Remove
Site Related
LATEST ARTICLES - PAGE 8

Upgrade Your Account: No Ads and Dark Mode for $25 a Year

Jason Tate

You can upgrade your forum account to unlock Dark Mode and remove advertisements from this website. For as little as $3 per month or $25 per year you’ll get all the forum perks and you’ll be helping support this website and support its continued development.

This website can’t exist without your support. If you have the means, please consider signing up. With the the current economics on the internet, and our decision to respect you and not fill the website with disgusting ads and trackers, we need the support of readers like you to exist.

Thank you.

Join the Dark Side: Bringing Dark Mode to the Main Website

Dark Mode
Jason Tate

It’s fitting that on release week for Star Wars: The Last Jedi I can bring the Dark Side to the main website. One of my favorite supporter perks in the forum has been Dark Mode — a dark slate colored theme — and I’m excited to be able to bring this color palette to the main website as well. I love our white, grey, and blue color scheme, but at night I almost always switch over to the dark theme while browsing the website on my phone. However, I’d often move over to the main site to read an article and the white contrast would be a rude awakening for my eyes. No more! Supporters can now activate Dark Mode on the main website via their supporter options page or in the forum preferences. If you’re not a supporter yet, join now to get Dark Mode.

I’ve included some screen shots below of what the website and forums look like in Dark Mode, for those curious. I think it maintains my main design goals: simple, clean, and focused on readability, while adding a new flavor to the overall feel of the website.

Read More “Join the Dark Side: Bringing Dark Mode to the Main Website”

A Weekend Plug

Chorus.fm
Jason Tate

I hope everyone is having a nice weekend. Hopefully it’s not too stressful. I just wanted to quickly plug the 2017 Holiday Gift Guide I posted up earlier this week, and once again call attention to our supporter program. As we get close to the end of the year we’re closing in on my personal goal for how many supporters I wanted to hit this year. We’re not quite there yet, so I wanted to once again ask if you like this website to please consider becoming a supporting member.

Also, on that note: “Dark Mode” for the main website should be completed within the week.

Bridging the Forum and the Website’s Supporter Systems

Jason Tate

Today I’m excited to announce I’ve completed the work on bridging our community and the main website’s supporter systems. Now, if you’re a supporting member of the forum community you can use your username and password to login on the content side of the website to view supporter only content (like my first impressions), manage your payment options, turn off advertisements site-wide, and soon gain access a special Dark Mode for the main website that matches perfectly with the Dark Mode of the forums.

And don’t forget: you don’t have to be a community member to be a supporter of the website! You can join right now for only $3 a month and help support this website and independent publishing. It’s because of readers like you that I can keep running this website. I can’t thank each and every one of you enough for your support over the past two years.

It’s funny how a project like this, which doesn’t end up having many outward facing changes, can be a massive undertaking behind the scenes. But now that it’s done, the foundation is better set for a bunch of cool things we can do in the future and the system is much more robust for handling payments and login credentials for our growing community.

If you are already a supporter, you don’t have to make any changes if you don’t want to, everything will just keep working as it has been. If you’d like to move away from PayPal and to the new credit card based system, you can do that here. Again, it’s totally optional to make that change if you want.

If anyone has any questions at all, feel free to drop me an email or message me in the forums.

Remove

Why I Deleted the Recent Makeout Video Post

Chorus.fm
Jason Tate

On Tuesday I posted the new video for a band called Makeout here on the website. I had posted about the band before, they’re on Rise Records, they recorded an album with John Feldmann, and the first single sounded like pretty standard pop-punk music that people like. So, I posted the new video without even listening to the song.

That was a mistake.

Not long after, I checked the forums and I saw people commenting on the lyrical content. I clicked over to the YouTube channel and read the lyrics. They’re disgusting sexist bullshit. (Also, the song sucks.) I deleted the news post from this site and won’t be posting about this album again. I debated if I wanted to write a post explaining this because I knew it would draw more attention to the song, and because I know the exact responses that will come from a certain type of internet commenter. However, I think it’s important to speak out about this kind of bullshit when we see it in our music scene. I hope that the band take some time to listen to the criticism coming their way right now and think about what kind of musicians and artists they want to be. (So far, it seems to be going about as I expected.) If any member wants to reach out to me privately, I’d be happy to explain my thoughts in more detail and what I think they should do going forward. You all look relatively young, you can do the right thing here and be better.

And, on that note: I recommend following Megan Thompson and Anna Acosta on Twitter for more, and I’m sorry that I let this video slip through when I posted it the first time.

Labor Day

Jason Tate

Today is Labor Day, so we’ll be on a more relaxed posting schedule. I’ve always enjoyed this Ezra Klein piece, from 2014, on Labor Day:

Labor Day is a day of rest that commemorates years of war. Congress inaugurated the holiday just days after President Grover Cleveland sent 12,000 federal troops to break the Pullman strike. The tactics were bloody; US deputy marshals killed two men and wounded many more.

That was 1894, an election year. Cleveland needed a way to win workers back to his side. He saw an opportunity in a federal holiday honoring workers — as well as organized labor.

And this from Tim Goulet:

In reality, however, Labor Day started twelve years earlier — even before the 1886 Haymarket events that inspired May Day — with a mass rally in New York. On September 5, 1882, socialists, the Knights of Labor, and various left organizations associated with the Central Labor Union (CLU) organized a march calling for shorter hours, higher pay, safer working conditions — and a labor holiday. That year, New York had been the scene of spirited labor struggles. On January 30, thousands of workers thronged Cooper Union to support Irish tenants protesting their British landlords.

