Well, livingwithmusic.com has been online again for a little over a week and things are beginning to run smoothly ... finally. There have been - and continue to be - a couple of bumps in the road to full functionality, but although I am, perhaps, the only German without a driver's license, I still have enough ability to steer clear of a couple of bumps that WordPress and my own inability have thrown into my path.
You were all privy to the immense spam problem I encountered when the site went live, and I won't go into all of that again. Unfortunately though - for the time being - I also had to turn off track- and pingbacks completely. They will be turned on again when I have enough time to work my way into a more lethal approach to this infestation that calls itself "spam". This won't be until June or July though.
Some stats: Since the 14th of April when the site went live, we've had an average of 250 to 300 unique visitors a day and, most importantly, the ones that land here also stay a lot longer than they used to. People having arrived here via Google used to just check out the post they surfed to, now they have a look at a minimum of 5 posts before they take off again (50% of the visitors from search engines now view 5 or more posts). So, the restructuring of the site has been a success.
Additionally, the subscription rate (RSS feed) has gone up considerably and besides a few minor issues in either the old IE6 or the new IE8 Beta (who could have possibly guessed that Internet Explorer would act up yet again?), which I will try to fix next week, not many problems have been reported. I'm still quite sure that a few visitors are probably unable to comment, but my rather rigorous spam protection has blacklisted a load of top-level domains simply because a load of spam also originates from them (so far, I've deleted more than 10.000 spam comm ents and trackbacks (in one single week!). Sorry about that, but I am working on a solution.
Two readers and one guest have also alerted me to some seriously broken links on this site (they still had some left-over code from the last version in them) and today, in a five-minute break at work, I ran a script on the database to fix things up. The reports referring to this particular type of broken link were very helpful and the problem was - once it had come to my attention - easy to fix.
Google is hard at work reindexing my site and I'm losing some top spots in search results. I knew this would happen, especially because I haven't gotten a solid grip on search engine optimization for the new site yet, but I hope to be able to fix these problems in the summer. Not that it's a priority for me.
The post discussing my hope that readers, writers and/or collectors are welcome to contribute here has lead to a surprising number of contacts with both regular readers and new acquaintances, and I hope to be able to present the first contributed material in a few weeks, maybe even earlier. One new interview with a regular reader has already been started, another one with a known personality will be kicked off in middle May, three longer pieces have already been promised to the site and yet another three I'm in discussion about.
I'm very happy about the readers and visitors who take their time to comment here and I thank you all. Keep 'em coming.
A few questions have come up that I'd like to answer here, just to clarify a point or two. Please take note:
01) What about copyright?
At the moment, the material I write is copyrighted by me. I know that in times of splogs (=spam blogs pulling in material via RSS feeds from other sites - like mine - to up their search engine rankings) and in a society in which everyone believes that everything comes for free and is up for the taking, that is a futile gesture, but I'm sticking to it. If, however, you are interested in contributing something to this site, I reassure you that everything you write and every item and detail published here belongs to you only and will be copyrighted as such. If you perhaps decide to have contributed material pulled from this site, you can of course do that at any time you like.
02) What's your "real" posting rhythm?
That's a tough one to answer, but I'll try. It does say on the site - in several places - that livingwithmusic.com is updated at least once a week, and that is the plan that I intend to stick to with this new version, but there have been times in the past (just check the archives page) and there will be times in the future at which I simply can't commit enough time for sensible posts here. Right now, I have enough time to post more than once a week, and I'm doing it, but starting in August of 2008, I will have a lot less spare time to invest. As things stand now, I'm going to be pre-writing a load of posts for that time which I can then just "switch live" when I need to "pull one out of the bag". Please remember that I like to invest a bit more time into what I write, so I'm not following suit and refuse to write ten one-liners or 5 two-liners a day. Those posts bore the hell out of me on other sites, so you won't see any of those here. Ever.
