The Song Fight Bulletin Board

fluffy wrote:You still have email notifications of Twitter follows enabled?

Hell if I know.

So the "news" section just emptied itself out. I assume it's somehow related to this conversation.

Spud wrote:On the other hand, there WAS a post to @songfight as recently as March, so there you go. It's alive and well.

Dorie posts on there, sometimes she's busier than other times. If we put it on songfight.org I'm pretty sure it would re-motivate her to post more frequently. I'm kind of in favor of this. There won't be so many posts that things will fly off the page quickly, and it will be easy for you or I or any blessed person to post.

I don't think we should just display everything with the #songfight hashtag.

JB

Generic wrote:So the "news" section just emptied itself out. I assume it's somehow related to this conversation.

Yes

jb wrote:Dorie posts on there, sometimes she's busier than other times. If we put it on songfight.org I'm pretty sure it would re-motivate her to post more frequently. I'm kind of in favor of this. There won't be so many posts that things will fly off the page quickly, and it will be easy for you or I or any blessed person to post.

I don't think we should just display everything with the #songfight hashtag.

Don't know what this all means. Put it (what is IT?) on songfight.org. What's the difference between @songfight and #songfight?. Seriously. I don't know.

SPUD

Spud wrote:

jb wrote:Dorie posts on there, sometimes she's busier than other times. If we put it on songfight.org I'm pretty sure it would re-motivate her to post more frequently. I'm kind of in favor of this. There won't be so many posts that things will fly off the page quickly, and it will be easy for you or I or any blessed person to post.

I don't think we should just display everything with the #songfight hashtag.

Don't know what this all means. Put it (what is IT?) on songfight.org. What's the difference between @songfight and #songfight?. Seriously. I don't know.

SPUD

if you tweet @songfight the tweet is directed at that page or links to that page
if you tweet #songfight you would just be mentioning the phrase songfight there are pages that track "hashtagged" items, I believe....I don't know a whole lot about twitter myself

"songfight" is the username of the "official" (as far as I understood it to be) Song Fight! Twitter account:

http://twitter.com/#!/songfight

When you put "@username" in a tweet (e.g. "@songfight"), you are "mentioning" the user whose username you put after the "@". That mention is made viewable to the user, in their "Mentions" stream, and maybe in their main stream of tweets. (I'm not an expert at Twitter, so I could be wrong about that part. I use it a little but I don't really get mentioned so I don't totally understand that mechanism.)

When you put "#something" in a tweet, it's like putting a keyword or metadata tag into your tweet. It will become a clickable link on twitter.com (and probably in most Twitter clients, though again I'm not an expert) and when you click that link you get a search showing you all tweets from all users with that "#something" in them.

I think what John means by "it" is the Twitter profile widget that I mentioned. You can see an example of the widget as well as configure a custom instance of one here:

http://twitter.com/about/resources/widg ... et_profile

It's a "widget" in the sense that it's something you can embed in a Web page, sort of like a YouTube video. You can go to that link above and configure a custom widget that shows the tweets of a user, and you can resize and style it and set some parameters about what tweets get displayed. When you're done you can view the HTML/JavaScript code you would use to emebed the widget. Copy the code off the widget generator and then paste it somewhere into the code for one of the pages for a site (e.g. the home page of songfight.org).

I am not going to put something on the page that no one can sufficiently explain. Apparently, this is what it would look like if I put it up today. I don't know if those are @songfight or #songfight, but one thing I DO know. They are pretty stale. How to we filter what goes up and what doesn't? Who can post? Who can't?

If you can provide some feedback about what was insufficient in my attempt at explaining it I'd be happy to go into more detail. Maybe a screenshot would be more helpful? I will try to whip one up.

Lunkhead wrote:If you can provide some feedback about what was insufficient in my attempt at explaining it I'd be happy to go into more detail. Maybe a screenshot would be more helpful? I will try to whip one up.

You did not explain whether widget would show only posts made to the account (i.e. posts FROM songfight), mentions, hashtags, or what. You also did not explain how we would manage this so that it wasn't full of spam, nor how it solves the timeliness problem that you perceive. Please note that one of the most recent posts is about the LACK of timeliness of the twitter feed itself. Thanks.

Yeah, those are stale. It doesn't really fix the problem of stale news sitting around. Just like now, people would have to post new news to push the old news down the list.

However, the mechanism for posting new news would be one that more people could safely access and understand. For example, lots of people know how to tweet. Only a couple people know how to edit the news on the songfight.org homepage. People could more safely be given access to just the songfight Twitter account to post news than they could be given access to edit the songfight.org homepage.

Additionally there would be a history of the news that was posted, that users could scroll through on the homepage. They could also go to Twitter to view/search the complete history.

People could submit news via tweeting it and using either "@songfight" or "#songfight" to try to get the official Twitter account's attention, in addition to submitting via email.

