My name is Jonas and I’ve been an ukulele fanatic for quite a while now. I’ve been studying music since I was 6 years old and started playing the piano a while after that. After the piano I started learning to play the guitar (acoustic), mainly finger style (novice/intermediate) and some occasional pop songs.
After a few years of playing the guitar I had an impulsive moment and picked up my first ukulele at a local music shop. It was the cheapest Makala ukulele in plain mahogany (laminate). I quickly learned that I needed to get a better ukulele (one that stays in tune, has more volume, better intonation, sustain…). After a lot of research I’d found the perfect ukulele at TheUkuleleSite (used to be Hawaii Music Supply), a limited edition tenor Kala with a solid cedar top and solid golden acacia back and sides. I absolutely LOVE it, it is an incredible little thing. I keep it in a vintage tweed ukulele case from the lovely people over at TheUkuleleMovement.
So after all those years my main instrument has become… An ukulele. What was the incentive for this website? Well, at first I was actually building a personal ukulele tabs and chords website, so that I’d have some kind of “online sheet music book” which I can access everywhere: on my computer, someone else’s computer, smartphone,… This little project of mine is however growing bigger everyday!
I have some history in freelance website building — it was by far my main occupancy — so I took the challenge to build a website with ukulele tabs and chords.
Technical aspects
I feel obliged to also tell you something about how the UkuWorld Network works in the background. Everything is build on the WordPress framework, you know that blogging software? It’s using the core functionalities of WordPress, since for example UkuTabs obviously isn’t just a “blog”. Using WordPress offers lots of options: easy to write plugins for it, use plugins, easy to modify, stable,… I know my way around PHP just enough to make some things happen, e.g. the chord highlighting in tabs and when you hover over them you can see the chord diagram, the tuner, chord library, scales, etc… UkuTabs is also using the last.fm API and musicbrainz database to retrieve the artist biographies, pictures, album name and album images.
Serverside. The most popular website within the network is with no doubt UkuTabs. That’s why it is hosted on its own server located in Chicago (Illinois) by the lovely people at WiredTree. They are one of the leading brands in the webhosting business when it comes to VPS (Virtual Private Servers) and dedicated servers. You got to love their dedicated support and great expertise. Running on 64-bit Linux (CentOS 6.2, i686 architecture) operating software, LiteSpeed V6.1 (!), has a 15k RPM SAS disk (RAID 10 Redundancy, SAS 70 Type II compliant), lots of RAM and very good CPU’s (24 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5645 @ 2.40GHz). Also an important detail, using SSD hard disks for incredible I/O speed.
What about the other websites (UkuGuides, UkuTuner, UkuScales, UkuChords and UkuWorld)? Well, they are hosted together on a separate server. This is to make sure that the won’t bother UkuTabs and vice versa.
Want more info about something? Feel free to use the contact form to send me a message.