Some Thoughts on Daring Fireball’s New Display Ads

Daring Fireball
Jason Tate

Last week I read John Gruber’s announcement of his new in-house advertising model on Daring Fireball. Unsurprisingly, I really like the way his mind works:

A maximum of 5 sponsors per month. Each sponsor will get 20 percent of all page views on DF (including the very popular Markdown Syntax Documentation and online Dingus pages). […] For sponsors, you get to be the only graphical ad on the page each time your ad is shown. […] Not only is there no tracking involved, there is not JavaScript involved. They’re just images, text, and HTML links.

In a lot of ways he’s going with a new system that’s not unlike what I first attempted when I launched Chorus. A smaller number of ads, sold at a higher price point. (And the ad unit is very similar to what we offer here: a graphic, link, text, and we don’t track users.) I had a few people ask me why I recently moved from this model to a slightly different self-serve advertising model that allows anyone to buy an ad on the site at a lower price. The answer’s pretty simple: the other model didn’t work for us, but yes, I think this will be very successful for Daring Fireball.

Based on the last stats I could find, this website does more pageviews a month than Daring Fireball; however, it’s two different audiences and two different sets of advertisers. A lot of the advertisements on this website are bands, record labels, producers, and clothing companies. While I’d love to have advertisers like Squarespace, Blue Apron, and other bigger companies see the value in reaching our audience, I don’t really see that happening unless I hire a dedicated person to run advertising and cultivate those relationships. Daring Fireball has a fantastic (and well-deserved) reputation, and a real cachet within the technology industry. It makes a lot of sense for some bigger tech companies to want to have their ads on 20% of Daring Fireball for the month. Whereas here, I think we’ve found the sweet spot in offering a quality ad unit that remains affordable to virtually any budget. And because of that, it’s way easier for me to run as a one person show.

Basically, I think what John Gruber is doing at Daring Fireball is fantastic and right in line with what more websites should be attempting. I think that an ad unit that respects the viewer is a better ad unit. I think our click-through rate and how many people I’ve seen talk about how they are more willing to check out a band, album, or service because of our specific kinds of ads, is proof of that.

I think that the first month or so of moving to a self-service ad model has convinced me that it’s correct move for Chorus right now as well. It’s working for us, it’s working for advertisers, and if you’d like to purchase an advertisement: you should check it out.

Happy Fourth of July

Jason Tate

Today is the 4th of July holiday so we will be on a more relaxed posting schedule. I hope everyone has a safe and enjoyable day and we’ll be back to our regular schedule tomorrow.

Remove

Batch Two and Three of First Impression Blogs

Jason Tate

Last week I posted about bringing over my first impression blogs from the forums for supporters of the website. Today I’ve got a some more to share:

Batch Three

Batch Two

Batch One

I’ve got one more group to move over and then I’ll be posting new ones on the main website, in our review database, roughly one day after they first appear live in our supporter forum.

Read More “Batch Two and Three of First Impression Blogs”

Bringing First Impressions to the Main Site

Jason Tate

For as long as I can remember I’ve been doing some version of “first impression” blogs about music on the internet. It started back on AbsolutePunk.net in my blog as I’ve always loved being able to offer some thoughts on an album without the full pressure of an official “review.” My original idea was a more free flowing and less structured way to comment on music usually after having only heard an album one or two times. Today we’ve got things like our forums and social media to serve as a similar medium for putting together opinions on something without it needing to feel too official. I like that. It’s freeing.

One of the things I’ve been doing for supporters in our supporter forum is these first listen/first impression live blogs for certain albums. The basic idea is the same as always: I listen to an album and I do a little live blogging of my thoughts, impressions, and feelings as I listen to it. It started out as a fun little way to talk about music and once again helped me feel free from some of the pressures of “official” reviews on music. It’s been a lot of fun and it seems like everyone really enjoys reading them. Now, one of the downfalls of using the forum for this is that it’s not as easy to archive and save these pieces for posterity. And they’re behind the community package paywall and therefore unaccessible to patrons of the main website. Today, I’m fixing both of those problems.

Read More “Bringing First Impressions to the Main Site”

Advertising Sale For About One More Week

Chorus.fm Logo
Jason Tate

Just a quick note to say that I’m going to be tweaking the prices for our advertising system within the next few weeks, so, if you wanted to lock in an ad at the sale prices … now’s the time to buy one! After launching the system three weeks ago, it’s been great to see just how much easier it is for me, and advertisers, to get placement on our site. I’m very happy with the results so far.

Feed sponsors are sold out for the next few weeks, but you can schedule one all the way up to October if you would like. So, if you’re interested in locking one in at the current prices, take a look at those as well.

Introducing Chorus 2.0

Jason Tate

One of the best parts about running my own website again is that I can work on improvements and changes and roll them out when they’re done instead of waiting for the never ending drudge of bureaucracy. Today I’m excited to bring you a collection of changes, improvements, additions, and new features that I am calling Chorus 2.0. Basically, I’ve spent the past year or so learning about what makes this website work, what doesn’t work, what needs to be improved, and how to better organize the information we push into it each day. And of course, how you, the reader, are using it. I’ve taken what I’ve learned and combined that with an optimization obsession to get this website to load as fast and reliably as possible on virtually any device you view it on. You may not see a lot of outward changes, but there were thousands of lines of code tweaked and changed along the way. I want to quickly go through some of the bigger changes, and introduce you to some of the more headlining features.

Read More “Introducing Chorus 2.0”

Remove

From the Forums: Food Competition

Chorus.fm Logo
Jason Tate

Our general forum’s infamous “food thread” is putting together a fun little “Chopped/Iron Chef” like competition. If you’re interested in participating, check out the thread and rules:

Anybody can participate as long as you meet the deadlines. If you miss one week don’t worry! There will be more than one opportunity to participate. Anybody can be a contestant or a judge. You can participate every time we do this or come and go as you please.

Remove