The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Ok, I've got this songfight.net domain just kind of... sitting there. Problems are:

1. The link ring requires me to watch it and occasionally prune it and yell at people and approve new people. It's difficult for me to make space in my life for that, so it gets stale, and does anybody really get traffic from it? It's nice to be a part of a group... is there some OTHER way to get the "I'm a Songfighter!" feeling?
2. The gallery has basically been usurped by Flickr and such, and rightly so. Another item that requires more maintenance than I can spare personally.
3. The "blog" never took off. It's based on Blogger and that's a pain, and aside from myself only Ken and occasionally Blue ever posted things to it.

So. My question to you, dear Song Fight fans is.... <b>what should I do with songfight.net?</b>

You can suggest anything you want, but serious suggestions should keep in mind that my top criteria is that the resulting sites features <i>update themselves</i>.

So, some sort of RSS-based feed, with links to the Flickr group and maybe some kind of thing that looks into the SongFight Myspace or something... I dunno.

Also, if you'd like to volunteer to build it, that would be great.

There's a songfight . net ?

I kid...but that illustrates how often I go to it.

I wouldn't mind putting into my daily routine if there were some sort of functionality to it that I'd use.

What would that be? I don't know. I read a lot of news but thats not music related. I like to watch viral videos... again not songfight related. The message board is HERE... so another one would be redundant.

I say stick a few games here and get a bunch of ad banners rolling. Yeah that'd be about right.

I know, I'm a lot of help.

Hoblit wrote:I wouldn't mind putting into my daily routine if there were some sort of functionality to it that I'd use.

That's kind of the idea, Hobs.

jb wrote:

Hoblit wrote:I wouldn't mind putting into my daily routine if there were some sort of functionality to it that I'd use.

That's kind of the idea, Hobs.

New picture gallery on Wednesday and a new Video every Saturday night.

I say that we use the space for Songfight news. We can throw on some interviews, songfight videos, etc. It can be the SF News Magazine.

SF News Magazine indeed! I'd definitely tune in for the weekly Songfighter Spotlight. I wish I had time to provide content, 'cause I'd love to be doing SFer interviews or a podcast or something like that. I could probably find time to do a weekly "Five Questions With _______" segment, maybe. And if you need a crossword, I can build those.

Great ideas Jim and I'd be willing to help create content for it.

Just point the .net to the .org and make things non-confusing. Y'all can create whatever extra content you want but there is no reason to have a second web-site for it.

Y'know, there's some sense in that, too. I guess there's nothing keeping me from doing a Five Questions With _______ thing right here on the boards. It begins now.

For me, the only .net stuff that's been of value is the forums. I think I've tried the ring links a couple times, and I always seem to land on somebody who hasn't done a fight in years and hasn't updated their songfight page. If I land at all.

As far as the gallery: if I (as a user) could create a new forum (when I wanted to post pictures from Santa Cruz, I had to wait for one of the FMs to create a category for them), and if I could easily DOWNLOAD the pictures from the gallery, I would use it. Yeah, there are lots of other places where photos can be stored, but eventually they get taken down to make room for other stuff and then they're gone (like most of the SF music would be if it was self-hosted). And most of those places require yet another login/password to even LOOK at pictures. So on the gallery... could we open up the process of putting and getting pictures? In particular, is there ANY reason for trying to prevent people from downloading the gallery photos?

Blog content seems like it could just be part of Monkey Business or some area of the forums. I bet most of it is duplicated anyway...

A potential .net use would be to allow us to set up a forwarding thing so that email to "king_arthur@songfight.net" could be forwarded to my real email address (without revealing that email address to the sender) and also a way that I could bounce my replies back through songfight net to hide my real email on replies. When somebody signs up for a songfight username, that would be one of the things they get. Maybe a lot of potential for abuse and need to maintain, though.

Could something be set up within the .net world so that when there is a coverfight, the covermaster could create an area to run the fight (and, he said, knowing that the answer will be no, host the songs)? FM might have an initial approval ("okay, Jim, here's your space and password to run the Rone Rivendale coverfight on songfight.net") and I s'pose hosting covers of non-SF written songs could be a problem... nonetheless, I keep asking 'cause maybe someday the answer will be yes...

In one of the other forums, I suggested that it'd be cool if each songfighter could post and update their "ten favorite songfight songs" as a .m3u playlist... for new folks coming here who don't want to wade through a ton of songs to hear something they'd like.

Oh, yeah, and set up a couple gizmos on the .net page so that people can sign up to receive an email when (a) new songs or (b) new titles or (c) fight results are posted.

