CLUAS Irish Indie Music

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        <title>CLUAS Irish Indie Music</title> 
        <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music</link> 
        <description>RSS feeds for CLUAS Irish Indie Music</description> 
        <ttl>60</ttl> <item>
    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4391/Is-this-the-worst-album-of-the-last-5-years#Comments</comments> 
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    <title>Is this the worst album of the last 5 years?</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4391/Is-this-the-worst-album-of-the-last-5-years</link> 
    <description>
	A few days I pulled together the list of the highest rated albums of those reviewed on CLUAS in the last 5 years. Now it&#39;s the turn of those albums that in the same period got the lowest ratings from CLUAS reviewers. The albums listed below are those that, since 2005, have been awarded less than 4 out of 10 by a CLUAS writer. Among them you will find albums by Placebo, Van Morrison, Smashing Pumpkins, Mercury Rev and James Blunt.&#160;

	So what album was considered to be the worst of those reviewed on CLUAS? Well the honour falls into the lap of Bj&#246;rk&#160;whose 2007album Volta was awarded a grand total of zero out of 10 by CLUAS writer Rev Jules. It was a divisive assessment if the comments below the review are anything to go by.

	Here comes the full list...

	Topping the list with a rating of zero out of 10...

	
		Bj&#246;rk&#160;&#39;Volta&#39; (2007 release)


	1 out of 10

	
		James Blunt &#39;All The Lost Souls&#39; (2007 release)
	
		Musiq Soulchild &#39;Luvanmusiq&#39; (2007 release)
	
		The Doors &#39;The Very Best of The Doors&#39; (2007 release)
	
		Correcto &#39;Correcto&#39; (2008 release)


	2 out of 10

	
		Red Hot Chili Peppers &#39;Stadium Arcadium&#39; (2006 release)
	
		Placebo&#160;&#39;Meds&#39; (2006 release)
	
		Van Morrison &#39;Pay the Devil&#39; (2006 release)
	
		Mercury Rev &#39;Snowflake Midnight&#39; (2008 release)
	
		Dan Black &#39;Un&#39; (2009 release)
	
		Alabama 3 &#39;M.O.R.&#39; (2007 release)


	2.5 out of 10

	
		Cute Is What We Aim For &#39;The Same Old Blood Rush...&#39; (2006 release)


	3 out of 10

	
		Smashing Pumpkins &#39;Zeitgeist&#39; (2007 release)
	
		The Enemy &#39;We&#39;ll live and die in these towns&#39; (2007 release)
	
		Linkin Park &#39;Minutes To Midnight&#39; (2007 release)
	
		&#39;Spiderman 3&#39; (soundtrack) (2007 release)
	
		Cornelius &#39;Sensuous&#39; (2007 release)
	
		Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles &#39;Original Soundtrack&#39; (2007 release)
	
		Taking Back Sunday &#39;New Again&#39; (2009 release)
	
		Michael Knight (I&#39;m Not Entirely Clear...) (2008 release)
	
		Panic At The Disco &#39;Pretty Odd&#39; (2008 release)
	
		Bill Coleman &#39;I&#39;ll Tear My Own Walls Down&#39; (2008 release)
	
		Jet &#39;Shine on&#39; (2006 release)
	
		Josh Ritter &#39;The Animal Years&#39; (2006 release)
	
		The Tyde&#160; &#39;Three&#39;s Co.&#39; (2006 release)
	
		Drowsy &#39;Snow on Moss on Stone&#39; (2006 release)
	
		Wonderstuff &#39;Suspended By Stars&#39; (2006 release)
	
		Devendra Banhart &#39;Cripple Crow&#39; (2005 release)


	3.5 out of 10

	
		Great White (2006 release)
	
		Laura Izibor &#39;Let The Truth Be Told&#39; (2009 release)
	
		The Corrs &#39;Dreams - the Ultimate Collection&#39; (2007 release)


	...and scraping in with a score just below 4 out of 10...

	
		Cansei De Ser Sexy (3.8 out of 10, 2006 release)

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    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Sat, 10 Jul 2010 03:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
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    <title>The absolute best albums of the last 5 years?</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4392/The-absolute-best-albums-of-the-last-5-years</link> 
    <description>
	 There are over 500 album reviews in the CLUAS archives. While they&#39;ve always been accessible via our archive pages, the way the reviews have been presented (one big long unordered list of reviews for each year) is not very user friendly. Which is a pity as there are some terrific reviews in there, as well as reviews of great albums that may have slipped under one&#39;s radar. Thankfully the chances of missing out on some such gems over the years has now decreased dramatically. Read on for the fabulous details...

	The CLUAS album archive pages have now been reorganised to ensure that our album reviews are listed, for each year, in order of the rating that the reviewer gave the album out of 10. Is that a collective &#39;Wow&#39; I hear?

