The latest changes to to the website have now gone live, with the re-jigging of the photo albums/galleries now just about complete.
The photo albums pages have now been split into years, and a photo from each photo album added alongside that album. For albums from this year, there's the option to view the album as either traditional galleries or, via a Flash application, as a slideshow.
One result of the changes is that currently the eCards program is a bit messed up. This will be fixed an
With more staff on board, there's more time to spend on doing all those those things which there was never time to do...
The latest change is added eye candy on the main news page.
As time allows, similar things to pretty up the site will be added.
For ages I've wanted to jazz up this website a little, but simply never had the time. With new hands at some of the controls I've finally got some time to start to work thru that horrendously long to-do list. One of the things on the list is a re-jig of the photo-galleries, to make them a little less of the quickly cobbled together mess that they've always been, and hopefully one side result of the re-jig will be a bit more eye-candy from photos thru-out the site.
Anyway, I've wanted to use a
Well, today is the first 'busy' day of the year, with T in the Park officially announced in an hour or so. With RATM having already leaked the line-up, traffic has been busy on the site since first thing this morning, and the servers have been coping absolutely fine - no stress at all.
For those who might have been on the site at around 8:30 this morning and experienced difficulties, that was for an entirely different reason - I was doing a little more pruning of non-festie posts, which is ve
Many people appreciate the tight moderation of the main forums here, as it keeps the forums focused on the festivals they're about - unlike other forums on other websites, they don't become full of posts about what someone had for lunch and other very-off-topic things.
To give those users here who would like more freedom to chat about their favourite festivals and anything else, we've now added MyFestivals Groups. Anyone can create a group along with a forum for that group, and the leader of
I've just visited the official Download forums for the first time in several years and they're hilarious.
First up was me noticing the forums becoming unusable for a while with a "server busy" message ... which happened to coincide with school's morning break time. At a guess - because i've seen it year on year on the eFestivals forums - a large number of the people posting there are not attending the festival and know they're not; they're posting just to pretend to be 'cool'.
Anyway, t
It's that time of year again when my thoughts start to turn towards the mad ticket on-sale days and the stupid load it puts on the eFestivals servers for just a couple of hours each time.
Last year I came up with a solution that worked reasonably well but not as well as I'd hoped for. So this year a number of steps have already been taken which have improved things substantually, and with some more things still to do I'm reasonably confident of a better result this time around. Fingers crosse
It seems that my 'disappearance' is confusing some people.
After ten years of breathing, eating, sleeping and farting eFestivals I've decided to take a different role. 5co77ie has been appointed as full-time editor of both eFestivals and eGigs, and I'm moving on to develop new projects while still having a little involvement in both of the sites.
In the short-term I'm around to help and advise 5co77ie as necessary, as well as keeping a long-term role in developing and improving both sites
:)
There's a small handful of people without whom eFestivals wouldn't exist.
Very sadly one of these passed away at the weekend, and she'll be sorely missed by me and her many friends but more importantly by her children and husband.
The festival scene well and truly has hit the point where anyone and everyone thinks they can put on a successful festival. 2007 has been full of attempts at running new festivals and events, with various success.
There's those who have a good idea as well as the skills to pull what's needed together, and who know how to sell their idea to a paying public. They put in the months of hard work on all the angles needed to pull the event off, and even if they lose money - as long as it's not too
I've been working thru a list of to-do's since the end of the summer, putting in place certain things for the new year for eFestivals. As ever with these sorts of things getting thru the list never quite goes as fast as hoped for, but even so much of the stuff is now sorted.
One of the more important things is sorted, and that's new staff for certain tasks. There's a new full-timer who's going to be having a big role, plus another part-timer who I've been bugging for a while and who is now in
I've just downloaded and installed the latest version of Fedora (Red Hat linux), and it's a dream.
It has everything you could ever want on your computer straight out of the package, all as least as good as anything Bill could ever buy in (it's not like microshit actually come up with anything good themselves), and it all runs far faster than Windoze does on the same hardware.
Why is anyone still enriching Bill?
Why does the world and their dog think that eFestivals is here to provide their organisation with a special and personal service for free?
Very regularly, eFestivals gets emails from research assistants who want to get us to do their research for them. Very often, the info they're after is easily available and easily findable on the website, but they can't even be bothered to look. Not only that, they are very often offended at being told that us doing work for their commercial benefit will c
I get endless press releases about various bands playing a "secret show" - it's so secret that they're sending out press releases.
What's the score with this idiot tosh? Is it something that's been made up as a marketing tool in a "oooo, I got tickets to their secret show, I'm such a big fan" kind of way, or are they shows that they thought they didn't need publicity to sell tickets for but then found they couldn't sell the tickets?
Either way, they're generally for bands I wouldn't for
I've just had a PM on here from an old mate, who recognised the name of another old mate in a post I'd made (tho he doesn't remember me, the bastard ).
edit: a few PMs later with some reminders, and he now knows who I am.
I've just dropped by the Internet Archive, trying to find copies of the original webpages that grew into the Glastonbury website I started, which then grew into eFestivals. Those pages aren't in the archive, so I'll have to do some further 'net hunting to try and track them down, or search thru my 500+ CDs of backups. Ho-hum.
Why am I wanting them? Well, it's coming up to ten years since I started the site, so thought it would be good to try and find some very early examples of where it all s
I've just received a Comscore report for hit stats for websites that fall into the "Entertainment - music" category. I knew that eFestivals had a significantly greater amount of traffic than many other better known general music websites, but up until this point I hadn't realised by quite how much!!!!
eFestivals comes in at number 35 in the list, but many of the sites listed above it aren't really in the same market - things like yahoo music, myspace, seeklyrics.com, last.fm, napster, etc. I
I've spent most of today updating the system software on the eFestivals servers (which explains why they've gone off-line occasionally today, if you were wondering), and despite my novice knowledge of linux they've all gone exceedingly well.
The newer server is all completed, but there's still some stuff to do for the older one. Because its an older installation and hadn't been updated before (whoops ) there's still a little more to do... Back to it.
I was charging a high powered rechargeable battery for one of my boys toys on Sunday morning, when it exploded - proper fireballs (several!) and everything. Because it went up with such a bang, straightaway it was a biggish fire (18 inches across i guess), and it set light to my toy (), and things nearby (books, chest of draws, placcy bags of stuff, etc).
If I hadn't been in the room at the time, within seconds it would have taken proper hold, and I'd now have no house. Very luckily I was, a
I have - apparently - a wonderful secretary, who calls festival organisers to arrange access for eFestivals staff. This is the latest scam being tried by some to blag their way into festivals.
Are people really so stupid to think that something like this will work? The answer of course is yes . Does it work? Nope - and these people aren't even clever enough to cover their tracks. Scammers are always a few sandwiches short of the full hamper.
So this year the bubble has well and truly burst. Alongside the new festivals that failed to get off the ground there were also some established names that failed completely or suffered from lower sales. Meanwhile, the better festivals held their own or grew as they were hoping to do.
So what happens when Mean Fiddler's Festival Republic's Melvin Benn gets asked about the trends this summer? He doesn't pick on the festivals that suffered, but instead comments that he's heard that sales were d