Yeah, I know, a lot of that stuff increases your workload rather than decreases it, but that's just some ideas on what could happen in the .net world to make it more useful for me. On the other hand, it would probably make sense to just have .net forward you immediately to .org and then put the links to all the good stuff on .org. Although I'd hate to see the .net domain name fall into evil hands...

Charles

jb wrote:So. My question to you, dear Song Fight fans is.... <b>what should I do with songfight.net?</b>

There's a faux-monday bitch of a question!

What do "we" want that's not already served by the forums and the .org front page? (Just rephrasing the question.)

Interviews of notable characters or fight winners would be interesting, but that's a lot of manual labor, even with volunteers to do the leg-work.

Does phpBB do the RSS thing? A precis of the "lively" threads on the boards proper might be interesting. Sort of like a sticky thread spotlight. Y'know, 'cause we're all lazy.

[joking] Flash games! [/joking]

The songfight wiki? Niveous' Library corner? Jim Tyrell's concert audio archive? Who's producing content? RSS reader output of the people doing the 10K songs (there's some good writing in there, and it's like a gravity well for me)? Podcast links?

The feeling of community is engendered both by the people putting into it, and the people who lurk quietly, consuming that output. Thanks for putting the question to us, JB.

well, redirecting to sf.org is an easy solution, but i'm thinking of making things a little harder. For example, I might just set up a feedreader on the thing, and display links and such from songfight stuff like YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/%22songfight%22.rss

And Flickr:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/ph ... at=rss_200

And del.icio.us:

http://del.icio.us/tag/songfight

And... Myspace?

king_arthur wrote:is there ANY reason for trying to prevent people from downloading the gallery photos?

Only that I couldn't figure out how to turn off the copyright crap in the Gallery application.

The feedreader is a great idea. In fact there have already been a ton of good ideas. It's just kind of up to you, JB, where you wanna go with it. If you wanna do some kind of news magazine type stuff, maybe in a simple blogform or whatever and you need content, I'll be more than happy to help produce content.

I think it should be a porn site.

Niveous wrote:The feedreader is a great idea. In fact there have already been a ton of good ideas. It's just kind of up to you, JB, where you wanna go with it. If you wanna do some kind of news magazine type stuff, maybe in a simple blogform or whatever and you need content, I'll be more than happy to help produce content.

Well, my thought is that people are more likely to produce content for themselves. So sf.net should piggyback on whatever songfighters are doing on their own, where possible. It's really easy to just add a "songfight" tag to a delicious, flickr, or youtube item, and if I can get possible the Myspace comments in an RSS feed, that would be kind of neat.

But I'm not going to produce a magazine or anything like that. A sfbb stats widget would be cool-- Fluffy, if you read this, how hard would that be? Like, who'ss online, recent topics, recent post subjects, stuff like that?

Billy's Little Trip wrote:I think it should be a porn site.

I repeat:


New picture gallery on Wednesday and a new Video every Saturday night.

Seriously though.

You could make it a marketing site or an official publicity site for songfight.org

SEO up the thing real good and take the brunt of songfight hits leaving the bandwidth saved for .org. Spread the bandwidth used between the two.

Someone needs to step up.

Hoblit wrote:SEO up the thing real good and take the brunt of songfight hits leaving the bandwidth saved for .org. Spread the bandwidth used between the two.

Bandwidth and Data Transfer are not an issue. Dreamhost gives us plenty of both, and we are not in danger of running out.

add a "songfight" tag to a delicious, flickr, or youtube item, and if I can get possible the Myspace comments in an RSS feed, that would be kind of neat.

Utilizing as much as the Internet world has to offer is my exact thinking here too. It would be really great to have a single place to go to that simply branches to a multitude of "constantly updated" info and media. Kind of a one stop shop sort of thing.

One of us needs to find a feed-reading webapp that will turn SF.net into an aggregation of all Songfight-related blogs. It should be pre-packaged and easy to setup/upgrade, and then there should be an email address (or maybe some spam-unfriendly method) for sending JB feeds to approve. JB says "ok", they go in, and that's all there is to it.

I'm picturing a page with maybe 100 one-line summaries of all sorts of random SF shit. Like new songs, song-of-the-day posts, show announcements, even just lame blog posts about how so-and-so feels that day. A nice clean, text-heavy page I can scan for "Frankie Big Face" or "Starfinger" to see if there's something I'm interested in.

And of course, if SF.org had a feed that announced the fights, that would make SF.net even more useful.

The software I'm imagining is a lot like <a href="http://www.reblog.org/">reBlog</a>, which I'll look into more later, but right now seems to require an editor to move a post from feed to blog.