eFestivals was approached by a newspaper journo - a freelancer, working for one of the nationals - the other day, after some festival information. There's nowt special about that as it often happens, however...
What was rather 'special' was this journo's approach. The normal deal - a deal that is requested explicitly from them, but which is also what they know is the case for this sort of thing - is that eFestivals helps them with their research, and eFestivals gets a mention in the article f
This summer eFestivals has branched out into producing videos about festivals.
Although self-produced videos are becoming a bigger thing as the technology improves and becomes easier, nearly every festival video out there is of the "look at me and my mates being daft" kind, which aren't of much interest to anyone who doesn't know those people.
We've gone for quality and a more professional angle, with a more documentary feel, to give a feel of what a festival is all about. We've already
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
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
eFestivals moved premises in mid-January. A move of phone services from one premises to another should be an easy task for any competent business to manage.
And yet...
- BT took the order wrongly.
- BT failed to fulfil the order properly.
- BT did the bits they did several days later than they should have.
- The engineer did a dreadful job, requiring the wiring in both my house and the exchange to need to be re-done.
- it was near-impossible to get them to send that diferent engineer,
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
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
well, things are starting to slow down at eFestivals now - there's finally time to breathe - as most of the announcements about festivals for this year have been made, so there's not so much in the way of news and updates each day.
But even with the extra resources that eFestivals now has there's still lots and lots to do, with the chance (finally!) to catch up on some of the things that have been put to the side - sometimes for several years - because there's just not been enough hours in th
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
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
god, I needed that sleep.
What can I say? I don't think I've enjoyed a festival that much in ages.
But next time, they need to book Steel Pulse for a 3 hour set.
yep, it's true, there's now this thing called free money, here's how it works.
What you do is set up or have a business. Then when you have some work to do, don't be a fool ... don't go doing it yourself! Do what Rupert Murdoch has his staff doing at the publisher Harper Collins (which he owns).
They come up with a book idea, an idea they know zilch about. Rather than waste their own time doing their job and researching it all, they try to find a few suckers - today I've been their target.
Geek alert - Fedora is a version of linux.
Why does anyone buy Windows? Having just downloaded and installed Fedora, it's bloody brilliant! It's got everything a 'normal' computer user might need included - including an excellent fully featured 'office' suite (word processor, spreadsheet, etc) - and it's dead easy to install!
The fun comes when you start to try and set it up anyway from a 'standard' install. So far I've managed to break apache (the webserver that comes with it) several tim
Well, almost
eFestivals now also has the domain eFestivals.com ... it was on sale from a 'domain broker' (that's a domain tout to you and me) for very very VERY silly money - $35,000. But I'm pleased to say that nothing anywhere near as stupid was paid for it.
It was bought mainly to protect the efestivals.co.uk brand. If someone else had bought and used it to start a festivals site then I'm sure it would eventually have impacted on (this) efestivals.
At the moment, I'm not sure how i
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.
WOW! - Nik Turner's reformed them, and they're playing a gig in Slough in mid-November .... I quite fancy going, but Slough's a bit of a trek ... I guess I'll have to decide soon, I'm sure it'll sell out pretty quick.
I woke up this morning and turned on a tap, to have only a trickle of water come out - luckily enough for the kettle. When I went to the shop over the road, I discovered that a main has burst nearby, and this whole area is without water.
It's not like I can't cope without water - I bought a litre of bottled for brewing up, but it's bugging me that I can't flush the loo, do the washing up or put some clothes washing on, even tho I know that there's guys out there working to sort the problem an
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
I keep getting press releases for Global Cool - an organisation set up to help fight global warming thru reducing your emissions and offsetting. At the bottom it always says that they're "one of only four current organisations who reach the Government’s proposed standards for carbon offset schemes".
I was aware that only four organisations have been approved (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6276305.stm), and I was aware that The Carbon Neutral Company - who eFestivals use for offsetti
Another upgrade was made to the eFestivals servers last night, after a week of false starts, technical failures and cock-ups in trying to put things in place.
Anyway, the new set-up really is the dogs (as is being proved right now with the traffic for V tickets), and come Glasto ticket day I expect things to cope extremely well - the capability of the new servers is massively greater than what was in place two years ago for the last Glastonbury (and even back then eFestivals was the only maj
