By eoghan on Wednesday, October 29, 2008Last 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... Read More » |
By eoghan on Friday, October 03, 2008 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 gain.
In addition there have - so far - been... Read More »
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By eoghan on Thursday, September 25, 2008CLUAS 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 MusicEnda Reilly2toneDrop-dState 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),... Read More » |
By eoghan on Wednesday, September 17, 2008The 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... Read More » |
By eoghan on Wednesday, September 17, 2008 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?... Read More »
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By eoghan on Wednesday, September 17, 2008 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
ThumpedStateGoldenplec... Read More »
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By eoghan on Saturday, August 16, 2008In 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).
... Read More » |
By eoghan on Tuesday, June 24, 2008 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... Read More »
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By eoghan on Monday, June 16, 2008 Back in October last year I predicted that within 6 months the Irish Times would remove its insistence on payment being required to access the vast majority of its content. Well, 6 months came and went and there were no such changes on ireland.com.
However it might be that my prediction was about six months out as, in the last week, there has been indications that the Irish Times is getting ready to restructure its online services, allowing free access most of its articles. The sooner they do, the better for them. And Irish web surfers.
But what about that other Irish pay-to-view website, Hotpress.com?... Read More »
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By eoghan on Saturday, May 31, 2008Back at the beginning of May CLUAS relaunched its email newsletter. The first newsletter I must say was a bit of a stab in the dark, considering it was four years since CLUAS had sent out its last newsletter and in the intervening period newsletters have fallen to the wayside a bit as a means for people use to get info from or on websites (especially with the rise of RSS feeds and social networking sites). Nonetheless, call me a traditionalist or whatever, I still think a newsletter can still play a valuable role for extending the reach of CLUAS.
To get our newsletter out CLUAS is using the services of YMLP.com (Your Mailing List Provider) a well established and trustworthy third party for sending out newsletters (for those who wonder why we don’t just send it out ourselves using normal email software I should point out that a third party is really needed for newsletters... Read More » |
By eoghan on Friday, May 16, 2008Two weeks ago I posted a blog entry about how Google had, all of a sudden, dramatically reduced the number of CLUAS.com pages it crawls in a day (it dropped from an average of thousand pages a day to about 25 a day, see the graph below).
I put this down to be something to do with the fact that CLUAS stopped running Google ads for 3 weeks in April. I predicted that once the Google ads were back up and running (as they were two and a bit weeks ago) all would return to normal. A quick check earlier today in CLUAS.com's Google "Webmaster Tools" account and I saw that (for once!) a prediction of mine was on the money. Google is once again crawling a daily average of 1000 pages on CLUAS. Check out the graph below... Read More » |
By eoghan on Friday, May 02, 2008Up to about 4 years ago I used to send out a CLUAS email newsletter every two or so weeks. It was very successful in regularly drawing to the site many visitors who would otherwise stop by very irregularly, if at all. The overall effect was that the newsletter helped drive traffic levels upwards. By the time I stopped sending the newsletter out it had about 3000 subscribers. However I had to stop sending it as emailing so many people simply got more and more difficult (as ISPs started, with the rise of email spam in general, to severely limit the number of emails one could send).
But, after a bit of research in the last few weeks I today relaunched the CLUAS newsletter with the help of YMLP.com, an excellent and reasonably priced third party mailing list provider. In choosing a company to go with I was conscious of the possibility of ending up with a company that would turn out to be some dodgy non-EU, non-USA backstreet outfit that were in this game to harvest email addresses... Read More » |
By eoghan on Friday, May 02, 2008(First up - apologies for my absence from this blog in recent weeks, I won't burden you with a long list of protracted excuses, suffice to say I'll be about this place a bit more often. So, moving swiftly along...)
With thousands of its pages indexed by Google, CLUAS today receives a healthy chunk of its traffic from the world's leading search engine. The number of visitors they send our way can vary greatly from day to day, from week to week, but it is safe to say that we get a minimum of several hundred vistors a day coming from Google. Behind this fact lies plenty of interesting info and observations about how Google sees CLUAS, stuff I have been keeping my eye on for years but which now (cue collective groan) I am going to explore in a series of blog entries...
Casual users of Google wouldn't be aware (nor do they need to be) of the fact that Google shares out, for free, considerable amounts of information to webmasters about how Google sees their website(s). They do this via their Webmaster Tools service... Read More » |
By eoghan on Friday, March 07, 2008Back in 2004, as part of its 5th birthday celebrations, CLUAS ran a readers' poll to identify the top 50 Irish albums of all time. Over 1300 votes were cast by CLUAS readers, giving the poll some sort of statistical legitimacy and indeed the majority of the albums that made the final top 50 were clearly deserving candidates.
Nonetheless the final results were not immune to raising a few eyebrows especially now, 4 years later, when you look through the list. For example, a Frames fixation among a certain part of the CLUAS readership back then resulted in a voting bias that helped push one two three four Frames albums to make the top 20. Indeedy. It's also curious to see that 10 of the top 50 40 albums came from the Paddy Casey-Frames-Bell-X1-Mundy-Damien Rice... Read More » |
By eoghan on Tuesday, March 04, 2008 A month ago I surveyed over 30 leading Irish music blogs and websites in terms of how heavy they were when it came to the number of kilobytes visitors would have to download once they hit the site's home page. As you do, like.
The results showed a huge diversity across the sites: the slimmest (that'll be CLUAS) stepped in at a super-svelte 97 KB, while the heaviest (egocentric) was over 20 times heavier with its scale-busting 2.1 MB of data that each visitor had to download just to access its home page.
Alas, the truth is there are far more people out there using dialup to access the internet then we'd ever imagine (Mulley only yesterday wrote about there still being 200,000 dialup users in Ireland alone)... Read More »
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