Reinvention
It’s been a while, eh?
For the past month or so, I’ve been using up a ton of my spare time with a sort of experiment. It may be a great thing for me, but it also may prove to be a bust. It’s taken alot of time and effort, and I’m only about 25% of the way through to the goal. The project? Rebuilding a prominent music website from the ground up. That statement doesn’t sound too hard by itself, but trust me, it ain’t been easy.
A little history: IndianapolisMusic.net has been a great resource for the local Indy music community for over 5 years. The site started out in early 2001 as a modest yet ambitious project by a local musician named Matt Fecher, with the site initially being simply a list of local bands, and a message board community. In just over a year, IMN grew to become the resource for local music news and information, featuring show reviews (by fans and local freelancers), a calendar of upcoming events, local CD reviews, and tons of pictures from the shows that were playing around town. IMN even began releasing compilation CDs of local artists and throwing bimonthly showcase concerts featuring many of the area’s top acts. Nowadays, it even has a weekly, highly entertaining podcast put on by the site’s Editors. This is a step in the right direction.
The site continues to be a fantastic source for all things local music, but in the past year or so, it has become pretty stagnant, almost stale in some regards. Viewership is down overall (mainly due to a suddenly-imposed pay-to-post system for part of the message board forums, a system that, according to Fecher, needed to be done to help cover the cost of keeping the site alive). Bandwidth for the site is still very heavy, averaging about 115GB of data transfer per month. This is down from about 175-225GB per month just a couple years ago, but the sheer amount of traffic is still enough to want to keep the site alive in service for the Indianapolis Music Community.
I have been an active contributor to the site in many ways pretty much since it’s inception. I was one of the original visitors to the site, back when Fecher was travelling all over central Indiana to various local shows trying to get the word out about the site in a very grass-roots fashion. Some time later, I took over as “webmaster” for the site, handling all the daily updates and assisting with some of the programming involved, taking some of those chores away from Fecher so he could continue to help build buzz about the site and the Indy music scene as a whole. I’m no longer the webmaster, but I do play an active role in keeping he site’s databases in tact and running well, as well as message board moderation. And I do this all for free. In fact, nobody who works with the site is paid. Some people volunteer their time down at the local retirement home or hospital, I choose to volunteer my time for the local music community. Yes it’s a bit less noble, but I do enjoy it overall.
So, what I’ve been doing the past month is working on “reinventing” IMN. This is something I just decided needed to be done, and I decided to run with it. So far I’ve logged an average of 4-6 hours of work almost every day for the past 40 days on this project. Early on, most of that time was mainly used getting used to the tools I’m using to do this: Ruby on Rails being the main one. Programming in RoR has been pretty awesome to say the least. It makes it very easy to do some of the things I’m trying to get accomplished with the site.
What are some of these things? Here’s just a short list of some of the things that the new IMN will feature:
Bands, Musicians, Fans, and Venues can sign up and create their own profile.
Profiles are slightly customizable, but not as customizable as, say, Myspace profiles (this is on purpose…).
all profiles will have the ability to send and receive private messages.
Band Profiles may contain:
- an uploadable Pic
- general normal info about the band
- a feed from the main IMN calendar, listing all scheduled shows, filtered for this band
- a list of the bands Fans with profiles (Fans can “Fan” the band, sorta like “Friending”)
- similar artists (or RIYL) tags (think Flickr tags…these will work in a similar way)
- a list of recent posts in the message boards containing the band’s name (maybe)
- at least some sort of sound sample. maybe even a full song or 3
- Comments by Fans
- the ability to send an email (or PM) to all listed Fans
Fan profiles may contain:
- pic
- general info
- list of bookmarked calendar entries
- list of “Fanned” bands, musicians, and venues
- the ability to blog about a show or local CD, including a pic upload facility. We may choose well-written show blogs to appear on the IMN front page.
Musician Profiles may contain:
- pretty much most of what the Band and Fan profiles can have
- the ability to flag yourself as available for caollaborations, studio work, lessons, fill-in work, looking for a band, in a band, etc.
Venue Profiles may contain:
- a pic, all the normal venue info and contact info (including booking contact info)
- a feed from the main calendar with listed shows filtered by that venue
- list of fans
It’s all about networking.
Everything will be very easily searchable as well.
The main IMN page will probably move to more of a blog format, with several select IMN “Bloggers” to frequently post about goings-on in the music scene.
And that’s just the beginning. Sometimes, I think I’m a total fool for taking this all on by myself. I’ve had plenty of offers for help, and I will take advantage of that offered help when the time comes, but for now, I am in total gung-ho nerd-mode and sometimes going it alone is the best way early-on. Some of the suggestions I’ve also been getting have helped, and alot of those suggestions are the same ideas I’m already having, so it’s nice to know i’m not totally crazy. I really do feel like this may be a great thing to help re-energize the local Indianapolis music scene.
I hope to have a “beta version” (how’s that for a buzzword?) online in a couple months.
OK, back to work.
UPDATE: After much deliberation, I ended up using my code-base for what was to become IMN v3.0 for a new music scene social networking site called Sceneseed.com. IMN is going to more of a blog format, from what I understand. The good news is Sceneseed is the exclusive event calendar system for IndianapolisMusic.net.
Leave a Reply