	Anyways. What&#39;s interesting to see is the albums that came out on the top of the pile each year. Most of the top ranking albums are solid but some are, ehhm, let&#39;s just say &quot;curious&quot;. Below are listed the very top ranking albums (i.e. albums that scored 8.5 or more out of 10) as reviewed by CLUAS writers from 2005 to 2009. Are these the best albums of that period? Certainly not, although many are gems that will stand the test of time. One thing for sure is that the list of albums and their accompanying reviews make for interesting reading.

	So what was the top rated album released between 2005 and 2009, according to the CLUAS writers? The answer is, of course, obvious. It has to be the, ehh, all time classic &#39;Holiday Mix 2005&#39; released by DFA Records.... Read on for even more mind-bending insights revealed in the list (including releases by 10 Irish acts).

	10 out of 10

	
		DFA Records &#39;Holiday Mix 2005&#39;


	9.5 out of 10

	
		Ray LaMontagne &#39;Trouble&#39; (2005 release)
	
		C O D E S &#39;Trees Dream in Algebra&#39; (2009 release)
	
		Placebo &#39;Battle For The Sun&#39; (2009 release)


	9 out of 10

	
		Biffy Clyro &#39;Only Revolutions&#39; (2009 release)
	
		Pearl Jam &#39;Backspacer&#39;  (2009 release)
	
		Fnessnej &#39;Stay Fresh, Ey&#39; (2009 release)
	
		Pearse McGloughlin &#39;Busy Whisper&#39; (2009 release)
	
		Alela Diane &#39;To Be Still&#39; (2009 release)
	
		Graham Coxon &#39;The Spinning Top&#39; (2009 release)
	
		Julie Feeney &#39;Pages&#39; (2009 release)
	
		Dark Room Notes &#39;We Love You Dark Matter&#39; (2009 release)
	
		Antony and the Johnsons &#39;I am bird now&#39; (2005 release)
	
		The Black Keys &#39;Rubber Factory&#39; (2005 release)
	
		Go! Team &#39;Thunder, Lightning Strike&#39; (2005 release)
	
		Joanna Newsom &#39;Milk-Eyed Mender&#39; (2005 release)
	
		Modest Mouse &#39;Good News For People Who Love Bad News&#39; (2005 release)
	
		Rufus Wainwright &#39;Want Two&#39; (2005 release)
	
		David Byrne &amp; Brian Eno &#39;My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts&#39; (2006 release)
	
		Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (2006 release)
	
		Artic Monkeys &#39;Whatever People Say I Am, That&#39;s What I&#39;m Not&#39; (2006 release)
	
		Future Kings of Spain &#39;Nervousystem&#39; (2007 release)
	
		Alessandra Celletti &#39;Esoterik Satie&#39; (2007 release)
	
		Electrelane &#39;No Shouts, No Calls&#39; (2008 release)


	Between 8.5 and 9 out of 10

	
		Rilo Kiley &#39;More Adventurous&#39; (8.9 out of 10, 2005 release)
	
		Arcade Fire &#39;Funeral&#39; (8.75 out of 10,&#160;2005 release)


	8.5 out of 10

	
		Ryan Adams &amp; the Cardinals &#39;Jacksonville City Lights&#39; (2005 release)
	
		Bell X1 &#39;Flock&#39; (2005 release)
	
		Bloc Party &#39;Silent Alarm&#39; (2005 release)
	
		Martin Finke &#39;Crown Time&#39; (2005 release)
	
		M83 &#39;Before The Dawn Heals Us&#39; (2005 release)
	
		The Frank and Walters &#39;A Renewed Interest in Happiness&#39; (2006 release)
	
		Luxembourg &#39;Front&#39; (2006 release)
	
		Hope of the States &#39;Left&#39; (2006 release)
	
		Islands&#160; &#39;Return To The Sea&#39; (2006 release)
	
		OK GO &#39;Oh No&#39; (2006 release)
	
		Goodtime John &#39;I&#39;ll Sing Till The Sun Turns Cold&#39; (2006 release)
	
		Neil Young &#39;Live At Massey Hall&#39; (2007 release)
	
		&#39;Death Proof&#39; (soundtrack) (2007 release)
	
		Jape &#39;Ritual&#39; (2008 release)
	
		Elbow &#39;Seldom Seen Kid&#39; (2008 release)
	
		Ham Sandwich &#39;Carry The Meek&#39; (2008 release)
	
		Mumford &amp; Sons &#39;Sigh No More&#39; (2009 release)
	
		AFI &#39;Crash Love&#39; (2009 release)
	
		Tommy Reilly &#39;Words On the Floor&#39; (2009 release)&#160;

More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Tue, 06 Jul 2010 03:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4393/Why-so-few-Irish-acts-at-Glastonbury-2010#Comments</comments> 
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    <title>Why so few Irish acts at Glastonbury 2010?</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4393/Why-so-few-Irish-acts-at-Glastonbury-2010</link> 
    <description>
	The lineup for Glastonbury 2010 was announced yesterday and it&#39;s a whopper (as you&#39;d expect for &#160;the 40th anniversary of the festival). Over the 3 days of the festival there are 285 different musical acts scheduled to perform (and that&#39;s not even counting the acts earmarked for the &quot;Poetry and Words&quot; stage).

