The Song Fight Bulletin Board

My wife was looking up the dates for this year's live event in NYC, and she accidentally wound up on Songfight.net. In turn, she showed it to me, just to demonstrate how hard a time she had finding the information she wanted. It's horribly out of date. The front page contains an unused chatbox and a Flash box streaming ADD's cover album of Achtung Baby (which can't be turned off until you register for the chat room). On the left are a list of links:

Songfight.org
The Songfight message board
Chat Room (preselected)
Song Fight Live! (points back to the page from the 2003 Seattle show)
Gallery (photos; hasn't been updated, it seems, since 2006)
Comics (link to the defunct unfunny.org)
Resources (maybe the only useful section here)
RSS Feed

What can be done? I would argue that none of the content here is recent or relevant enough to be useful, and Songfight.net could just redirect to .org the way that Songfight.com used to (how much are those squatters selling it for, by the way?). What does the crowd think? More importantly, what do the people who own the domains think?

Isn't .net JB's?

They're all hosted on the same account. For the sake of forwards it doesn't really matter anyway.

fluffy wrote:They're all hosted on the same account. For the sake of forwards it doesn't really matter anyway.

True.

Criticism is an implicit offer to volunteer to run that page, is it not?

I should probably just put a meta refresh redirect on the front to point at .org I guess, though that's really really boring.

I would definitely volunteer to run it, and I've got the time and energy to do so... I just don't know what content we could offer on that site that isn't already on Songfight.org.

Perhaps someone has some more constructive suggestions than mine?

Generic wrote:I would definitely volunteer to run it, and I've got the time and energy to do so... I just don't know what content we could offer on that site that isn't already on Songfight.org.

Perhaps someone has some more constructive suggestions than mine?

*Looks upward, makes big hand gesture in anticipation of his announcement being emphasized by finger sprouting

THE GIRLS OF SONGFIGHT!

Always a pleasure to have you back around, Hoblit.

One thing that MUST happen if Songfight.net won't redirect back to songfight.org - the LINK to the .org homepage should be much more prominent. I'm also going to brainstorm among my IRL friends. Some ideas have occurred to me for possibly useful features. (This is all brainstorming-style, so some of these might be rubbish; I'll sort 'em all out tomorrow.)

1.) We could get the Songfight Webring going again. Most of us have our own sites to plug, or at least Bandcamp or Reverbnation pages.
2.) A "News" section with more room for detail than the one on the Songfight.org homepage.
3.) The "Songfighter Videos on Youtube" thread could be consolidated into one section there.
4.) (more up-to-date) info on the most recent live show, and the next.
5.) I know you guys have photos. Let's get that gallery back up to date. And possibly host it elsewhere? Or get a different image hosting application? That 4images interface looks very clunky and dated.
6.) Does Dorie (or anyone) still update the @Songfight Twitter feed? It's looking like no. We could get that active again and put a "recent tweets" window in place of the chatroom that no one uses.
7.) (Psst, the real chatroom is on IRC. Maybe we could post detailed instructions on how to access that, plus link to that Mibbit widget that Jan put together...)
8.) Maybe profiling individual Songfighters? A periodic "Songfighter of the month" feature?
9.) Maybe put the spotlight on a single past Sidefight or Hxaro? Change the featured collection of songs once a month or so?
10.) An "about" page featuring all the stuff that Wikipedia wouldn't let JB publish? Among us all, we (by which I mostly mean Spud, JB, and fluffy) could write a fairly compelling history of the site.
11.) Testimonials from participants?
12.) Oh yes, keep that "Resources" link. Sometime when it's not FAWM, I'll make sure all the links still work and are up-to-date, and suggest other ones.

Hoblit wrote:
THE GIRLS OF SONGFIGHT!

gets my vote!

also, speaking of hand gestures, isn't yours getting tired of waving after what, almost 10 years now?

also, didn't you visit San Francisco when you came to Santa Cruz?

JonEric has a lot of good ideas.

I just wanted to suggest adding Niveous' Top whatever of songfight.
Also, integrating Lunkhead's SF Jukebox player.

I really like the idea of including videos there. Mostly because BSS has a bunch of them now, but it might encourage others to make videos too.

Maybe JeffF or someone (GlennCase?) would consider a SF related podcast?

What about the old SF Radio? I kind of miss that. Remember when everyone recorded station IDs for it? Good times.

Ken

ken wrote: Maybe JeffF or someone (GlennCase?) would consider a SF related podcast?

