Is there less oestrogen then testosterone 'round these parts? Well, according to the Facebook stats for those who are fans of this site, more men than women dig CLUAS...

Since the CLUAS Facebook page was launched last week 104 people have so far become fans of the site, but only 42% of them are ladies and 58% are men. So much for the site's 21st century, progressive equal opportunities policy.

Maybe a dash of pink is required in the CLUAS logo? Or a super-smart javascript that, er, changes the site layout to nice pastel shades if it suspects the visitor is a member of fairer sex? 

CLUAS has always been well ahead of the curve. Sure, weren't we on the internet a full year before U2 decided it was time they had a website?

Therefore it will be no surprise to hear that CLUAS continues to plough a path at the bleeding edge of 21st century technology. The latest example of this? Our decision to set up - only yesterday - a page for CLUAS on Facebook.

So if anyone else out there is also an early adopter of Facebook, you can now add yourself to the CLUAS Facebook network....

CLUAS will be hitting the 10 year milestone in May 2009 and as far as I know it is Ireland's longest running music website. Am I wrong? Am I forgetting some obscure gem of an Irish music site out there that was knocking around before May 1999 and is still on the go?

I thought hotpress.com might also have been around 10 or so years but it turns out not to be the case. With a bit of digging (thanks to archive.org, the ambitious online project that is keeping a snapshot of web sites over the age) I was able to establish that hotpress.com was home to an offset printing company based in Santa Cruz, California up to Dec 2000. Hmmmm. The domain name, it seems, was only acquired by Hot Press magazine in early 2001 (but no content...

Back in January I upgraded the CLUAS discussion board to the latest and greatest version of the software that it uses. As I blogged at that time it introduced a whole bunch of improvements, including a considerable reduction of trips that had to be made to the database to pull data required for building a discussion forum page (the sort of thing I - sadly - get excited about as it means faster loading of web pages for users).

Nonetheless there was a downside to this upgrade: the code we used on the CLUAS.com home page to automatically insert links to the latest discussion topics was broken by the upgrade....

Some pretty major changes are to be rolled out next week on CLUAS. One small part of this is a new logo. Below are three candidates in contention. The first two were developed by 50dollarlogos.com, the 3rd one by CLUAS blogger Stephen McNulty and Matt, a designer colleague of his. Let me know which you prefer:

Candidate A: 



 

Candidate B: 



 

Candidate C: (click on it to see a higher resolution version of it)



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Did you ever do a Google search and see that, just below the number one result, there is a set of supplementary search results? These are what Google calls "site links", basically about 8 or so extra links that can take you to some specific pages on the no. 1 ranked site for your search. Google does this for a small proportion of sites, those it considers more important and CLUAS, for many years now, has been one of them (hooray!).

Every few months Google updates the links that it places as "site links" and I recently noticed that if you run a search now on Google for 'CLUAS', 5 of the 8 "site links" for CLUAS point directly to pages we have that list our gig reviews by venue. These pages actually have been a big success, even before Google decided to highlight...

2009 is a year that will see the roll out of a large number of major changes to CLUAS. For the moment I confidently say that the CLUAS.com site, within a few months, will look hugely different and will offer new services to visitors. But the changes are not only visible ones, almost as important will be changes that will be put in place behind the scenes.

The first changes of the year were already put in place last week when the software that runs the CLUAS Discussion board ("Active Forums") was upgraded to the latest version. Such an upgrade usually delivers an incremental improvement. However this time the upgrade has delivered a quite dramatic improvement of the discussion board (especially in terms of speed) compared to the previous version. This is simply down to the...

Last night I rolled out some tweaks to the navigation bar across good chunks of the site. You won't see the changes on this page (I will get around to doing the CLUAS blog and forum pages later tonight) but you will see it on the home page and any page that does NOT end with ".aspx" in its address. In a nutshell: the navigation bar is being moved to just below the CLUAS logo (previously the nav bar was to right of the logo, where it has been for ages). Why is this being done? This is a first step in a roll out of a complete refresh of the CLUAS look and feel. A few quick points about the change that has been implemented so far:

It means we can have more items in the navigation bar becuase the nav bar now runs across the full width of the screen (the way it has been up to now meant we had to have a limited number of items on...

