I mentioned briefly last month that I’m starting a new job this year, as a Web Application Developer for the Song and Hymn Writers Foundation, which supports initiatives such as Resound Worship. Officially I begin tomorrow, since today has been a Bank Holiday, but I’ve been doing some limbering up this week.

Today’s main project was something I’ve had in mind for a long while, creating a web tool to use at church to make sure that the band are all “singing off the same hymn sheet”. We’re all using electronic devices to read chord sheets but it is a very heterogenous collection and it has not been unknown for us to end up trying to play the same song from several different and sometimes incompatible sources. I like to use ChordPro charts on my iPad and I’ve found some ways of sharing them but it has been a bit clunky.

Today I’ve worked on manually converting the charts we need for Sunday to HTML and displaying them on a single page, including some navigation tools and putting the chords neatly over the top of the necessary words. That’s now up and running and we’ll test it on Sunday. The next trick will be to automatically parse ChordPro to HTML and to build in the ability to transpose to different keys, which I figured out in Python last term. Ultimately I want a few short instructions to quickly build a full set list and that will also help us start capturing information like what songs make up our “Top of the Pops” and which keys each person likes to use when they lead a given tune.

Will it be used in the new job? Probably not immediately although it is possible some opportunities to repurpose it may come along. However, it has worked well for getting me back in the flow of being a web developer and should also be a real benefit to the music group at my church.