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Frequently Asked Questions
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I receive a fair amount of email about this site; much more than you would expect for an unofficial fan site (and a whole lot more than I expected when I first set it up). Sadly, I really don't have the time to answer it all. Here are some of the most frequently asked questions and their answers.
Can you send me the mp3 of <insert song title here>?
Nope, sorry. If I've got it and can legally distribute it, it's already on the site. Otherwise, no.
Do you have any guitar tabs?
Unfortunately not. I'm a singer, a bell-ringer, a harpist, but not a guitarist. You can try OzTabs for Tripod tabs.
Do Tripod send you all their lyrics?
Do Tripod even write down their lyrics? Perhaps. Do they transcribe their ramblings? I suspect not.
Every song on this site has been transcribed by fans from recordings or from memory. If I've thanked someone at the top of the lyrics page, then they did it; otherwise it was my work.
Are you friends with Tripod? (Yes, I swear I've been asked this a fair few times)
No, sadly not. I'm just one of a million fans. There is no secret path to getting to know them by emailing me.
Oh. How can I contact Tripod, then?
Well, according to their official site:
You can email Tripod at tripod@token.com.au. Whilst all messages are forwarded to the boys we hope you will understand that due to the large volume of email, it is not always possible for the boys to respond.
(And given that the amount of email I receive must be a thousandth of what they get, I'm not surprised!)
I've written a Tripod fan-fiction/parody/tribute/drawn a picture, will you put it on your site?
Sorry folks, this is a Tripod lyrics site, not a community site. If I put up one person's contributions then I'm compelled to put up everyone's.
WOW, Tripod iz REALLY COOL!!!!!! EMAIL ME BACK PLZ!!!!!!1
This is not actually a question, but it's the most common email I receive. Thanks for the emails. I appreciate your enthusiasm. Yes, Tripod are cool. But... do you really need a reply from a complete stranger on the Internet to convince you?
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Infrequently Asked Questions
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Okay, this section is blatantly self-centred, so please feel free to skip it. These are a few questions about this site that no-one has ever asked me... for obvious reasons, I guess, because the answers are fairly boring. Ah well.
How do you update the site and do all that colour-coding?
Every song in a section has a link to every other song in that section, so you might expect that adding a new song is an arduous process - especially since the only web hosting I have only supports flat HTML pages. This means I have to update all the pages in a section every time a song is added or renamed.
So, the way it all works is like this. Every song on the site lives in a text file on my hard drive, and it's into these text files that I type all the lyrics. I've created a really basic format for them that makes them quick to type up; they look like this:
New
.T: The hot dog man is packing up,
.T: He's putting all his sauces away.
G: Yeah!
.T: Scrapes the onion grease into a cup,
.T: To use again another day.
The "New" heading is what gives it the little red "new" icon in the index. The dot at the start of some lines tells it those lines are sung, not said. And the letter or letters before the colon determines who sings or says it (T for Tripod, S for Scod, GY for Gatesy & Yon, etc). I then save each song with the song name as the filename.
Once I've finished the song, I run a little utility that I wrote specifically for developing this site. I specify which sections I've modified, and it reads each text file in that section and converts it into HTML - replacing "S" with "Scod", italicising the sung lines, combining multiple lines sung by the same person (so you don't get the same headings underneath each other), generating all the links to the other songs, etc, etc. The classes are set at this point but the actual colours come from a style sheet.
What about updating the index?
For this purpose, I run another of my custom utilities to generate the big site index. This checks back through the files to find out the song titles and albums, which ones are new, and what recordings (if any) I've linked to. It then generates four versions of the index - one for each possible way that you can sort the columns.
Why bother with all the programming?
Because it took me a few hours to write each program and they've saved me hundreds of hours of manually updating pages. Besides, I'm a geek - if I can write a program to do it for me, then I will!
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