CLUAS is well into its 9th year of operations, a period that has seen a huge amount of activity in terms of content published to the site. For the first time I spent a few moments to try and put some numbers on this.

It turns out that a total of 1380 articles (reviews, interviews or features) have been published to CLUAS since we started back in 1999. These have been written by a pool of 132 different writers, some of whom wrote just one article, others who authored scores and all were volunteers who submitted their contributions for no monetary...

CLUAS was one of 15 sites longlisted last week for the 'best music site' category at the Irish Web Awards. The short list of six sites was published yesterday and CLUAS was not among them. The sites that made the grade were:

Muzu TV Kilkenny Music Enda Reilly 2tone Drop-d State Magazine The shortlist represents a cross-cutting list of different types of sites: there are two music magazines (Drop-d and State), one musician's site (Enda Reilly), one local music blog (Kilkenny music),...

The CLUAS Discussion board has been active now for almost 7 years. In that time there has been almost 10,000 topics discussed (to be precise: 9467 topics, and counting). Among this number there have been some real classic threads, but a problem is they risk becoming difficult to reach in the depths of CLUAS.com's constantly growing database of discussion topics. Not wanting to 'lose' the best of our topics I last week created 7 new pages which list the top 75 topics (chosen on the basis of those topics with the most replies) from each year since the discussion board was launched. These new pages will make it easier for visitors to discover some great threads from our archives such as The Slow Death Of Certain Irish Bands (from 2006), Irish Bands To Get Excited About (from...

CLUAS has been covering Irish music festivals since 2000 when we reviewed the first Witnness festival (which morphed into Oxegen). 2008 however saw CLUAS step up dramatically in terms of our coverage of the music festival season. For the first time CLUAS has provided comprehensive reviews of all the major festivals that took place this year in Ireland. Oxegen? Electric Picnic? Cois Fharraige? HWCH?...

Yesterday the "long-listed" sites for the Irish Web Awards were published. I was pleased to see CLUAS has been long-listed for the 'Best Music Site' category. There are a total of 15 nominees longlisted for the best music site award (see them below) and at a quick glance you can see there are many excellent sites in with a shout. If CLUAS managed to make the short list it would be a serious achievement. Any noticeable omissions from the list below? Well I note that neither Hot Press nor Muse.ie made the list.

The winner will be announced on October 11 in the Radisson SAS Royal Dublin.

Best Music Site, long listed sites Thumped State Goldenplec...

In the last month or so a lot of stuff has been going on in the background at CLUAS. Below are just some of the developments that have taken place behind the scenes (just so you don't think we do be sleeping on the job, or something like that).

Biggest readership of a single CLUAS article. Ever. CLUAS writer / blogger Steven O'Rourke got his paws on a 3 days Super-Deluxe-VIP-Access-All-Areas-and-thous-shalt-avoid-the-portaloo-queues pass to Oxegen and in return for such a lavish gift from the Gods he wrote up a review of all three days of Oxegen 2008. What's more, diligent man that he is, Steve published his three articles (one per day of the festival) within 12 hours of the end of each day. They were picked up immediately by Google (and Google News) and the consequence? Google sent over 1000 visitors to the reviews the day after the festival ended and, by the end of that week, the reviews had been checked out by 2647 visitors. This was a record for the site, no gig we've covered has ever attracted so much traffic, this even surpassed the number of visitors Michael' O'Hara's (now legendary) review of REM in the Olympia got (which when you consider that his review was linked to by REM's official site it is really saying something).

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When I first launched CLUAS.com in 1999 I used Microsoft’s FrontPage to publish and maintain content on the site. While FrontPage was, er, cutting-edge back then it today is a massively out-dated technology (indeed Microsoft announced several years ago that they are retiring FrontPage and will no longer support it from next year on). So in 2005 I started looking around for alternatives to FrontPage out of necessity. I was acutely conscious that whatever choice I'd make would be vital for the site's future and so it took me over a year of pure procrastination to come to a decision on what technology I would deploy on CLUAS. In the end I went for an open source Content Management System...