua Puss for $149, or less if I trust the low-ball sellers on eBay.

For longer echoes, I think the MXR Carbon Copy is the pedal for me. It's small, has great analog sound, and the delay times are up to 600ms, which should be long enough. If I want to get crazy, I'm going to have to go digital, and then I can use my Echo Park. It's true-bypass, has a small footprint, and great analog sound, including optional modulation. People on the internet and at guitar shops are really digging this pedal. For $149, I can have all the echo I need…I need…I need…I need….

UPDATE 2/5/2011: Tonight, I picked up a Way Huge Aqua Puss MkII! I'm pretty happy with it so far. It sounds a lot more live and organic than the H2O. I think it will be great for the shorter delay times I want.

Chorus

I haven't figured out exactly what chorus pedal I'd like to have on my dream pedalboard, but I'm pretty happy with the Boss CE-5 Chorus Ensemble pedal that I have. It's not on my current board because of the H2O, but I like that CE-5 and its lush sounds. It may not be true-bypass, but the effect is great. Maybe I can put it in a true-bypass loop to help keep everything clean.

Volume

I'm not really sure what to do about this. I read that passive volume pedals can really suck the high-end off your tone. I hadn't noticed this at first when I first started using it (see "frog in pot" adage), but after removing it from my signal chain, I really notice the difference. I like having the volume pedal, but until I can find transparent option, I think it may have to go sit in the corner.

Old Friends

I've got a few other pedals I'd like to bring back into the mix. I mentioned the Boss CE-5 Chorus Ensemble, but I'd also like to get my Ibanez TS9DX back in use. It's a slightly different flavor than my TS-808 and I'd like to use it as the first pedal in my multi-stage gain spectrum. My Visual Sound Jekyll & Hyde might make an appearance, but if I get the Keeley Fuzz Head and if I have my TS-808 on the board, then the J&H is covering a lot of the same territory. I like my Line 6 Verbzilla, but it's a little more experimental than I need for most playing. Frankly, I really like the spring reverb in my Twin Reverb. The last "old friend" I want to add to my pedalboard is my Voodoo Lab Proctavia octave fuzz pedal. I don't use it a lot, but I just love that effect and I want to have it ready for use!

Board Yet? Get It?! "Board" Heh…Heh…

In addition to all the new pedals and rearrangements I want to make to the actual effects in my rig, I'd also like to build a new pedalboard. I've got an idea in mind that would incorporate my diamondplate decks as well as a wooden frame. I also want to incorporate some true-bypass loopers, but I can't find one that will accommodate all the pedals I'll need. I may end up building a couple small loopers and then chain them together. Either way, I want to incorporate a signal buffer to try to help retain the high-end of my tone. Tone suck with a Telecaster really…well, sucks.

The Paradox Of Cash And Regret

Here is where I run into a pretty big issue. I want to make a lot of expensive changes, so I should sell some of my pedals I'm not using, right? Wrong. Well, kinda wrong. You've got the right idea, but I have run into regretting the sale of nearly every piece of gear I have sold in the past. I wish I still had a Digitech Whammy. I got $100 out of it, but I'd rather have the pedal now instead of the $100 I got. Would I really play it that much? No, but I hate that I don't have it anymore. I want all my pedals to give to my step-son someday. They would be worth so much more like that than to sell them on Craig's List or eBay for half of what I paid for them. I may consider selling some of my pedals, but I'm going to think very cautiously and carefully before I do. I'd much rather just put them in a box and never play them so that I have them to pass down some day.

Since I don't know if I'll be able to fund my new gear by selling old gear, this may be a long and drawn out process. The good news is that it's something to stay excited about and keep striving for. If I got the perfect rig right now, then what would I have to look forward to in the gear realm? Oh, yeah…maybe I could just be content. Bah! Blasphemy! I've definitely got some of Eric Johnson's tone OCD in me. Step 1 is admitting you have a problem. Step 2 is ditching all the batteries in your pedals and going to AC-powered adapters! Hey, I'm one step ahead of Eric on the road to recovery.

If you're using GoDaddy for your web hosting and you've installed Drupal on your shared hosting (Economy, Deluxe, or Unlimited hosting plans), then you may have run into the issue where you can't enable Clean URLs for Drupal. Fortunately, there's an easy fix. Unfortunately, the fix is so easy, I'm not sure why GoDaddy hasn't fixed this.

In your FTP client or the file browser in GoDaddy's tools, navigate to the root where your Drupal instance has been installed and look for your .htaccess file. Look for this important line, noted in red:

#
# Apache/PHP/Drupal settings:
#
...

# Various rewrite rules.
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
 ...

 # Modify the RewriteBase if you are using Drupal in a subdirectory or in a
 # VirtualDocumentRoot and the rewrite rules are not working properly.
 # For example if your site is at http://example.com/drupal uncomment and
 # modify the following line:
 # RewriteBase /drupal
 #
 # If your site is running in a VirtualDocumentRoot at http://example.com/,
 # uncomment the following line:
 # RewriteBase /

...
</IfModule>

# $Id: .htaccess,v 1.90.2.5 2010/02/02 07:25:22 dries Exp $

All you have to do here is delete the # in front of that line, which will uncomment that directive and allow Drupal to be able to successfully manage your site with Clean URLs. You will, however, have to enable it in your site configuration.

