Sup, duders. Just wanted to put a couple highlights on a few changes I’ve made around the site during the past week.
- Subscribe via email: this funtionality has disappeared with all the template changes I’ve made over the past few months, but now it’s back in the sidebar. So if you prefer to have a daily email with all of our latest posts delivered first thing every morning, you can enter your email address and sign up there. Or below, that’s cool, too.
- Summary feeds: I’m working on a solution to this, but in the meantime I want to stop some of the blatant scraping that people have been doing on our site content for a while now. We get a bit too many Google Alerts with our own name and links in the content but published on spammy aggregator sites all over the interwebs. We’ll likely implement an extended excerpt that ideally provides a full glimpse into what our post is all about, and you can decide to clickthrough if you want to read and comment on it. In addition, this allows our feed to be a bit more streamlined as we tend to post large photo galleries that clog up your news reader, especially if you’re not a big fan of the band that we’re posting a photo gallery for. All in all, I think this change is for the best but please holler in the comments if you think we need to re-think that. I’m all ears.
- Enhanced photo viewing on the homepage: any galleries we post on the front page will have a quick-viewer that will pop up and let you view the medium-sized image without clicking through to our Flickr account. I’ll be working on extending this to other pages around the site, including a better-designed Photo page where all of our latest stuff is highlighted. I’ve always loved how jambands.com had a photo of the day and I’d love to get towards something like that with this site. Show off some of all of our amateurish talent once and for all.
I wanted to get out ahead of this before I started publishing our Rothbury photos and our shots from Phish at Jones Beach. We need to begin the Red Rocks countdown, ya’lls!
As always, feel free to comment here or drop us a line at vibes@livemusicblog.com. I read everything but hardly ever have time to reply to everything, but your comments will not be taken lightly. PEACE!