Welcome to Skyline Drifter

A web page devoted to the artistic works of Marillion and Fish, in all varieties and combinations. This web page serves as a front end to the database of an extensive collection, as well as a portal to initiate communications with fellow collectors.


How this site works:

The entire collection is stored in a MySQL database, and all data pages are automatically generated through PHP code. On the left is a collection of year links, as well as other information; each of these links will update this right-hand column. The year pages will list shows from that year in an abbreviated format, but the dates are linked to 'detail' pages that contain track listings and other information. Near the top is a 'detail filter' which allows the viewer to custom filter what is displayed. This filter remains in effect until either the session expires or the 'Clear Filter' button is pressed.


Requirements:

This site is designed for 1024x768 and above resolutions. It is viewable on lower resolutions, but I don't develop it with these in mind. It is also necessary for the browser to be javascript enabled and support stylesheets.


Trading:

While there is an entire section dedicated to what we trade and how... here is a comment from Marillion that does a good job to identifying why we dont trade copywritten material: Please Don't Upload Our Music!


News:

December 31, 2023 - Hope nobody noticed the intermittent website issues over the last few days, I cut the incoming cable ot the house digging up a big crepe myrtle. it's all fixed now.


September 1, 2022 - Oops. I upgraded the server and it rendered the website unviewable. Took me a bit to fix it, sorry for the interruption! It should be fixed now.


August 15, 2021 - I moved again, this time back to Tennessee. The website has remained up most of the time... a bit behind on content updates..


September 5, 2020 - I took pictures, many good, some crummy, of everything in my personal music collection, and they are added to the database! No more wondering what I actually have and if that item in eBay is the same or not.


July 19, 2020 - I fixed a bug where details showed up without data. Sorry about that! Should not have ever made production.


July 3, 2020 - I managed to join the hordes of unemployed... so hopefully I can make more progress on website and collection organization :)


June 14, 2020 - Seem to be having an issue with the drive on the server filling up... not sure why maybe a log file exploded. It means the details in the shows don't show up.. I'll try and get it fixed quickly


May 25, 2020 - Good chance I lost an update or two here, but for now.. adding to the published collection... magazines... t-shirts..etc


September 9, 2019 - A wide array of updates have been packaged into 2.4. Now multiple formats within one package are bundled together.


July 29, 2018 - Lots of backend work on Song Titles and related fields. If something seems to have changed and is wrong, please let me know :)


July 3, 2018 - Lyrics are working. They are populated for the most part and debugged. Maybe a good lyric search engine someday...


May 12, 2018 - Lyrics.. are loading. I built the structure, now to populate. If they don't work, or you find the wrong lyric when you push a button, let me know. There is more more work to get them loading for mulitple song tracks.


March 24, 2018 - Facelift is complete, now the content scrolls, the heading stay in place and sorting actually works as expected. Let me know if something fails to work correctly


January 10, 2018 - Another batch of bug fixes and features... let me know if went haywire :)


January 1, 2018 - Happy New Year! I just pushed a variety of bug fixed trough the site, let me know if something does not work as it should. Getting better every year!


July 10, 2017 - Well it only happens when I am out of town, the router stopped updating the IP through DynDNS correctly. I'll get it fixed, manually for now :)


June 18, 2016 - Updated the server and now the website to PHP7.0... let me know if anything is dreadfully broken!


May 17, 2016 - You'll notice I added an animation when loading a page that has a lot of database queries. This helps distract from the time it takes. The power spectrum plots are standard on everything I have scanned, which is the vast majority of the collection. Let me know if any of the above does not work as expected.


April 16, 2016 - Seems the addition of the power spectrums came at quite a cost to load time. I am working to correct this, in the meantime, please be patient.


April 12, 2016 - Major addition to the website underway... power spectrum data for everything on CD! if you see this image: then click the date for details and see the power spectrum! Of course, if you see any issues, let me know...