	Playing are Muse, U2, Vampire Weekend, Flaming Lips, Florence and the Machine, La Roux, Pet Shop Boys, Orbital, MGMT, Midlake, The xx, The National, Editors, Grizzly Bear and Broken Social Scene. And the list goes on...

	[Aside: Having managed last Sunday morning to secure one of the last tickets to Glasto 2010, I do be terribly exicited].&#160;

	However what&#39;s disappointing is the Irish delegation at the festival. Yes, U2 are headlining on the Pyramid stage on the Friday night (and could well deliver a highlight of the festival, it being their first time in over 20 years to deliver a full set without any visual gimmickery&#160;in front an outdoor crowd) but otherwise you have to dig very deep to find Irish acts.

	As far as I can see there are, in addition to U2, only 8 other Irish acts in the entire lineup (or 9 if your definition of Irish stretches to including Rodrigo y Gabriela). And half of those (The Saw Doctors, Christy Moore, Brian Kennedy and Ash) could not credibly be held up as representative examples of where the Irish music scene is today.&#160;

	So what&#39;s the reason behind this? Well I have no clue. Is it that the more recent waves of Irish acts are not selling themselves hard enough to the Glasto promoters? Or are they doing so, but the promoters are not interested? Or does the best of Irish scene not cut the mustard for such a prestigious festival? Or some mix of the above? Any insights out there?

	Here are the Irish acts confirmed so far for Glasto 2010:

	
		U2
	
		Two Door Cinema Club
	
		Brian Kennedy
	
		Julie Feeney
	
		Ash
	
		Christy Moore
	
		Imelda May (who is actually playing two gigs at Glasto 2010)
	
		The Saw Doctors
	
		Fionn Regan
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    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Fri, 16 Apr 2010 03:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4394/CLUAS-on-the-move--from-Arizona-to-Nebraska#Comments</comments> 
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    <title>CLUAS on the move - from Arizona to Nebraska!</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4394/CLUAS-on-the-move--from-Arizona-to-Nebraska</link> 
    <description>
	Two weeks ago I undertook one of the biggest tasks in the last 4 years of CLUAS: I moved the entire website to a new hosting company. &#160;It&#39;s a move that sees us abandon the arid desert of Arizona for the flat plains of Nebraska...&#160;

	For the last four years we were hosted by the Arizona-based company Crystaltech&#160;and they served us well. However in the last 6 or so months I have seen that CLUAS needs a hosting company that&#160;really understands the Content Management System we use (&quot;DotNetNuke&quot;, also known as DNN). DNN is a very sophisticated piece of kit and is simply becoming more and more critical to CLUAS and its operation.&#160;

	&#160;

	There is one hosting company - PowerDNN - who are fully focused on hosting just DNN websites. Their tech support team know DotNetNuke inside-out, which is exactly when I need to ensure our website is maintained in the right environment and, when problems crop up, that I can contact a support person who knows DNN. PowerDNN - based in Nebraska - fit the bill and are now, I am pleased to say, the new home of CLUAS.com.

	&#160;

	They are a bit more expensive than our previous company (and we even get less diskspace and database space than we had with Crystaltech, something that has been debated elsewhere) but I think the benefits will outweigh these factors that are less critical in our case.

	&#160;

	I got to see the expertise of PowerDNN almost immediately during this move: there were a few problems that reared their head in the migration but all was soon solved thanks to the excellent help of Joe, a senior engineer at PowerDNN, who dropped all tools for a period to ensure some rough spots were ironed out and that CLUAS was soon up and running&#160;with PowerDNN.

	&#160;

	Moving the site to these DNN experts in Nebraska brought some immediate benefits. For example, an utterly head-wrecking problem that I have been trying to fix for 6 or so months is now fixed. The problem was that since August 2009 CLUAS users who, during login, clicked the &#39;remember me&#39; option (which should keep them logged in to CLUAS on that computer for 7 days) would instead find themselves being logged out after a really short period of time, sometimes even minutes. This was a major frustration for writers publishing new articles, or users posting entries to the discussion board, as sometimes they&#39;d be logged out before they &#39;d finished writing their content and their work would be lost. Thankfully this problem is now a thing of the past.