Spud wrote:You did not explain whether widget would show only posts made to the account (i.e. posts FROM songfight), mentions, hashtags, or what. You also did not explain how we would manage this so that it wasn't full of spam ...

The profile widget only shows tweets made by the user you specified (e.g. "songfight").

Spud wrote: , nor how it solves the timeliness problem that you perceive. Please note that one of the most recent posts is about the LACK of timeliness of the twitter feed itself. Thanks.

It does not address the issue of old news remaining visible when no new news is submitted. It just seems to me personally like it could lower the barrier to getting new news visible on songfight.org, which might make it more likely for there to be new news pushing the old news out of view.

So what I see as the major issue is that the process of submitting and processing the news is problematic. People have to email them in, and I may or may not see them (they might go to spam or whatever), so they may not get posted in a timely fashion. Also, they languish there on the front page until some more news comes in and pushes them off. This leads to a situation where people see the news as a not very important feature, so they don't bother to submit, and the cycle continues with the news getting more and more stale. I do not see the twitter feed as solving the problem, because it excludes the chunk of the population that either doesn't twitter or doesn't understand how it works exactly (all of us in this thread, so far). Therefore, I propose:

http://www.songfight.org/submit.html

There would be a review page that the news editor (any volunteers?) would use and simple press the OK or the REJECT button next to each as they came in, and possibly an option to take an item down once it was stale. I could even add a kill date to the form. There could be a news archive where the old ones went to die... Please note that this particular form could solve a couple of other problems as well. I prefer bigger moves that solve multiple problems to individual solutions for each thing.

I am very much a fan of that submission page, and think that's a great solution for everyone.

Yeah... I was momentarily confused by the separate "artist" and "band" sections until I realized that "artist" was referring to VISUAL artist, i.e., people who've submitted cover art for fights. Might see if you can make that a little clearer, otherwise you'll have solo music artists sending in info to the 'covers' archive and wondering where it went.

Other question would be - if I submit new info or picture for the "King Arthur" band page, do I need to re-enter all the info on the page or just the stuff I want to update? Maybe just include a note indicating how that works.

But, uhh, yeah - hooray Spud!

Charles (KA)

Lunkhead wrote:Yeah, those are stale. It doesn't really fix the problem of stale news sitting around.

I thought that was the entire problem that using the Twitter feed was supposed to fix in the first place?

Lunkhead wrote:However, the mechanism for posting new news would be one that more people could safely access and understand.

What's confusing about this?

Those look good. Is there code behind them as well for handling the form submissions? How do I volunteer to be a news editor? Where does a volunteer news editor go to approve/reject news? How is that page protected from any random person coming upon it?

King Arthur raises a good point too about the music archive profile submission process, regarding how newly submitted info interacts with existing info. I was wondering that myself.

Generic wrote:

Lunkhead wrote:Yeah, those are stale. It doesn't really fix the problem of stale news sitting around.

I thought that was the entire problem that using the Twitter feed was supposed to fix in the first place?

It was more like a suggestion at a possible indirect solution. Lower the barrier to entry and distribute the access more, to see if more people participated.

Generic wrote:

Lunkhead wrote:However, the mechanism for posting new news would be one that more people could safely access and understand.

What's confusing about this?

What if your email to songnews@songfight.org gets filtered as spam? What if Spud is indisposed and you have something you want posted quickly because it's about something that's not going to be relevant for very long? What if someone else is going to handle those emails? How exactly does the content get from the email onto the songfight.org homepage? My guess is that it involves logging in to a server on the Song Fight! hosting account to edit the home page file. If that is the case, do you have access to do that? Do you know HTML/PHP well enough to do that? If someone gave you access to do that, what else would you have access to do that you don't really need to do and probably shouldn't have access to do? etc. etc. etc.

Lunkhead wrote:Is there code behind them as well for handling the form submissions?

There will be shortly.

Lunkhead wrote:How do I volunteer to be a news editor?

You just did.

Lunkhead wrote:Where does a volunteer news editor go to approve/reject news?

I will send you a link.

Lunkhead wrote:How is that page protected from any random person coming upon it?

I will also send you the password.

Lunkhead wrote:King Arthur raises a good point too about the music archive profile submission process, regarding how newly submitted info interacts with existing info. I was wondering that myself.

Text and image are stored and handled separately. You can have a profile with no image and an image with no profile. They are not linked. How we keep some malicious person from sending in a new picture of fluffy that he doesn't want posted is another problem. I guess for now, that will be the editor's problem to sort out.

I have a new picture of myself to send in, so as soon as the mechanism is in place, I'll see what happens if I update just my picture or just my text.

Charles (KA)

I was already working on this when this whole discussion started, but I was not thinking of it as a high priority. I will upgrade its status due to the demand.

So, I recently wrote something to import into sfjukebox.org the songfight.org artist profile data from the files where it has been stored previously. Is the profile data submitted via this new form going to be stored in the same way?