Happy new year!

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

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

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

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