	&#160;

	Another benefit I am seeing is a pretty big reduction (it could be as high as 50%) in the load time of pages on CLUAS. I&#39;ll wait another week to see if these fast speeds continue to hold up. If so one of Ireland&#39;s fastest music websites will have just gotten even faster.&#160;Look out for a blog entry from me about it next week with nifty nice graphs and stuff.

	&#160;

	So, in the meantime can you step aside for Bruce Springsteen and his homage to Nebraska, CLUAS.com&#39;s new home...

	&#160;

	
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    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Mon, 25 Jan 2010 03:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4395/The-story-behind-the-2009-CLUAS-Writers-poll#Comments</comments> 
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    <title>The story behind the 2009 CLUAS Writers poll</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4395/The-story-behind-the-2009-CLUAS-Writers-poll</link> 
    <description>Typically at this time of year CLUAS is full democratic flight with polling booths wide open for readers to submit their votes to find the top albums of 2009. However, this year we&#39;ve decided to not do a readers poll. And why not? It&#39;s simply because of the utterly mad amount of time it takes to tot up the thousands of votes we get.

Fret not, as there will still be a CLUAS poll this year. The last few weeks the CLUAS writers have been busy voting for their top 10 albums of 2009 and tomorrow (16 December) the results will be published. As always the CLUAS writers have stepped up to the plate and their votes collectively deliver an intriguing, diverse, credible and occasionally surprising top 40. I was pleased as well to see that, despite the intense competition from non-Irish releases, a total of five Irish albums released in 2009 made it into the top 40. Which ones?&#160;You&#39;ll see tomorrow.

In advance of the poll here&#39;s a quick overview of the numbers behind this year&#39;s writers poll:

    23 writers submitted a list of their fave albums of the year.
    202 votes were cast (an average of just under 9 albums voted for by each writer)
    131 different albums albums got a vote, of which...
    ...89 albums were voted for by only one writer leaving us with...
    ...42 albums that were voted for by 2 or more writers.
    Breakdown of number of writers who voted for an album that made the top 40:
    
        Number of albums voted for by 5 or more writers --&gt; 3
        Number of albums voted for by 4 writers --&gt; 3
        Number of albums voted for by 3 writers --&gt; 10
        Number of albums voted for by 2 writers --&gt; 24
    
    

One thing I can already say is that the album that topped the poll did so by a healthy distance. It was voted for by over a third of all the writers who voted (8 out of the 23). That there would be broad agreement among the writers on the top album of 2009 is quite a surprise considering the massive number of different releases (131) that secured a vote in the poll. 

Hang in there until tomorrow to see which album topped the poll. The only hint I&#39;ll offer is that it is NOT one of the following two 2009 releases (both of which just missed a place in the, er, coveted top 40, they being placed 41st and 42nd placed in the poll):

    Mark Eitzel &#39;Klamath&#39;
    Arctic Monkeys &#39;Humbug&#39;
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    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Tue, 15 Dec 2009 03:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4396/Irish-Web-Awards-2009-The-Skinny-the-Bloated-and-the-Bonkers#Comments</comments> 
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    <title>Irish Web Awards 2009: The Skinny, the Bloated and the Bonkers</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4396/Irish-Web-Awards-2009-The-Skinny-the-Bloated-and-the-Bonkers</link> 
    <description>A pet peeve of mine is bloated websites: site with pages that are so stuffed with  images and widgets that they take too long to download, even on broadband. Over our 10 years of operations  CLUAS .com has continually tried to keep things lean and mean when it comes to page size (indeed CLUAS,  as far as I am aware, remains Ireland&#39;s lightest – and hence fastest – music website).
Back in 2008 I had a good old rant about  bloated Irish websites (specifically about Music and  Technology blogs). Another indulgent rant is long overdue, this time I&#39;ve fixed  my attention on the  winners at the recent 2009 Irish Web Awards. Are the best Irish websites of  2009 a lean and mean bunch, or are they a morbidly obese bunch? Read on...
The table below presents the results of an analysis of all 21 sites that won  an award at the Irish web awards in terms their page size as reflected in:

    the total size of their home page, and
    the total number of files that need to be downloaded (also know as number  	of &quot;HTTP requests&quot;) to create the page. 	

