A few weeks ago my friend, Rob Greaves, asked if I could get my uncle to answer a few questions about Sonisphere for a background feature he had to write for university. My uncle was happy to do so. Having read the article I thought it's really well written so asked Rob if I could publish for him. He went for it straight away so here it is.

About the Author: Rob Greaves studies Popular Music with Journalism at the University of Northampton.

Music festivals are nothing new, especially when it comes to hard rock and heavy metal; the first Glastonbury festival was held in 1970, and the first Monsters of Rock festival was in 1980. But a new festival has arrived, with intent to take over the world.

Sonisphere Festival may only be being run for its second year in 2010, but it has already achieved some spectacular things; foremost of which is being the first ever globally touring rock and heavy metal festival ever. Locations for Sonisphere include Greece, Sweden, the Czech Republic, the UK, Poland, Switzerland, Finland, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey and Spain. John Jackson is the Series Creator and Director of Sonisphere and has big expectations for this year's festival; "Our licence is for 50,000 (people) per day and we will sell out all 3 days". "In the UK we have expanded the festival to three days whilst keeping the same two day price as last year."

Heavy metal as a genre of music began over 30 years ago as a darker, more sinister branch of hard rock. Black Sabbath are widely regarded as the genres main pioneers, alongside bands like Led Zeppelin and Alice Cooper who also had major influences on the scene. As the years passed, heavy metal began becoming more popular with bands like Judas Priest giving a more melodic and energetic edge to the sound. During the 1980's heavy metal began to get faster, darker and more aggressive, as well as more diverse. Metal began to generate a definite split between its sub genres; this included Thrash metal, Doom, Death metal and Glam, amongst many others. Whilst Thrash and Glam became increasingly popular, a lot of the metal scene became too extreme for many people and sank into the depths of the underground. Heavy metal has been slowly disappearing from the mainstream music scene since the 1990's, but still has hundreds of thousands of followers worldwide who love nothing more than to get together and celebrate heavy metal together, as a community. To metal lovers, it is no longer just a genre of music; it is something to be lived and breathed, and that is what festivals are all about. These festivals are about a mass of like-minded people enjoying their music together, and Sonisphere Festival is taking this idea and escalating it worldwide.

There are already a number of rock and metal festivals held across the globe every year, including Wacken Open Air in Germany, Hellfest in France and Graspop in Belgium. The UK hosts many well renowned metal festivals too, including Bloodstock and the notorious Download festival. But not only is Sonisphere the first ever global festival, they have another claim to fame that will draw most metal fans to this monumental event. "At the new European Sonisphere festivals in June we have managed to put together the legendary Big Four thrash metal bands Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax for the first time in history on one stage," John explains, "something that I am particularly proud of. As we were unable to arrange this line-up for the UK we offered a special deal whereby early buyers of Knebworth tickets were given a ticket to see The Big Four at Poland Sonisphere for free. This has proved to be very successful and indeed Sonisphere Poland is on course to draw 100,000 (people) on its debut."

Although the idea of a worldwide, touring festival was originally John Jackson's idea, the Sonisphere festival is a joint venture with Twin Peaks Ltd, and ex-Live Nation managing director Stuart Galbraith's company, Kilimanjaro Live. Alongside local partners for each country the festival takes place in, primary funding is from the AEG (the Anschutz Entertainment Group). The cost of this years festival is in the tens of millions (USD).

Although the line up changes slightly depending on which leg of the festival you attend, the line-up remains mostly the same throughout the tour so the experience and atmosphere remains largely the same no matter where you are in the world and nobody has to miss out. The UK headliners this year are heavy metal pioneers Iron Maiden, and Alice Cooper along with a UK festival first for Germany's pyrotechnic-mad Rammstein. The Finnish festival will be headlined by Iron Maiden too, but alongside Finland's own HIM. "In Finland we have expanded the festival to two days," explains John, "due to the massive demand of last year's first festival which sold out 60,000 in a day." The 'Big Four', Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax, will headline the festival in Switzerland, Greece, Poland and the Czech Republic.

This feature was written by Rob Greaves and published with permission.

Here's a quick round up of what I'll be blogging about and where I want to take nojacko.com in 2010.

