Today is the first really busy day since all the recent upgrades were put in place ... there's currently over 900 people on the forums (and many times that number using the green pages of efests), and the servers are ticking along nicely, no stress at all. Good news!
I've just had a chat with a reporter from Channel 4 news. They'll be running a piece (probably this Thursday, 7pm) about the explosion of live music and festivals, and they wanted my expert ( ) advice to help with their piece.
They said that eFestivals would be mentioned, and it would either be a quote from me (not my voice tho) or a screenshot of the website ... but I never quite believe these things till they happen. Anyhow, fingers crossed!
The new website design seems to be going down extremely well.
While it's not possible to do a true like-for-like comparison of last year's website traffic compared to this year's traffic due to some of the changes in the redesign as well as some other background changes, it's certainly the case that there's been a very significant increase in website readership, and the 'stickiness' of those readers.
For example:-
- number of pages viewed is significantly up.
- number of pages viewed pe
... is very obviously at http://www.myspace.com/efestivals
And I hate it - it's the most user-unfriendly website I've ever had the misfortune to interact with.
Can anyone tell me how I can edit the URLs that display on the page? I want to link to the main efests site, and can't work out how too.
I'm pleased to say that eFestivals is now a carbon neutral website.
We're working with The CarbonNeutral Company to offset the emissions created by our business, as well as doing all we can to reduce our energy usage and emissions creation.
Climate change is happening - just look around you. We can wait for governments and businesses to stop pointing the finger at anyone but themselves, or we can take responsibility for our own actions and the consequences of those actions.
The amount o
The second lot of passes for V Fest have turned up today, for the efests reviewer and photographer that are attending.
Somehow, the press office seem to have lost the first line off the efestivals address on these passes (the set that turned up yesterday for the other site were fine), and they only contain the company name, town and postcode.
Luckily I seem to have a smart postie, who worked out where they should go - thanks Mr Postie.
God knows what would have happened if they'd have
I just picked my post up from my doormat.
I opened a letter from DVLA, saying that I hadn't sent them my licence to be endorsed for speeding as they'd requested, and so my licence will be revoked from this coming Sunday.
I open the next letter, and it's also from DVLA .... all it contains is my licence, newly endorsed for the speeding offence.
If the guys at DVLA could add two and two to make four, they'd be dangerous.
I've spent much of the last couple of weeks thinking how to get the best out of the efests servers during the mad Glastonbury ticket rush tomorrow, mostly doing little things which combined will add up to something hopefully worthwhile ... but just now I've had a brainwave which will make a great difference to things.
It seems that my 'disappearance' is confusing some people.
After ten years of breathing, eating, sleeping and farting eFestivals I've decided to take a different role. 5co77ie has been appointed as full-time editor of both eFestivals and eGigs, and I'm moving on to develop new projects while still having a little involvement in both of the sites.
In the short-term I'm around to help and advise 5co77ie as necessary, as well as keeping a long-term role in developing and improving both sites
It's always a real pain when a computer dies, but thankfully my most recent computer deaths have been about as kind as they could possibly be.
Prior to this one today, I last had a computer die on boxing day last year. That was my own 'work' computer - the one I run eFestivals from - so it really couldn't have died at a better time. Nothing happens in the festival world between Xmas and new year, so that gave me the chance to get another built and configured before everyone started back at wo
The weather has been dreadful lately, it's hard to believe that the country is suffering a drought. And last summer's festival weather was dreadful too, the worst I've encountered across a summer since I started running eFestivals back in 2000.
With this year's summer festival season just about to start, I'm betting there's lots of festival organisers and festival goers wondering when it'll stop.
For some they're now in the two-week range, when the more reputable weather forecasters are pr
having been ill and missed Sparks at Guilfest, I made a late decision to go to the Big Chill. I hadn't been before, and Lynz_star was going for efests, so I attached myself to her little group (who made me feel very welcome - thanks peeps ) and checked it out.
It's a great festival - bigger than I expected, and more free of corporates & advertising than most fests. The majority of time is spent sat down (it's the big chill after all ), with regular trips to the bars for more cocktails (yu
I was charging a high powered rechargeable battery for one of my boys toys on Sunday morning, when it exploded - proper fireballs (several!) and everything. Because it went up with such a bang, straightaway it was a biggish fire (18 inches across i guess), and it set light to my toy (), and things nearby (books, chest of draws, placcy bags of stuff, etc).
If I hadn't been in the room at the time, within seconds it would have taken proper hold, and I'd now have no house. Very luckily I was, a
To help people get started, there's some step-by-step instructions on how to set-up your own blog here:-
http://www.efestivals.co.uk/forums/index.php?showtopic=66794.
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Well, the install of the blog software all went smoothly ... the difficulty came with sussing out a few bits and pieces of the configuration, and I had to ask for a quick bit of support from the makers to get a few things sorted out.
They were on the ball with getting the bits fixed, but what t
Lee, the guitarist/manager of The Blockheads has posted a few comments in the Summer Sundae forum, saying just how much they all enjoyed playing there at the weekend. He also dropped me a mail, asking if eFestivals had managed to photo their second performance at Summer Sundae (nope), and I took the opportunity to say thanks...
A couple of years ago my son (then aged about seven) went to Plymouth Festival with his mum, and afterwards he phoned me all excited, to tell me that he'd somehow (I n
Well, it seems as tho some people think that eFestivals are the people that hand out passes for festivals, and some people will go to extraordinary lengths to try and blag a freebie.
Yesterday I had someone telling me how they're a director of a couple of music biz related companies, and he suggests I check at Companies House. So for the fun of it I check, and it turns out one is dissolved and the other is dormant.
He also told me how he knew one of the directors of eFestivals, so I asked
I always get scam emails with false rumours - I've become rather good at spotting them i think (tho a few always get thru) - but one I got last night is just brilliant.
Surely he didn't really expect me to fall for that?
What you like is what you like; you don't have to agree with me.
Ali Campbell
UB40's ex-frontman is now out on his own. The fall-out with his brother and other UB40 members looks like it's pretty large - perhaps as large as Ali himself now is in his ill-fitting suits - because the set contained absolutely no original UB40 compositions as far as I could tell. All you get linking back to then is the classic covers - 'Red Red Wine', 'Kingston Town', and the like.
Meanwhile, Ali himself puts
It's now just over a year since the revamp of eFestivals, and the massive increase in traffic thru the year proves that it was long over-due and that it's gone down very well. :angry:
There were about 6.2M unique users over the year, which is over 3 times the number claimed by our nearest competitor. There were about 75M pages viewed thru the year.
Approximately 40% of those page views were for the forums, with the rest being on the main part of the site. The percentage of unique users for
I get endless press releases about various bands playing a "secret show" - it's so secret that they're sending out press releases.
What's the score with this idiot tosh? Is it something that's been made up as a marketing tool in a "oooo, I got tickets to their secret show, I'm such a big fan" kind of way, or are they shows that they thought they didn't need publicity to sell tickets for but then found they couldn't sell the tickets?
Either way, they're generally for bands I wouldn't for
I've today removed the 'member mugshots' feature that's been part of this website since 2002.
It was originally included as a way for members to put up their photo, but since this feature was added to the forums at some later point, the 'member mugshots' section had near enough become redundant ... and it hadn't worked for a while as well for uploading new photos, due to its integration with the forums membership and the fact that the forums had changed how it encrypted users passwords - I c