The 3 colour-coded categories  in the table correspond as follows:

    &quot;The Skinny&quot;:  	(&quot;Optimal balance of page size and http requests&quot;)
    The Bloated:  	(&quot;Just too much going on in terms of page size and http requests&quot;)
    &quot;The Bonkers&quot;:  	(&quot;Inexcusably massive number of HTTP requests coupled with an utterly obese  	page size&quot;)

The Irish Web Award 2009 winners, categorised by payload


    
        
            Site
            Winner of Irish web award for…
            Number of HTTP requests
            Total size of page (KB)
        
        
            The  			Persuaders
            Best Podcaster
            9
            123 KB
        
        
            Kildare  			Street
            Best New Web App/Service
            11
            148 KB
        
        
            RTE Sport
            Best Sports Site
            34
            167 KB
        
        
            CLUAS.com
            (did not win, just shortlisted)
            30
            168 KB
        
        
            Silicon  			Republic
            Best Technology Site
            44
            217 KB
        
        
            Count Me Out
            Best Social Media Campaign
            32
            240 KB
        
        
            Curious Wines
            Best eCommerce site
            45
            266 KB
        
        
            Talk Irish
            Best Education site
            40
            271 KB
        
        
            RTE
            Most Useful Website
            61
            295 KB
        
        
            Entertainment.ie
            Best Entertainment Website
            91
            350 KB
        
        
            Look and  			taste
            Best Videocaster
            35
            432 KB
        
        
            Boards.ie
            Best Discussion forum
            23
            468 KB
        
        
            Cars Ireland
            Best Practice
            100
            540 KB
        
        
            Decisions  			for Heroes
            Most Innovative Website
            68
            708 KB
        
        
            Nos Mag
            An Su&#237;omh Gaeilge is Fear
            64
            729 KB
        
        
            Rose Project
            Most Accessible Website
            44
            792 KB
        
        
             			Phantom FM
            Best Radio Website
            145
            560 KB
        
        
             			IDA Ireland
            Best Govt. &amp; Council site
            175
            655 KB
        
        
             			Irish Times
            Best Online Publication
            151
            832 KB
        
        
            Organic  			supermarket
            Most Beautiful Website
            71
            1376 KB
        
        
             			Nialler9
            Best Music Site
            100
            1387 KB
        
        
             			Dance Ireland
            Best Arts Website
            62
            2053 KB
        
        
            
            Note: The data above is based on visits to  			these sites on 14 Oct 2009, page size of any site may have changed since then.
            
        
    


&#160;
Seeing a whole load of data listed in a table is one thing. Presenting  it in a chart is another, and can often make it easier to understand what is going  on across a diverse set of data. So I plotted the results of each individual website  on a chart in an effort to extract some more immediate and meaningful results from  this analysis. The chart (see it below, where each dot represents one of the websites)  has the number of HTTP request along the X-axis, the total size of the home page  on the Y-axis. The general trend of the plotted data (that&#39;ll be the blue line rising  gently upwards, my Leaving Cert Physics teacher would be proud of me) confirms what  you&#39;d expect, i.e. that the greater the number of HTTP requests a web page makes,  the larger the size of that web page. However it&#39;s also easy to pick out from the  chart which sites are skinny (hello to the sites that managed to squeeze into the  box way down there in the most bottom left part of the graph) and which are bloated. And then there  are those outlying sites which are just just barking when it comes to page size  and number of HTTP requests...

Pity your poor browser - and internet connection –  if you hit one of these &#39;bonkers&#39; sites. For these 6 sites we&#39;re talking an average  payload of 1.17 megabytes of data to be downloaded via an average  of 104 HTTP requests!? Take the worst offender in terms of page size – danceireland.ie.  Their home page is made up of 2MB of data (I repeat: 2 megabytes)  to be downloaded. If you&#39;re on an iPhone and visit their home page, this single  page will consume 7% of the daily bandwidth your phone company has allocated you  (based on the monthly limit of  1GB of data afforded by O2 to iPhone customers in Ireland). One single solitary  web page consuming 7% of your daily download allowance? Truly. Madly. Deeply. Bonkers. 

The 8 &#39;bloated&#39; award winners? They are only somewhat better than their bonkers  brethren. Between them they impose an average payload on visitors of 455 KB of files  to be downloaded via an average of 70 HTTP requests.
But it&#39;s hats off to the 6 &#39;skinny&#39; sites (that&#39;ll  be 5 of the 2009 Irish Web Award winners plus gatecrasher CLUAS.com) who all manage  to keep their page size to less than 300kb while keeping the number of HTTP requests  to less than 50. Between them they average a modest 265 KB of files to be downloaded  per page via an average of 31 HTTP requests. Needless to say, thanks to our ongoing  dietary efforts, CLUAS is among these 8 skinny sites, and our page size of 168KB  means we clock in as the 4th lightest of the 22 sites.
Two concluding pleas:

    
    Plea 1: Could all webmasters run their websites  	through one of the many free online tools that check the overall size of a page  	(I recommend the one offered by the 	WebsiteOptimization.com  	guys). If comes out at over 500KB get pruning. Remove some heavy images or chunky  	widgets on your page to get it down to a reasonable size.
    