What about the old SF Radio? I kind of miss that. Remember when everyone recorded station IDs for it? Good times.

Ken

The SF Radio stuff was great. I miss that as well. Also the SF themed podcasts like Johnny Cashpoint's.

jack wrote:

Hoblit wrote:
THE GIRLS OF SONGFIGHT!

gets my vote!

also, speaking of hand gestures, isn't yours getting tired of waving after what, almost 10 years now?

also, didn't you visit San Francisco when you came to Santa Cruz?

I already know what I'm going to change my gif to once I have time.

And sadly , no I did not visit San Fransisco on that trip. I did visit Monterey though, and it was beautiful!

In hindsight I could have visited SF instead but I'm not sure I'd ever been able to pull myself away. I had to fly out of San Jose the next day.

Hoblit wrote:I already know what I'm going to change my gif to once I have time.

Don't listen to him. Your avatar is one of the few consistent things about this place after all this time.

ken wrote: I just wanted to suggest adding Niveous' Top whatever of songfight.
Also, integrating Lunkhead's SF Jukebox player.

Yes, those are both excellent ideas.

Bump.

The site at songfight.net is still far out-of-date, and now the engine that runs that moribund chat agent will be retired this Tuesday.

I still like about two-thirds of those ideas that I posted about six months ago, plus the ones that Ken suggested.

JB, how would you feel about giving someone else access to songfight.net to give it a makeover? I hereby volunteer, provided no one more worthy wants the job.

My two cents is that a content aggregation tool/portal that automatically draws from a variety of content sources that people are already updating anyway seems like a good way to make sure things stay fresh. Have it pull in content based on tags on Twitter, Flickr, etc. etc. That way anybody can contribute using the tools they already use just by tagging their content Song Fight! related.

The "Resources" stuff seems like it would be better off in sfbase.net where users could contribute to it.

Unfunny seems to be defunct.

As for SF! Live, it would be great if there were some easy location for all the sites for all the live shows, like http://www.songfight.org/live/ always pointed to the most recent one, or the upcoming one shortly before it happens, and http://www.songfight.org/live/20XX pointed to the site for the live show for that year.

Hey Lunkhead, I was doing exactly what you suggested, and I was trying to link to the jukebox and somesongs, but your server seems to be down...

SPUD

Yeah, having server issues today. It was my brother's birthday yesterday so I'm giving him a little more time to realize things are broken and fix them before I bug him about it. I'm getting what I pay for with "free" hosting...

Lunkhead wrote:My two cents is that a content aggregation tool/portal that automatically draws from a variety of content sources that people are already updating anyway seems like a good way to make sure things stay fresh. Have it pull in content based on tags on Twitter, Flickr, etc. etc. That way anybody can contribute using the tools they already use just by tagging their content Song Fight! related.

The "Resources" stuff seems like it would be better off in sfbase.net where users could contribute to it.

Unfunny seems to be defunct.

As for SF! Live, it would be great if there were some easy location for all the sites for all the live shows, like http://www.songfight.org/live/ always pointed to the most recent one, or the upcoming one shortly before it happens, and http://www.songfight.org/live/20XX pointed to the site for the live show for that year.

This all sounds great. I'll look into how to make that a reality.

Is the Twitter account still Dorie's thing?

As far as I've ever heard Dorie and presumably JB have the login/password for the Twitter account. Hopefully I'm not bringing up a sore subject here or anything, though I am probably sounding like a broken record, but you can if you want show tweets that have "songfight" in them, instead of just tweets from the "official" @songfight Twitter account. That might be a way to aggregate SF! related tweets from other users so that we don't have to rely on one or a few people having access to and using the official account. (Even if not everybody here gives a shit about Twitter, there are many SF! folks using Twitter, some of them very heavy users, like JB, Front, etc.).

Anyway, as I've posted before, Twitter offers "widgets" that you can embed in your site by pasting in some HTML:

http://twitter.com/about/resources/widgets

You can have a profile widget which shows tweets from a specific account, or a search widget, which shows tweets that match a search (such as "songfight"), or both I guess if you wanted.

Flickr lets you embed slideshows. One option would be to go to http://www.flickr.com, search for "songfight", click on the "Slideshow" option, then in the upper right click "Share" and copy the embed HTML.

I have created a new page that is up to date at http://www.songfight.net . Clearly, a lot of room for improvement, but at least you don't get a page full of broken links.

SPUD

Looks awesome! Nice work Spud, thanks.