Blog:

:: posted @ 14:42 / 5 March 2008

Feeds Again

So—all the section feeds work correctly now (I think). The main feed is run through feedburner; I’m uncertain how to parse our section feeds in the same way (most of the Textpattern tutorials on the subject concern past versions), but for the time being, at least, you can still subscribe to our main site feed, to track reviews, concert reviews, features, podcasts, scenecasts, and retconning. As well as this blog, though it will likely be another month or so before Chet and I get things geared up for anything more interesting than announcements showing up in this space.

I’m working on a refined search engine; I realize the live search function we have is useful to a point but doesn’t really allow people a way to browse. Textpattern doesn’t seem to offer a way to easily search by title, however, so it may be a bit before we can change that.

So, yeah, we’re working on fixing these issues, but feeds are up.


Mark Abraham  ::               


:: posted @ 15:49 / 13 February 2008

Feed Update

Hey all,

sorry for the delays on this—I’m on the road at the moment, so I’ll be able to give it more attention when I get back to Toronto next week. In any case, I’ve switched our main feeds over to feedburner; you can access them through the links on the front page.

The feeds for individual sections are not working yet, but hopefully soon.


Mark Abraham  ::               


:: posted @ 12:45 / 6 February 2008

Feeds

Well...we're supposed to have working feeds, anyway. I'm not sure whether this is a lag because of the server change or what, but I'm working on it.

Mark Abraham  ::               


:: posted @ 08:36 / 5 February 2008

Welcome back!

Hey all,

so -- for the moment, we'll use this space for updates and information, though in the future we way add more blog-style content into the mix.

Some info on the new design:

The good:

We now feature a searchable database and rss/xml feeds for each section, as well as improved archival menus for browsing, staff pages that show each staff member's content in a variety of ways, including their most recent reviews, their top rated albums for the year, and -- soon -- their stafflists, in the hopes that you can get a better idea what each of us is all about. We've also partnered with iMeem to provide more streaming content to go along with the downloadable stuff we've always had. Many of these players are set up, but we'll have more as we develop content.

Our No Big Hair content, while still being archived in the traditional way, will also be tabbed here: No Big Hair Blog. Both album reviews and track reviews from bands who self-release or need exposure will filter here, allowing you to keep tabs on the most indie and underground music we cover.

The bad:

To avoid delaying the relaunch any further we've had to delay dealing with certain things. First, any existing internal links point towards the old .html files from the old site. Given our inability to match those urls, the links don't actually take you anywhere. Annoying, we know, and we're going through and deleting them, but easy on the links for the next little bit. And, since those are dead, we're making it so that related record reviews intuitively present links to each other in the sidebar, so shouldn't be too big a deal.

There are still a few hiccups (I'm not sure why but some of our section archives page well beyond their article content, so: sorry, we don't actually have 375 pages of track reviews). More egregious is my inability to understand why floated elements are acting so odd in the archives (they're fine in Firefox on a Mac; they're sometimes fine in IE; they're crazy off in Firefox on Windows; I dunno...) but I'm working on it, so hopefully we can fix that.

Additionally, given my utter lack of experience in design, the site doesn't validate for any number of reasons, but I'll be trying to fix those problems over the coming months to improve accessibility and adhere to web standards (as much as a site can that features four years of .html-only content). The new site is powered by Textpattern and hosted by Mediatemple.

I promise future blog posts will be less tech-related. But I also welcome any comments/advice from those of you familiar with Textpattern and CSS on problems you find around the site.

We hope you enjoy it!

Mark Abraham  ::