Classic Cat

Watching museums

2011-02-03T10:58:00.000-08:00

The Economist has a nice blogpost about the Google Art Project. It allows you to walk around in 17 museums (in Streetview style) and see paintings in incredible detail. Mostly classical paintings.

Happy new year!

2011-01-03T05:15:00.000-08:00

I wish all the visitors of Classic Cat a happy new year!!!

As you can see in the history there quite a few new entries. Classic Cat has now for the first time more than 7000 audio entries. This includes the first about 100 lp recordings from European Archive. I also created a helpfile for orientation on the European Archive website.

You probably haven't noticed the updates in what appears under the "Visitor's favorites". I tried to make it more relevant by giving more attention to newer entries. Some users have the habit of putting all the performances of a certain work in their favorites. This used to increase the chance that that work would be shown in the Visitor's Favorites. I repaired this.

If you have any suggestions for further improvements please let me know!

There are now some 1400 registered users and 400 favorites in the system. Some of the users may be spam (I deleted some 1000 spam users - recognizeable by their websites), but most are probably people who erroneously believe that you need to register to get to the music. The number of unique visitors stays rather constant at between 4000 and 5000 a day.

As you may have noticed in your Favorites Classic Cat is a dynamic website. When one of your favorites is no longer available the link will disappear not only from Classic Cat but also from your Favorites. Sometimes - but not always - it will reappear if the link becomes available again.

Some other updates: you can now reset your password and the link on your screenname when logged in now points to your favorites page. The latter feature is at the moment only implemented for the home page but will be rolled out for the whole site with the next update. The user page itself is still there when you click on your username in your favorites page.

I received this year about 50 dollar in donations. It seems to have helped that I mentioned them in a previous blog entry. Below is an anonymized overview:
8-8 A.A.N $3,50 Westbank
17-9 E.P. $ 10,- USA
22-11 K.C. 1,- USA
28-11 A.A.N. $0,75 Westbank
8-12 J.D. $ 5,- Brazil
19-12 C.C. GBP 10,- UK
23-12 C.G. $1,50 Malta
31-12 J.T.L Euro 10,- Spain

My thanks to all the generous givers! Classic Cat is an extended website that takes a lot of effort to maintain. And I keep trying to make it more useful for its visitors.

About the last update

2010-12-02T10:16:00.000-08:00

About a week ago I did some major update of the site. Google ads are back, but the main improvement are some new links (and the removal of quite a few dead ones).

I have added the first entries from the European Archive. It remains to be seen how visitors pick this up as it is a rather Spartan website. In some cases you have to look at the image of the cover or the image of the record itself.

There is still a long way to go: I have added at the moment only 40 of the 842 records.

In the mean time I keep looking for extra financial sources. On advertising alone the website is not sustainable and donations - my thanks to those who did give - on the website stay rare.

Last weekend the site was down

2010-10-23T11:03:00.000-07:00

Last weekend the site was down due to some problems with Bluehost. Occasionally the database goes down due to excessive data traffic and I had built in a function that sent me a mail when that happened. They saw my site sending too much mail and concluded that it was a spammer. Never mind that I had informed them before why I sometimes sent a lot of mail. Obviously their organizational memory isn't that great.

In the meantime I haven't solved the problem of the occasional downtime for the database. Fortunately not all data are in the database so that the visitor gets at least something when the database is down.

It has become a bit faster I hope

2010-09-08T08:55:00.000-07:00

Some optimizations didn't work what caused extra work for the database and made the website slow. I now repaired this and I hope the experience is now faster.

I encountered a website with many new pieces: the

Little update

2010-08-18T05:19:00.000-07:00

Today I did a little update. Some 100 new performances (too few to make an update file) and some small changes to the website.

I deleted the vote section. Nobody used it and I had the impression that it discouraged people from using favorite lists.

I noticed that the link to this blog in the menu is wrong. I repaired it for a few pages. The rest will have to wait for the next update.

Moved to a new server

2010-08-17T07:28:00.000-07:00

I have moved to a new hosting provider: Bluehost. I had once again walked into the overcomplicated way things are implemented at GoDaddy and wasted a day with it. So enough was enough and I moved to the account where I already had hosted OpusFinder. I hope everything keeps working as it did. If you find problems please let me know.

The menubar on Classic Cat keeps puzzling me. Sometimes it nicely fits in and sometimes it starts in the middle of page and wraps around. If there is any html-guru around who understands it I will be happy to hear from him.

Random favorites

2010-08-15T02:55:00.000-07:00

Some users have now started to make a favorite list. So I took the opportunity to make them visible with the "Random Favorites" list that can now be seen at the right side on the home page. After the next update it or something similar will be on other pages as well.

I can't spend much time on the website at the moment as I need to find some new sources of income. But I have still quite a few plans around those Favorite Lists.

User registration and favorite lists

2010-08-08T04:11:00.000-07:00

Most people like Classic Cat, but there are complaints too. These usually center on the quality. Some of the linked music is very good, but some not.

As I cannot check all the music myself and I have to consider abuse when introducing a voting system I have long been stuck on this. In the end I came up with a special kind of voting: the favorite lists.

If you look at this page you will see how it is supposed to work. If you click on "A favorite for 1 member" you will see a list with (in this case) one link that leads to the favorite list that contains this performance as a favorite. On the list-page you can click on the owner name and then you see the owner-page. As you will see these are test data. But it will give you an impression how it works.

I have the option now a few days online. There were some initial troubles and a few things still have to be repaired (most important: the link for password forgotten doesn't work yet; mail me if you really forgot it). Also there are several additions planned to make the favorite list experience more complete. But my biggest problem is that - although some 40 people have registered by now - nobody has chosen a favorite yet.

So I am a bit puzzled what to do next.

New: a Classic Cat blog

2010-08-08T03:42:00.000-07:00

Hi,

Welcome on the blog about my Classic Cat website.

With this blog I want to tell something about what is going on behind the screens of the website. Your comments are very welcome.

Wim Roffel