Music Nerds Notes

To combat the same author, artist or indeed album from being picked over and over for Song Of The Day, we rewrote the code so it spreads it out more evenly. It’s automatically chosen each day now and the process bars any writer or artist who has already been chosen in the past 2 or 3 weeks or so. This is good to avoid monotony and also to expose more visitors to more music.

Thanks particularly to ant for bringing this to our attention.

See the Song Of The Day page for current info.

One thing that was requested by Music Nerds users is a way to save partial reviews; this is now a feature on the new review-submit page. (There is a button at the bottom to save a draft and another to submit a finished review for an admin — and until an admin actually gets to it you can edit is, as before).

Hopefully this will allow those who need it a place to store their reviews while working on them. We also highly recommend allowing cookies in your browser and logging in to Music Nerds with the “Remember” button checked, so your session doesn’t end while you’re typing and you lose your data.

This new draft feature doesn’t change the time limit for actual submission, which is still seven days from the time you claimed an album.

While we’re updating things on the site there is currently no way to add a new article or start a new list. This should be ready in the next couple days (remember to always multiply our time estimates by about a hundred, of course).

Submitting album reviews is ok as we mentioned in an earlier post — you can claim an album and a link to submit the review will be either on the album page (or one of its song pages) or your member page.

You’ll notice some changes to the layout and other things on Music Nerds lately. You’ll probably also notice some things that don’t work or are missing. We know about (most of!) them and they are on the list, as we’re still working away trying to get everything settled.

One of the most important things we are working on is the page where you submit reviews. The old one was ugly and the new one looks better, and has a preview feature. The feature is JavaScript based, and currently does not work in Internet Explorer, though it does work fine in Safari and Google Chrome (we haven’t tested it yet in other browsers like Opera and Firefox). A key new feature of the editing/submitting page is formatting buttons — select some text, click a button and you can automatically make it bold, underlines, etc. These buttons for the time being also don’t work in IE. If you see the people who create IE please punch them in the stomach good and hard.

Hopefully in a couple days these things will be fixed for all browsers. In the meantime, claiming albums and submitting reviews still works in all browsers. We’ll post more info about specifics in the coming week.

Thanks to all who are making this site possible and fun! Hope you have found something new to listen to.

You’ll notice at the top of each page, when logged in, there are a few stats listed. One of these is the number of new comments that have been left on pages you wrote that you haven’t seen. If you go to your member page you will see the list of them, so you can click and read them.

Everyone is encouraged to reply when at all possible to any comments left anywhere — discussion and participation really make the site more enjoyable and educational. Thanks to everyone who has already been joining in.

NOTE: Writers may see several old comments indicated as new. That’s because this feature is new, so you’ll have to visit each page on which a comment exists to mark it “read”.

This feature isn’t actually finalized yet, technically, so let’s call it Beta and hopefully it will be tweaked and streamlined within the next 24 hours or so.