Don't forget to save your file after editing and best practice is that you should probably backup the .htaccess file before editing it.

See how easy that was? I wonder why GoDaddy hasn't fixed that yet. *shrug*

Sources: http://drupal.org/node/89089, http://drupal.org/node/364511

Note: I'm aware that there are several places on the web that this is explained, but it's important for GoDaddy users to know if they are using Drupal, so I thought I would add one more instance of this information to help spread the knowledge.

I mentioned in a recent post (okay, very recent) that Yoast Breadcrumbs needed some tweaking to get it to behave the way I wanted it to. This post will outline the changes that I made to my theme to get Yoast Breadcrumbs to cooperate.

First, check to see if the plugin is installed and enabled. If it is, let's get the output from the plugin:

<?php
    if(function_exists('yoast_breadcrumb'))
    {
        $breadcrumbs = yoast_breadcrumb("", "", false);
        ...
    } // end if test
?>

The first issue that I ran into is that even though I had Separator between breadcrumbs in the configuration set to », it was still throwing out » (rather than the HTML entity). To force that, I added this line:

$breadcrumbs = str_replace("»", "»", $breadcrumbs);

Since I was using a static page as my homepage and since I had all my breadcrumbs prefaced with a hyperlink to KennyCarlile.com (linked to root), I didn't want it to appear as KennyCarlile.com » About. That would just be silly. But, I wanted that root link to preface all my other pages, so I just wanted to hide the » About part.

        if(is_front_page())
        {
            echo '<a href="/">' . $breadcrumbs .
                '</a> &raquo; ' .
                '<strong>About</strong>';
        } // end if test

Now we get into the real voodoo and black magic. All other cases should be for pages where we want to display the full breadcrumb. For some reason, it was adding multiple links on occasion, depending on where it was in the site hierarchy. To handle that, I split the breadcrumb into an array, then looked at each position in the array and compared it to the next one to see if they are the same. If they are different, add it to a new array. If they are the same, ignore it and continue on.

        else
        {
            // split breadcrumb string into array
            $linksArr = split('»', $breadcrumbs);
            $newLinksArr = array(); // new links array
            $lastIndex = count($linksArr) - 1;

            // look through the links
            for($i = 0; $i <= $lastIndex; $i++)
            {
                // if 2 in a row are NOT the same...
                if(trim($linksArr[$i]) != trim($linksArr[$i + 1]))
                {
                    // ...add to the new array
                    $newLinksArr[] = $linksArr[$i];
                } // end if test
            } // end for loop

Okay, no more duplicate breadcrumb links, but now it's still linking the final breadcrumb. I want to display the page that I'm on in the breadcrumb, but it doesn't need to be a link. Why link to yourself, right? Here's some real voodoo. This is your cue to take off running if you hate regular expressions.

            // get the new array size
            $lastIndex = count($newLinksArr) - 1;

            // looking to extract the text from a hyperlink,
            // replace it with the same word in bold
            $pattern = '/(.*>)([^<]*)(<.*)/';
            $replace = '<strong>$2</strong>';
            $newLinksArr[$lastIndex] = preg_replace($pattern,
                                            $replace,
                                            $newLinksArr[$lastIndex]);

Cool, no more link for the page that we are on. Now we just need to turn that array back into a string and print that string to the output stream and we're done!

            // return links array to string
            $breadcrumbs = implode(" » ", $newLinksArr);    

            echo $breadcrumbs;
        } // end else test
    } // end if test
?>

That's how I solved the limitations of the Yoast Breadcrumbs plugin. I should say that I'm very impressed by what Yoast was able to do, but it just wasn't quite what I needed. I'm sure there are plenty of other ways to do this, possibly easier ones too, but this is my solution.

Here's the full code that I added to my theme to handle the breadcrumbs correctly:

<?php
    if(function_exists('yoast_breadcrumb'))
    {
        $breadcrumbs = yoast_breadcrumb("", "", false);
        $breadcrumbs = str_replace("»", "&raquo;", $breadcrumbs);

        if(is_front_page())
        {
            echo '<a href="/">' . $breadcrumbs .
                '</a> &raquo; ' .
                '<strong>About</strong>';
        } // end if test
        else
        {
            // split breadcrumb string into array
            $linksArr = split('&raquo;', $breadcrumbs);
            $newLinksArr = array(); // new links array
            $lastIndex = count($linksArr) - 1;

            // look through the links
            for($i = 0; $i <= $lastIndex; $i++)
            {
                // if 2 in a row are NOT the same...
                if(trim($linksArr[$i]) != trim($linksArr[$i + 1]))
                {
                    // ...add to the new array
                    $newLinksArr[] = $linksArr[$i];
                } // end if test
            } // end for loop

            // get the new array size
            $lastIndex = count($newLinksArr) - 1;

            // looking to extract the text from a hyperlink,
            // replace it with the same word in bold
            $pattern = '/(.*>)([^<]*)(<.*)/';
            $replace = '<strong>$2</strong>';
            $newLinksArr[$lastIndex] = preg_replace($pattern,
                                            $replace,
                                            $newLinksArr[$lastIndex]);

            // return links array to string
            $breadcrumbs = implode(" &raquo; ", $newLinksArr);    

            echo $breadcrumbs;
        } // end else test
    } // end if test
?>