03) Reacting to comments or contact requests
I usually try to react to every comment left here. The new site is geared to me actually noticing when something new comes in, my old version (my own fault) wasn't. At times I simply didn't notice that someone had left a comment on a much older post. It just sat there .... unanswered. I do live (plus or minus one hour because of that daylight savings BS) in that GMT zone, so you can expect me to be looking at my site in the afternoons, rarely in the mornings, and extensively in the evenings, local time. Should I be gone for a longer period of time, which has happened more and more frequently lately, I will announce it here. Just have a look at the front page in case you're wondering why I'm not responding. You'll probably find an announcement there.
04) Anything new?
Yep. I've added a page at the top entitled "Elsewhere". It's a list of links to sites I frequent and will be expanded regularly. Just look at the title which states the most recent revision (including the date for the latest revision). Not too much on there yet, but still a lot to come. If you happen to be wondering what kind of guy I am, that page might give you a few additional hints to follow. Secondly, I've added a small box to the right-hand sidebar (bottom) that tells you what's upcoming here. Take the date with a grain of salt, but so far I've managed to submit to the pressure I'm putting myself under. :)
05) Any site updates in the works?
Yes, there certainly are. I'm thinking of restructuring the categories on this site. As of now, the plans call for a removal of (4) Series, which will be replaced with a page listing posts that belong to series alphabetically ... on a separate page. Secondly, there will not be a separate "Contributions" category (thanks to everyone who mailed in about that one). The contributed articles will just be posted in the existing categories they best fit in. Thirdly, I'm in the process of integrating a gallery into this site. That one is a bit more difficult and requires about two days of solid work. Expect that to happen in May/June, depending on how well I can realize my ideas with a fabulous plugin I'm testing as we speak.
06) What about content updates?
Yep, some are most definitely necessary. Starting next week, I will go through past articles and give them a thorough work-over. The "Jazz in Paris" and "Universal Deluxe Editions" posts, to cite just two examples, are in need of an update, especially the latter. I also need to fix some links which seem to have gone the way of all things digital (dead), and I need to update some prices (which I have done on some posts already. I'm NOT going to replicate what others often do in these cases and push these old posts to the top again, but once I'm done, I'm going to write a post outlining the changes that have been made on older posts.
07) What about some things promised in the past ... and STILL MISSING?
Yep, I know. Mea culpa. Still, this new version has been a long time coming because I set it up to facilitate faster posting. Actually, my old site was set up in a way that needed 70 percent more time to get a post ready for publication. That had nothing to do with the excellent backend, Expression Engine, but with my own stupidity. I won't bother you with any details. As I write this, new parts are being assembled for the "Trials & Tribulations", the "Guilty Pleasures" and the "Danish Pop: 1970-1990)" series. While the first two are easy to add on to, the last one isn't, at all. As it turns out, I have to largely rely on my own memory (clouded as it is) plus a load of material that has been locked away for ages (believe you me ... I don't even know where half of it is). Surprisingly, hardly any material on many of the bands I intend to write about is available online and the stuff I found is so ludicrously superficial, that it has nothing to offer that I didn't already know. So, some serious and accurate research is necessary. The first installment is nearing completion but I still have to reactivate some former contacts which - in some cases - I haven't been in touch with since the early 80s. I need to verify a lot of facts to make sure I'm not posting unreliable gibberish here. Like I said, I'm working on it. Let me just add one more thought: Much like in real life, the Internet is far from actually growing into a reliable database of knowledge. Sometimes I get the idea that most of what I find is as superficial, faulty and fractured as any half-knowledge you get from many people today. It's sad to see that very few people are inclined to actually research their stuff and add on to what's out there instead of just regurgitating what we can already find all over the place.
And that's it for now. I hope I could answer some of your questions. If you have more, comment here or send me some other digital notice. I'll get back to you as soon as I can.
Back to regular programming.
4 Responses to “Picking up speed …” Leave a reply ›
hi Volkher,
just wanted to say congratulations on the new livingwithmusic. Well done :)
flim
Thanks!
Let's hope it works better this time than it did in round one. :)
Just a minor point re your time zone comment: Germany is in the Central European Time zone, which is GMT+1, or GMT+2 during Daylight Saving Time.
Oops.
Yes.
Just read what I wrote there.
Proofreading is apparently not my forté.
Thanks, Hans!