    
    Plea 2: Both the size of a webpage - and  	the number of HTTP requests the page makes - should be standard judging criteria  	in any web awards. Placing a carrot like that in front of any website owner  	who aspires to being recognised by his/her peers with an award for their site is one way to help focus minds on this often overlooked but important  	aspect of user experience, whether the user be connected via broadband or dialup. (...Of course it never crossed my mind that if super light CLUAS.com were ever to be up for consideration of an award  with such an additional judging criteria, that our chances might get a bit of a lift...).
    


&#160;More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Wed, 21 Oct 2009 03:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
    <guid isPermaLink="false">f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:4396</guid> 
    <enclosure url="http://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Blogs/Promenade/tabid/75/EntryId/1232/Irish-Web-Awards-2009-The-Skinny-the-Bloated-and-the-Bonkers.aspx" length="23842" type="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
</item>
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4397/CLUAS-on-final-list-of-nominees-for-Best-Irish-Music-Site#Comments</comments> 
    <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> 
    <wfw:commentRss>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=36&amp;ModuleID=728&amp;ArticleID=4397</wfw:commentRss> 
    <trackback:ping>https://www.cluas.com:443/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=4397&amp;PortalID=0&amp;TabID=36</trackback:ping> 
    <title>CLUAS on final list of nominees for &#39;Best Irish Music Site&#39;</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4397/CLUAS-on-final-list-of-nominees-for-Best-Irish-Music-Site</link> 
    <description>Last week it was announced that 26 sites were in consideration for the category of &quot;Best Music Site&quot; at the Irish Web Awards 2009, and CLUAS&#160;was one of them.
The 26 sites has now been whittled down to 11 and I was pleased to see CLUAS.com is one of them. The full list of sites now in consideration is:

    Muzu TV
    Heineken Music
    State Magazine
    Nialler9
    Cluas
    Metal Ireland
    Comhaltas
    Fred the Band
    Thumped
    John Conneely
    Golden Plec

As you&#160; can see we are in fine company. The winner will be announced on 10 October at a ceremony in the Radisson SAS&#160;Royal Hotel in Dublin. Best of luck to all those who made the final 11.More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Tue, 29 Sep 2009 03:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
    <guid isPermaLink="false">f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:4397</guid> 
    <enclosure url="http://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Blogs/Promenade/tabid/75/EntryId/1205/CLUAS-on-final-list-of-nominees-for-Best-Irish-Music-Site.aspx" length="23842" type="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
</item>
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4398/CLUAS-shortlisted-for-Best-Irish-Music-Site#Comments</comments> 
    <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> 
    <wfw:commentRss>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=36&amp;ModuleID=728&amp;ArticleID=4398</wfw:commentRss> 
    <trackback:ping>https://www.cluas.com:443/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=4398&amp;PortalID=0&amp;TabID=36</trackback:ping> 
    <title>CLUAS shortlisted for &#39;Best Irish Music Site&#39;</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4398/CLUAS-shortlisted-for-Best-Irish-Music-Site</link> 
    <description>Yesterday CLUAS was one of the sites shortlisted for the &#39;Best Music Website&#39; category of the 2009 Irish Web Awards, the winner will be announced on 10 October at a ceremony in the Radission SAS&#160;Royal hotel in Dublin. A total of 26 different sites were nominated in the category, the other sites that made the grade along as well as CLUAS&#160;are listed below. Best of luck to all concerned!

    http://drop-d.ie
    http://state.ie
    http://roisindubh.info
    http://nialler9.com
    http://kilkennymusic.com
    http://Muzu.tv
    http://thumped.com
    
    http://downloadmusic.ie
    http://musicreviewunsigned.com
    http://panicdots.com
    http://irishtimes.com/blogs/ontherecord
    http://guesslist.com
    http://dmi.com
    http://johnconneely.com
    http://metalireland.com
    http://goldenplec.com
    http://fredtheband.com
    http://umusic.ie
    http://archive.comhaltas.ie
    http://comhaltas.ie
    http://aliasempire.com
    http://heinekenmusic.ie
    http://haidooo.wordpress.com
    http://music.eircom.net
    http://sharoncorr.com