February 3, 2015 - This is the development build of the website, as I move some equipment to a new server


January 25, 2014 - Connection has been a bit flaky the last couple weeks..new cable modem should help!


July 27, 2013 - The server has been upgraded, hopefully this was virtually transparent to the user community out there!


April 30, 2013 -- I made it.. the website has been up for a few weeks now and I have most of the kinks worked out of a server upgrade that occured along the way... whew!


February 17, 2013 -- Big News.. I am moving... and this means the website will be unavailable for a week or 10 days.. starting February 26th or 27th with a power up planned for March 7th. So hold your breath and come on back after March 7th!


May 3, 2011 -- I almost made it one year... without a comment. Bear with me. The router is dying..a new one is ordered...


May 6, 2010 -- I apologise to anyone using IE 8 to view this page, if it appears to be of poor quality..toggle your 'compatibility mode' and it should fix the situation.


April 28, 2010 - In the end..the solution was easy. I realized I had several issues.. web site slow and incomplete.. NFS not working... FTP data corrupt... the common thread? my onboard NIC is bad on the new motherboard. I slapped a trusty 3c905 in..and viola..it all works!
Sorry for the interruption in web service... it may be down briefly again to replace the board I imagine.


Well here we go..I'll be reinstalling the operating system to correct the issues on the web site..NFS..etc.. sometime around this coming weekend.. sorry for the poor quality of the site..something went horribly wrong during the hardware upgrade and CSS and Images do not work very well.


February 19, 2010 - Welcome to 2010! I made a big trade and in exchange for some music.. got cover art for a ton of the Fish albums... very cool!


December 22, 2009 - Okay..all my images up uploaded, more or less.. if a concert has this image:

It has images associated with it. Enjoy!


December 13, 2009 - First and foremost.. Everyone have a very Merry Christmas! (it's just around the corner you know!)


Also... I am adding images to the concerts..over the years I've collected any images that came with the shows in a folder ... these are all being added to the database under the appropriate (hopefully) show! So check them out! Also..for those curious the site gets about 8 - 20 unique visitors per day.. not bad considering it does nothing :)


October 24, 2009 - New fan in the Power supply.. took the site offline for about an hour. Hope it works better now!


October 16, 2009 - Sorry for the unstable server over the last several days.. two things happened. 1 - I was out of town.. and 2 - The fan in the power supply stopped turning. This caused the power supply to overheat and shut down. It is not cooling by other means until the new fan arrives.


September 5, 2009 - Thank you Peter for pointing out the broken image link for collection items...


August 23, 2009 - Oh dear.. the drive filled up and two of my PHP3 scripts are now zero length..I restored from backup.. but it was not the most current.. the result is that I cannot add shows to the database until I fix this. it will take some time..so..enjoy the site.. but no content updates for now. Sorry!


August 22, 2009 - It is amazing the problems you encounter.. AFTER.. you take a site live. If something does not work, go to the contacts page.. send me an email...I'm 'fixing' things actively... which may in turn break something else. Thanks for your help!.


August 18, 2009 - This is now the primary interface for the activities... you can still see the old webpage here: Original SkylineDrifter.


July 6, 2009 - Everything seems to be working correctly.. a quick restructure of the navigation... And I had to force IE8 into compatability mode due to something different in the way is reads the nav menus... But otherwise... it's coming together quickly... now to port the database over.


July 2, 2009 - Final beta testing is ongoing and this rewrite of the web page should be redirected as main in a few more weeks once the database is ported into the new structure. Development has taken, well years... I had a daughter born in there among many overseas trips and the general hussle and bussle of life. Here it is!


December 12, 2007 - Well.. some other things got in the way and I took several months off from working on this great project. But now..you'll notice the filter is working!!


July 8, 2007 - Welcome to the new incarnation of Skyline Drifter. The database has been restructured and entire web frontend has been recoded from the ground up to provide a more visually appealling and more accurate representation of the collection. It also fixes some limitations on the database that only became evident after the collection grew as large as it is.