The Song Fight Bulletin Board

The songfight.org "song news" section usually gets pretty stale. Maybe there are a simple ways it could have some content that gets updated automatically? Possibly even by community members?

One simple thing that comes to mind would be embedding a Twitter widget. It could be a widget that shows the tweets from the official account, and/or tweets with the #songfight hashtag.

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

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

Any other ideas?

Status quo, rah rah rah!!

The problem with a Twitter feed is that it would get bogged down with minutia. I would argue that if someone's got an album release or a major upcoming show, that deserves to be visible for longer than minor stories that would inevitably bog down a user-updatable Twitter feed.

Something editable. By the community. I think I recently heard of something like that? What was it? A kiwi? A mickie? Something like that.

Generic wrote:The problem with a Twitter feed is that it would get bogged down with minutia. I would argue that if someone's got an album release or a major upcoming show, that deserves to be visible for longer than minor stories that would inevitably bog down a user-updatable Twitter feed.

The problem with the current system is that it gets bogged down with stale news. Nur Ein has been over for a couple months. Song Fight! live was six weeks ago. Jonathan Mann's project has been over for almost a month.

I think having stale news is a worse problem than news not being visibile long enough, but that's just my opinion. I think we could be so lucky as to have so much news that it doesn't stay on the site long enough. That would be a great problem to have. (It's a problem that could be addressed by the Twitter widget, for example, by increasing the number of tweets loaded into it and providing a scrollbar for users to scroll down to older news.)

Irwin wrote:Something editable. By the community. I think I recently heard of something like that? What was it? A kiwi? A mickie? Something like that.

Yeah, good luck embedding content from the wiki in that one spot of the songfight.org homepage without writing a bunch of PHP code. I'm no expert but some preliminary searching indicates that if it's even possible at all it will be with nothing like the configurability and ease provided by the Twitter widget or similar widgets.

I don't think the Twitter widget or something like it would be a perfect solution. I just think it could be better than what we have and that it could be almost trivially easy to set up. If you bother to follow the links I put in you will see that you can use a GUI to configure the widget you'd like to use, then just copy and past in the JavaScript code.

Lunkhead wrote:Yeah, good luck embedding content from the wiki in that one spot of the songfight.org homepage without writing a bunch of PHP code. I'm no expert but some preliminary searching indicates that if it's even possible at all it will be with nothing like the configurability and ease provided by the Twitter widget or similar widgets.

Eh, between IFRAME and php's include() function I think there's a few options, and if there's a way of just extracting the formatted page content without any navigation or whatever, it doesn't need more than a line or two of code on the website.

Personally I'd prefer some major overhaul where the entire site is driven by a unified CMS like Movable Type or Drupal or something. But I don't particularly want to think about that right now, and it doesn't really solve this problem anyway (except making it a bit easier to manage news items and have them auto-expire from the front pagebut still be retained in an archive or something).

Well, I'd prefer any improvement over no improvement. And the least effort improvement seems like the one least unlikely to happen. A Twitter widget could be pasted in in <2 minutes. Tie it to a hash tag like #songfightnews and update the homepage to say "Post your Song Fight! news on Twitter using the #songfightnews hash tag!" and that's that. Then you and/or Generic can go off into a cave in the mountains and devise the ultimate perfect uber super amazing l33t solution that will be done "real soon now".

Lunkhead wrote:

Generic wrote:The problem with a Twitter feed is that it would get bogged down with minutia. I would argue that if someone's got an album release or a major upcoming show, that deserves to be visible for longer than minor stories that would inevitably bog down a user-updatable Twitter feed.

The problem with the current system is that it gets bogged down with stale news. Nur Ein has been over for a couple months. Song Fight! live was six weeks ago. Jonathan Mann's project has been over for almost a month.

I think having stale news is a worse problem than news not being visibile long enough, but that's just my opinion. I think we could be so lucky as to have so much news that it doesn't stay on the site long enough. That would be a great problem to have. (It's a problem that could be addressed by the Twitter widget, for example, by increasing the number of tweets loaded into it and providing a scrollbar for users to scroll down to older news.)

Lunkhead, I concede the point.

However, the other problem is that not everyone who would want to edit the news has a Twitter account. If we migrate to a Twitter box tied to the hashtag #songfightnews, then does that mean I won't be able to submit my next album release, since I'm not on Twitter?