&#160;More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Thu, 17 Sep 2009 03:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
    <guid isPermaLink="false">f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:4398</guid> 
    <enclosure url="http://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Blogs/Promenade/tabid/75/EntryId/1187/CLUAS-shortlisted-for-Best-Irish-Music-Site.aspx" length="23842" type="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
</item>
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4399/Making-CLUAS-a-W3C-compliant-website#Comments</comments> 
    <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> 
    <wfw:commentRss>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=36&amp;ModuleID=728&amp;ArticleID=4399</wfw:commentRss> 
    <trackback:ping>https://www.cluas.com:443/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=4399&amp;PortalID=0&amp;TabID=36</trackback:ping> 
    <title>Making CLUAS a W3C compliant website</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4399/Making-CLUAS-a-W3C-compliant-website</link> 
    <description>While for many surfers the WWW often resembles a modern Wild West where just about anything goes there are - believe it or not - some formal standards in place. The particular standards I&#39;m talking about are for HTML code: how HTML should be used when creating a webpage (and how a browser should interpret HTML and present it on a page). The setting of the standards is overseen by the all important World Wide Web consortium (also know as W3C, which is headed up by Tim Berners Lee, no less than your man who invented the World Wide Web).
Now to be honest, up to about a year ago, CLUAS did not care about these standards and there was not a single page among our thousands that was even close to being compliant. This did not stop me having a begrudging respect for websites that spouted on about their &quot;W3C compliancy&quot;. I was after all only too keenly aware that CLUAS would need to overcome a proverbial mountain to enter the hallowed corridors of compliant websites.
All the same, last year I looked into it and I started - slowly - to update our HTML code, with a little change here and minor tweak there, all with a view to making as many as possible of CLUAS.com&#39;s thousands of pages compliant. To be honest it was initially just one of those pointless personal challenges you set yourself once in a while, the motivation of which few people would ever understand (and if they ever did understand the motivation they&#39;d doubt your sanity).
The exercise is ongoing however already the result is that already a massive number of pages on CLUAS.com are at last complaint to W3C&#39;s &quot;HTML 4.01 Transitional&quot; standard. Basically the vast majority of pages whose address does not end in .aspx are now complaint (for example 73% of last month’s top 100 most visited &quot;non aspx&quot; pages are now compliant).
So what about these non-compliant .aspx web pages? Well these pages are generated using the DotNetNuke content management system we use and just a handful of them are already compliant (to the different &quot;XHTML 1.0 Transitional&quot; standard). However the level of their compliancy will improve in coming months as the next release of DotNetNuke Blog Module (which is used to publish our album and gig reviews, blogs, and interviews) should be fully compliant, meaning in one swoop huge numbers of CLUAS&#160;pages will step in the world of compliancy.
So why bother about compliancy? Put simply there are a number of advantages, such as:

    File size and loading times are reduced.
    Sites are easier to update in terms of content or styling because of the smart structure (i.e. separation of content from styling) that is implicit in W3C compliant websites.
    Greater assurance of future proofing your website - if a site obeys established rules, they should continue to work in browsers and devices of the future.
    And having a compliant website means the webmaster feels all smug and elitist compared to pitiful other sites that have not clue about the wonders of compliant HTML code.

The gas thing is that while all this effort may result one day in CLUAS.com being a website fully compliant with W3C standards, the next generation of HTML&#160;standards for web pages are already in the pipeline. So we may have to start this compliancy effort all over again…More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Wed, 15 Jul 2009 03:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
    <guid isPermaLink="false">f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:4399</guid> 
    <enclosure url="http://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Blogs/Promenade/tabid/75/EntryId/1107/Making-CLUAS-a-W3C-compliant-website.aspx" length="23842" type="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
</item>
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4400/Nailing-traffic-with-10-years-of-links#Comments</comments> 
    <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> 
    <wfw:commentRss>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=36&amp;ModuleID=728&amp;ArticleID=4400</wfw:commentRss> 
    <trackback:ping>https://www.cluas.com:443/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=4400&amp;PortalID=0&amp;TabID=36</trackback:ping> 
    <title>Nailing traffic with 10 years of links</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4400/Nailing-traffic-with-10-years-of-links</link> 
    <description>It&#39;s common knowledge that securing links from other websites plays a key role in getting your website&#39;s pages into major search engines. CLUAS has been steadily attracting links over its 10 year lifetime resulting in a steady stream of people visiting CLUAS via these links and also - more importantly - ensuring we have an excellent ranking in the search engines. For example we have, for years, been the number 1 result for people searching &#39;Irish indie music&#39; (and bizarrely also for &#39;Irish Jazz music&#39;). But such searches are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. CLUAS receives a very considerable amount of its traffic from search engines thanks to - literally - thousands of different &#39;long tail&#39; searches done by users each month.
So why does CLUAS rank above other Irish music websites when it comes to so many search phrases? There is a complicated answer. And a simple answer. The simple answer is: &quot;links, and loads of them&quot;. Thanks to something I stumbled upon last week I can now visually demonstrate the &quot;linking success&quot; of CLUAS compared to other similar Irish music sites. I came across a tool made available by &quot;Majestic SEO&quot; (a company offering &quot;Search Engine Optimisation&quot; services) who started to trawl the WWW back in June 2007 and recorded all the links they found. To use their own words they have...:

&quot;...crawled over 96 billion webpages and analyzed almost 697 billion unique URLs and their anchor text to calculate who link to who and with what anchor text.&quot;

They allow registered users of their site to compare websites in terms of the number of links they have attracted. The graph below (click on it to see it in higher resolution) shows the number of different domains that the Majestic SEO crew found over the last two years linking to CLUAS and compares it with the links they found for 3 other Irish music sites (Hotpress.com, State.ie and Nialler9.com).

