It's starting.
All across the nation, through-out the Clay boards, the fans are stirring. There is a palpable energy surging from one message board to the other. Like a game of telephone, we are starting to hear rumblings from the Giant. And it is good.
The past five months have been hard on Clay Aiken fans, especially the fans tuned into the internet. Clay sightings have been few and far between. His last concert tour ended the last week of December, 2005 and his subsequent TV appearances have been nil.Clay went to Eastern Europe for a week on vacation, where he promptly got the sickest he’s ever been, and he posted some pictures of him and Kristy Barnes, the CEO of his Bubel-Aiken Foundation and his companion, on that vacation. He had some fittings for a photo shoot, where he was very careful to only be photographed from either above or behind, never a full frontal shot. Hiding the new hair do, Clay?
But it wasn't enough.
What was Clay doing? This was the longest stretch of time that the ClayNation has ever gone without a multitude of Clay mentions. What's happening with the CD? Is he recording? Is he in the studio? Has he chosen the songs yet? Does he have the arrangements laid down? Who is he working with? Who are the producers? The song writers? So many questions, so few answers.Then two things happened.
First, Clay spoke in his blog on his Official fan Club site, saying that he will be recording covers and a few original ‘gems’. This was a total 360 degree turn-around for what the fans were expecting. The speculating and extrapolating were running rampant until.....
We heard that he would appear on American Idol.
I could never have imagined how excited that would make everyone. The exposure to the AI audience of over 200 million was invaluable and best of all, we’d get, finally, to see Clay again. So it was with anticipation that we watched the show. And fell in love all over again.
Never let it be said that Clay’s fans aren’t creative and enthusiastic. Last year (2005), to get us through the drought, one of the internet boards, Clayversity, designed a pin for their board members. Another internet message board, The Clackhouse, also decided to design a pin for their members. What started out small, grew and grew and grew all across the Claynation. Lanyards, and keychains, and pins, oh, my..... More and more boards jumped on board with designing pins (and keychains and lanyards), each designing their pins specific to their boards. The creativity of Clay's fans is astonishing; the designs of these pins are amazing. In the end, over 150 different pin designs were created and bought; to wear, to show our support, to trade with other fans What started out among a sub-set of Clay fans, morphed into a fun way to share our community with each other.This year, we turned our attention to blogging. Just look at the links to the right of this post. Most of these bloggers, myself included, had never blogged before. We didn’t know or understand code, so we taught ourselves. And we're having a freaking blast doing it, too!
The 'Community of Clay' is alive and well, despite the fact that Clay hasn't been seen much lately. The 'O'fficial Fan Club is up and running and we hope to get news of either a single drop date or an album release date QUITE soon! We hope to get news of what Clay has been up to, news about the CD.
So.....All across the nation, through-out the Clay boards, the fans are stirring. There is a palpable energy surging from one message board to the other. Like a game of telephone, we are starting to hear rumblings from the Giant. And it is good. So we wait and we wonder and we speculate. The Giant is awakening from a long slumber and the fans are stirring.It's going to be a terrific summer of Clay, version 2006.
Related Tags: Clay Aiken, Bubel/Aiken Foundation, Eastern Europe, RCA, Clay Aiken Official Fan Club, American Idol
3 comments:
Hi Shady!
There's some great writing on your blog - it's really interesting! I'll add you to my blogroll tonight.
In case you didn't see my reply when you dropped in to WebWeaver's World earlier, here it is again:
How to add extra text to your header:
The text in the header is called the description. If you look in your template, near the beginning of the page you should see something like:
p id="description" $BlogDescription$ /p
(I had to leave the brackets out cos the comments won't accept them)
That bit of code pulls in the description. If you go into Settings/basic on your dashboard, you'll see a box marked "description". Type whatever you want in there, save your changes and republish and it will appear on your page under your header. Easy!
Let me know if it works...
:) webweaver
Hi again Shady!
OK - you wanted to know how to change your template so that you get a background image in your header.
The way to figure out how someone else's template works is to view the source. Your browser should include the option "View" in the top menu. This drops down to give you a series of options, one of which should be "View Source" or "Page Source". Select this and a new window will open containing the HTML source of the web page. Do the same for your own page, and compare the two.
The Blogger pages are pretty simple. At the top of the page (the "head") you have a bunch of meta tags and some javascript. Don't worry about this.
Next are all the CSS styles which style the content in the actual page. These begin with:
style type="text/css"
and end with:
/style
(I'm leaving out all the opening and closing tags again, cos comments won't allow them).
The rest of the page (the "body") is the actual HTML where the page is laid out. Scroll down until you find this:
!-- Begin #content - Centers all content and provides edges for floated columns --
Directly after you'll see two div id's - one called "content" and the next called "header". These are the divs that makes the header.
Your blog template is laid out in the same way as my blog template, so all we have to do is change the styles and we should be all set.
Scroll back up to the styles near the top of the page and look for:
/* Blog Header
Now - go to my blog and View the Source for my blog. Find the same part of my page in the Source - where it says:
/* Blog Header
Compare the styles in the two Sources (yours and mine) - the #header and #header div. See how they are different? The background images (.gif) are different, and the padding is different.
Open your template in your dashboard. Copy the whole template and save it somewhere to keep it safe (Word or a text editor will do). This is in case it all goes horribly wrong and you have to put it back the way it was.
You are now going to copy the code from my Source and paste it into your template.
In my Source:
Copy the code from @media all (directly after /* Blog Header) until the last } directly before #blog-title. It looks like this:
@media all {
#header {
background:#476 url("http://www.blogblog.com/rounders4/bg_hdr_bot.jpg") no-repeat left bottom;
margin:0 0 0;
padding:0 0 8px;
color:#fff;
}
#header div {
background:url("http://www.blogblog.com/rounders4/corners_cap_top.gif") no-repeat left top;
padding:8px 15px 0;
}
}
@media handheld {
#header {
background:#476;
}
#header div {
background:none;
}
}
Copy this from my Source code and paste it into your template, overwriting the same bit of your code.
Save and republish your template, hold your breath and check your blog. Has it worked?
I’m not 100% sure the background corners will match, colour-wise, but really the only way to find out is to experiment and see. Because you will have saved your original template, if you don’t like the result, you can always put the old one back again.
Let me know how it goes!
:)webweaver
Great blog - really interesting - and this is such an exciting time. Thanks!
Post a Comment