Hey, all -- the astute & keen-eyed may notice a few changes to the SCR site over the past week or so, so I wanted to mention what's new and/or different both so's nobody gets confused and to perpetuate the illusion that this freaking thing actually does change occasionally (kidding! kidding...um, kinda?).

New Classifieds/Board:
Yes, the old, ugly, pain-in-my-ass (and yours) way of putting Classifieds up on this site is dead, dead, dead, and I am happily kicking its corpse down the street. As yours truly is typically about a half-decade behind the latest Website technology, it should come as no surprise that the old method/page for classified ads was, while astoundingly popular, an utterly manual deal, requiring you to email me and me to remember/have the spare time to stick your ad up on the site via a dedicated Blogger blog. (At one point, I was all about using Blogger to do every damn thing; now, they can bite me.) This was not only plain-text-y blah and a major waste of time for me, but it meant that if I got busy, your ad could languish in my mailbox for, um, a really long time. Which sucked pretty hard for anybody looking for a new band member or band or vintage keyboard.

I'm really, really sorry about that, and to make amends, we're attempting to modernize somewhat. From here on out, if you want to post a music-related classified on the site, the Classifieds link takes you to the brand-new Space City Rock Board & Classifieds, where you can post your own ad in one of the four categories (Bands Seeking People, People Seeking Bands, Junk For Sale, & Junk Wanted), either logged-in as yourself or as a guest. Makes things way faster, way prettier, way better in general.

BTW, I've ported over the classifieds that'd already gone up this year on the old page, so if you sent me a classified ad under the old system, you may see your post out there now with my name on it. I did decide to scrap anything older than late 2008, so if you really, truly need your ad put back up, heck, go for it. All yours.

Plus, as you can guess from the board's name, this thing also includes "Board" areas, General Talk & Upcoming Shows, where anybody who feels like it can post stuff, babble about things they like/dislike, mention their band's next show, etc. It's pretty wide-open, as long as you keep it civil; no death threats, eh? That sort of crap does nobody any good.

I don't mean, btw, to try to steal away the Hands Up Board's loyal, if sometimes conflicted/embittered fanbase. Anybody who wants to use this thing can; if not, hey, that's fine, too.

Mixtape & Other Links: You might remember a little while ago that I'd mentioned the new SCR Mixtape, powered by the Opentape framework here on our little site. Well, I have yet to get it to fit properly into the page like I want it to, but rest assured, it's still alive & well, and now it's linked from pretty much anywhere in the SCR site, as is the aforementioned Board.

Oh, and if you really want to keep up on what all goes on the Mixtape, you can subscribe to its RSS feed using your favorite newsreader. Should you want to keep stalker-ly close to us, y'know.

Possible Shows List Changes:
As I noted above, there was a time when the world of Blogger was magical and amazing to me, and back then it seemed like it could help me run the ever-popular Shows List oh-so-slightly. Times change, however, and these days the blog-based setup I'm using feels horribly antiquated and overly manual to use.

So, to that end, I've started messing more with Google Calendar lately. It's far from a "new" tool itself (although it's somehow still in beta, apparently), but I've only recently been really figuring out how to use it properly. The end result of that is that right now you can subscribe to one of the two public calendars I've currently got set up, via your own Google Calendar, Apple's iCal, or an RSS reader:

SCR Cool Shows:

SCR General Shows:

This is something that I've been needing to do for a while now, I think; it might take eyeballs away from the site, but hell, I think it's worth it. The real downside, though, is that it duplicates work, seeing as all shows now have to be added to both calendars. And that's never a good thing.

Right now, the Google Calendars exist alongside the old-fashioned, plain-text, blog-generated shows list that you all know & love. I'm thinking more and mor, though, about kissing that goodbye, too, in favor of a differently-formatted embedded Google Calendar showing both the "Cool" & "General" shows, as above. Something like this:

Apologies if it comes out a little weird -- still fiddling with getting the iframe to align properly. But that's the basic idea, anyway. So...what do y'all think? Good? Bad? Don't give a shit? If I can get it to work the way I want & people aren't horribly opposed to it, this may be the way the SCR Shows List shows up in the future (probably in the same place). If you care, leave your votes in the comments...

Labels: Admin Stuff, Cool Web Junk, Random Rambling, Things To See

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