Music Nerds Notes

A Nerdlet is a short, one-sentence blurb about a song. You can add one to any song on the Music Nerds site; just go to the album page and each song has an input box underneath it. (You have to be signed in to see it.)

You can put whatever you want in the space, but you only have 100 characters (the “[song title] is” part doesn’t count, don’t worry). You can try to describe the song as you hear it, write something impressionistic, or whatever.

You may have noticed that you aren’t receiving Song Of The Day emails anymore, and that the SOTD box is missing from the site’s pages.

We’ve been reorganizing the site, planning to add some more features and alter the way it works so that more people can write more easily about the music they like. Song Of The Day was removed as part of that since it was of limited use and interest; we may bring back something similar eventually.

Any comments, please send us some feedback about it! Thanks. Now we’re off to listen to the Pixies, see ya.

We know lots of people would like to write up an album review but can’t because we don’t have it in our database. It was always our intention to devote a certain percentage of time to adding albums but it turns out that other aspects of the site maintenance keep us busier than expected.

So finally, any user can now add albums to our database. It’s a pretty simple process:

1. Select the artist or type in a new artist name.
2. Type a list of albums to add along with their year of release. (NOTE you can do this automatically by copy and pasting a link to any allmusic.com discography URL instead; this is much easier if adding several albums by a single artist).
3. For each album, we automatically search for a cover image and a song list; you check these over and if ok, click OK.

That’s it. Basically, you tell us the artist and albums list, and we try to do as much of the rest of the work as possible. Albums added like this won’t be immediately visible, but an admin will look over it soon and if it’s all in order, add them to the listings. They can then be claimed, written up, picked apart, commented on, etc. Every step is explained better on the actual page where you add an album.

Thanks to ant who helped us test this tool out. He claims there was no major problem so we’re hoping that is true, and that his experience wasn’t flawless as a mere result of his technical genius. Either way send him a private message and thank him.

Any problems, questions, or suggestions go to the usual place, admin (at) music-nerds (dot) com.

Try the add-an-album link here.

If you go to any registered user’s member page, you will see a link near the top to send that user a PM. These private messages are not public, and are only visible to the person you sent it to.

If you receive a PM, you will see a note about it at the top of any page (as long as you are logged in). You can read new PMs on your own member page, mark them as ‘read’, reply to the sender, and view old PMs.

If you have any issues with the PM system let us know at admin (at) music-nerds (.) com. Thanks.

We’ve added more prominent (but discreet, we hope) links to iTunes Music Store MP3s on relevant album and song pages around the site. Obviously lots of people tend to prefer torrent sites and similar things to download new music for free, which we don’t condone but facts is facts.

Music Nerds is all about finding new music and trying new things though, and iTunes can actually be simpler and easier to get an MP3 you are curious to hear, and for $.99 each you can try a few here and there and not even miss the money.

So anyway, if it’s available in your area and something piques your curiousity, the links are there. Remember also that writers on the site get paid through such links, so it’s an especially apposite way to test out new sounds if it’s on a review page you like.

Honesty and music nerdiness compels us to add that even if you do use torrents and stuff at the complete exclusion of legal MP3s, we’re still glad you’re finding new music and we hope you’ll post a comment about the things you find and the ones you already know! There are comment sections on every song and album page. It’s all about the music, man…

Now there are automatic formatting buttons for comments boxes on the site, so you can easily select whatever text you want and make it bold, italic, underlined, or quoted.

We are also working on making comments previewable and editable (for a certain time after posting); this should be done in the next few hours. (Just ask Supertramp.)

We’re having a few problems and several functions are temporarily unavailable, we’ll post again when it’s fixed.

UPDATE
Got it, it should be ok now again.

We have restructured the way commissions are stored in the database and in doing so have had to recalculate some writers’ commissions dating back to October 2007. The total you see at the top of your page is the revised amount.

A couple reminders about commissions on Music Nerds — until further notice, you will receive 100% of commissions that come from people clicking on your album, song, article or list pages. In addition to that, Google AdSense ads sprinkled around the site are totalled each month, and each writer who had at least one thing published during (or before) that month gets a percentage of the AdSense total. (The more things published, the higher a percentage.)

In addition, album and song pages that have no review yet will be assigned a writer’s commission id at random upon each page load, so if someone clicks such a page that happens to have your id embedded in it, you get commissions as if it were your page.

Any questions or comments, email admin (at) music-nerds (dot) com.

Just a reminder that comments are now open on virtually every page on the site, including songs and albums that have not had a review published yet.

Along those same lines, comments will soon be available to be left on member’s pages, in case you have a general comment for someone.

We’ve fixed the bold, italic, etc formatting buttons in the new edit/submit page, and tested both the buttons and the preview feature on IE7, Safari, Opera, Firefox and Chrome. All seems fine.

The only thing that is odd is when you click Preview in IE … a new window pops up briefly in all browsers, then instantly closes, but in IE you are prompted when closing the window. You should accept this (click Yes) to close that window; the preview is then displayed on the original window where you entered your text.

Hope it works, of course email us if it doesn’t but it was fine in our tests… (famous last words…) (wasn’t that a Supertramp album?)