Upcoming Blog Posts

1. "Sonisphere Festival - Taking Heavy Metal Worldwide"
   A background feature on Sonisphere by a friend of mine (Rob Greaves) with input of John Jackson, the Series Creator and Director of Sonisphere.
2. "Speed and Performance of CMS 0.5rc"
   A report on the differences in speed and performance between the previous version of nojacko.com, the new version without database caching, and the new version with database caching. The data is being collected as I write this.
3. "Steel Panther at the O2 Academy Sheffield"
   On the 20th March I'll be in Sheffield to see Steel Panther (supported by The Sirens). Should be a great night and I'll be reporting my views, pictures and videos.
4. "Full Background jQuery Plug-in"
   When I finish the full background jQuery plug-in I'll be letting the world know.
5. "PHPem Take over!"
   I am running the April meet for PHPem. I'll be posting about what will be happening and posting afterwards.

I've plenty of other blog ideas but I'll keep as a surprise.

nojacko.com Road-map

1. Build Content
   This is the main and most important thing for me. I will be creating as much (hopefully) interesting content as I can. This may be reviews, projects, events, images, videos, ideas, or just general ponderings.
2. Projects Page
   A place for all the little projects I'm working on. There'll be more information about my CMS and anything I'm working on such as jQuery plug-ins.
3. Galleries and External RSS Feeds
   I mentioned these two in my last post and that's because they are on the road-map. Galleries will be able to hold videos and images with the appropriate widgets. Same with the external RSS Feeds. I'll be displaying feeds and hybrid feeds (combining all feeds into one) on the site and in widgets, of course.

Again, I've plenty more ideas on the road-map but I don't want to give it all away.

It's been a long time coming but I've finally uploaded the work I've been doing with my CMS. I've added a few new features but the main thing is the rewrite. Here's a run down of what's new, some noticeable and some not.

New Features

• Blogging
  Before my blog was lots of manually created pages and one huge homepage. Now each post is separate and all the pages are generated automatically with a maximum of 10 (changeable) posts per page.
• Caching
  Now the results of database queries are cached. This has made a huge difference in the speed of the site. I've seen the new site loading anything between 2 and 15 times faster than the old one. I will be doings some proper benchmarking this weekend and will post them on this site.
• Widgets
  Little bits of content you can add to any page (see 'About Me' on the right... if it's still there). Right now there are simple html widgets that you can position above, below, to the right or to the left of the main content.
• Design
  I've slightly changed the design of the site. Most noticeable will be removal of the header banner and the addition of the big background image (this uses my jQuery plug-in that I'll also be blogging about soon as it's not finished just yet). You'll also see that blog posts show the date there were posted in a nice little box.
• Admin Area
  I've changed the admin to make it better and easier to use. Page and blog creation are now only one page (previously several tabs). Also, I've a more universal method for adding widgets and meta data to a page.

I'm going the be working on more thing in CMS 0.5rc so that I can remove the release candidate status.

Upcoming features

• Blogging
  I'll be extending the blogging to include RSS feed, tagging and several blog based widgets. Some widgets include 1) latest posts, 2) popular tags, 3) archive list (list years and month where posts were made).
• Caching
  I'll be looking at more caching methods such as full and part-page caching. There are so many options for caching I will be looking into it a lot and, where possible, I'll be blogging about it.
• Widgets
  More, more, more! I'll be making more widgets such as RSS, popular pages, image/ad and any other type of widget I can thing of.
• Design
  There's a few ideas in my head as for the way I want nojacko.com to look but I'm not a designer so this will probably be a slow process of small changes.
• Admin Area
  I'm mainly focusing on functionality in the admin area. Galleries and external RSS feeds (display RSS from other sites) are the two features I'm looking at implementing next. Afterwards I'll be looking at making it look nicer.

Having this version live is very nice as it's taken me a long time. I've got a lot of momentum right now to keep developing the CMS and also the content on this site. So much so I'll leave all that for another post.

Just got back from a night of laser tag with my fellow Jadu Core Teamers. I had not been in years and now I don't know why because it was great fun. We played two 20mins rounds. The first was a free for all with us 5 and about party of 10 others in their early teens. I came 7th out of this group of 15 so not bad. My accuracy was 32% which was second or third best so I was happy. The other round was team based. Three teams. We were green and this time it was again about 20 young boys. I have to say there is something quite enjoyable about shooting kids :D. For this round we stuck together for most part with the occasional moment of madness where I went out alone and got shot at from all sides. Once again I came 7th and had 30-something percent accuracy. With the extra players 7th was pretty good. I definitely would have been higher if it was not for the madness. Our team did come last but we only had 5 members against 9 and 10 in the others. Our average score was way higher than the two other teams so we'll take that as a moral victory :D. A great time was had by all and with a little more practise I could be the next Barney Stinson.