Has anybody determined that the problem is with the page updating, as opposed to "nobody sends anything in?" Would be nice not to step on Spud's toes again quite so soon, especially if the problem isn't his.

In terms of mechanics, would there be a way to set up a forum for "song news" and then just post the titles of the most recent six or eight news threads from that forum as our "song news"? Maybe put some sort of limits on posting in that forum so that the spambots can't just come in and fill it up with ads...

Charles (KA)

That is a good point, KA. I don't have any hard evidence about that one way or the other. A Twitter widget wouldn't solve that problem as old items wouldn't automatically expire. I guess in an ideal system people could set an expiration date for their news item so it would automatically disappear when it is no longer relevant.

The forum idea may be possible, but would probably involve somebody writing some code to make that integration work.

And yes, using a Twitter widget would mean the content would have to come from Twitter. I know not everybody has a Twitter account. One option would be to have the content come only from the official Song Fight! twitter account. People would still have to email their news to the FMs and they'd have to post it to Twitter, but then there would be a history of all the news items posted, which is something we don't have now as far as I can find. (I could be wrong, though, but if there is a history it's not readily available from the home page.)

Lunkhead wrote:(I could be wrong, though, but if there is a history it's not readily available from the home page.)

There isn't, aside from what's on archive.org.

Lunkhead wrote: One option would be to have the content come only from the official Song Fight! twitter account. People would still have to email their news to the FMs and they'd have to post it to Twitter, but then there would be a history of all the news items posted, which is something we don't have now as far as I can find. (I could be wrong, though, but if there is a history it's not readily available from the home page.)

But aside from the archived history and the involvement of a third-party platform, this suggestion is identical to the current setup.

I think the main issue here is that articles don't expire when they're no longer relevant. This would be a non-issue if there were more news to report.

So is this a problem because 1.) not enough "song news" is actually happening, or 2.) because no one is submitting song news?

If it's #1, then we all need to start scheduling shows and making albums and planning more highly-involved sidefights (maybe I should have submitted Circle of Titles... oops). Or else learn to live with the fact that the Song News section of the page isn't very active.

If it's #2, then we just need to keep doing what we're doing, but actually submit about it. Who Izzy's recent show could have been Song News, for instance. Ross is a finalist in Spintunes 3, so that could be Song News (if he wins, it'll definitely merit a front-page mention). MC Frontalot just came out with a new album. That's definitely song news. The downside is that posting about local gigs means that the information won't always be relevant to everyone, but at least it'll all stay fresh.

Let's have song news *and* the twitter feed.

That will give the twitter feed a chance to prove itself.

I have a feeling that it's not going to be a drop-in replacement, but it might be good for the site to have anyway.

The song news is way too slow for some things, and I feel like a twitter feed might help Generate Buzz (tm).

Thanks, KA. I was feeling a little sucker-punched there.

Spud wrote:Thanks, KA. I was feeling a little sucker-punched there.

Spud - The only news I have to send in is that I haven't checked my Twitter noise account in like 4 months. I'll let you know when something comes up.

I hear ya, Roymond. I get a notice every couple of days that someone new is following me. These people must have a lot of patience.

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

No sucker punch intended, Spud, sorry if it sounded that way. Just brainstorming about ways the news could function that might involve less manual labor and might also provide additional features, like access to community members and/or archiving, etc.

I wrote a very long response to that, Sam, but couldn't bring myself to press Submit. Let's just say that if there was an expiration date on news, most of the time there wouldn't be any. But hey, no news is good news, right?

***waits for comments from everyone who ever sent in a news item that didn't get posted for one reason or another***

You still have email notifications of Twitter follows enabled?

Enhancement requests should not be perceived as personal criticism of anyone.

Manhattan Glutton wrote:Enhancement requests should not be perceived as personal criticism of anyone.

No, but around here nobody just asks for something, they go into great detail as to how it could / should be done, and sometimes they leave the person who would actually be responsible for the change out of the discussion.

As opposed to, say...

"Hey, Spud - I've noticed that the song news section is often out of date. Any suggestions on how we could help you keep it more current?"

Charles (KA)

The internet was invented so that people with poor communication skills could argue indefinitely while the rich get richer. It is a Proletarian plot - don't fall for it!