Click to see graph in higher resolution

It is clear from the graph that CLUAS has attracted links from more domains (i.e. websites) than any of the other sites. This massive repository of sites linking to us is, if you ask, me a key signal used by the search engines when they decide to rank CLUAS above other websites. Building such a eco-system of links sure takes time, but we can vouch for the fact that once it is done the impact is considerable (and occasionally surprising...).More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Tue, 14 Jul 2009 03:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
    <guid isPermaLink="false">f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:4400</guid> 
    <enclosure url="http://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Blogs/Promenade/tabid/75/EntryId/1105/Nailing-traffic-with-10-years-of-links.aspx" length="23842" type="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4401/CLUAScom-traffic-surges-after-Michael-Jackson-dies#Comments</comments> 
    <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> 
    <wfw:commentRss>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=36&amp;ModuleID=728&amp;ArticleID=4401</wfw:commentRss> 
    <trackback:ping>https://www.cluas.com:443/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=4401&amp;PortalID=0&amp;TabID=36</trackback:ping> 
    <title>CLUAS.com traffic surges after Michael Jackson dies</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4401/CLUAScom-traffic-surges-after-Michael-Jackson-dies</link> 
    <description>There have been numerous media reports of surges in internet traffic once word was out that Michael Jackson had died. For example, the spike in traffic that hit Google was so out of the norm they thought they were being hit with an automated attack.
CLUAS too saw a surge in traffic as soon as word was out that The King of Pop had passed away. In our case this was due to our 2005 article on Michael Jackson&#39;s fall from grace (&quot;Michael Jackson: demon or demonised? Or both?&quot;) that Aidan Curran authored. It alone was visited a whopping 1190 times last Friday (see graph, the spike you see is for the number of page views the article had on Friday). A huge increase when you consider, according to our web stats service, that in the year before Jacko passed away, this article was visited an average of 8.6 times a day.
Over the weekend the traffic kept flowing to the article, and by Sunday evening it had been visited a total of 1820 times over four days (see table below). This is just another example of how CLUAS.com&#39;s focus on optimising its pages for search engines can, when you least expect it, deliver a result.

    Visits to Michael Jackson article on CLUAS
    
        
            Day
            Visits
        
        
            Thursday June 25
            110
        
        
            Friday June 26
            1190
        
        
            Saturday June 27
            274
        
        
            Sunday June 28
            246
        
        
            Total
            1820
        
    

&#160;More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Mon, 29 Jun 2009 03:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
    <guid isPermaLink="false">f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:4401</guid> 
    <enclosure url="http://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Blogs/Promenade/tabid/75/EntryId/1083/CLUAS-com-traffic-surges-after-Michael-Jackson-dies.aspx" length="23842" type="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4402/Anatomy-of-a-writers-poll-part-2#Comments</comments> 
    <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> 
    <wfw:commentRss>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=36&amp;ModuleID=728&amp;ArticleID=4402</wfw:commentRss> 
    <trackback:ping>https://www.cluas.com:443/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=4402&amp;PortalID=0&amp;TabID=36</trackback:ping> 
    <title>Anatomy of a writers poll... (part 2)</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4402/Anatomy-of-a-writers-poll-part-2</link> 
    <description>As promised last week in the first part of the anatomy of our poll to find the top Irish albums released in the last 10 years, you&#39;ll find below the albums that were voted for but did not make the top 50. In total there are 86 albums that were voted for but that did not make the final published list of ranked albums. Of these, 5 were voted for by 2 writers, the rest secured a solitary vote.
A quick glance and you can see some acts who were &#39;penalised&#39; for their productivity in the last decade as their votes, being spread over multiple albums, diluted their rankings and so reduced their prospects of making the final top 50 (e.g. Ann Scott, Redneck Manifesto, Future Kings of Spain, Nina Hynes and Pony Club).
[Aside: I didn&#39;t have the time to do a forensic eligibilty check on the albums below so you may come across entries that were not full length albums, or were released before 1999, or are by acts that are not Irish...]
Albums outside the top 50 that secured 2 votes:

    Bell X1 - Flock
    Crayonsmith - White Wonder
    The Dudley Corporation - In Love With The Dudley Corporation
    Hybrasil - The Monkey Pole
    Super Extra Bonus Party - Super Extra Bonus Party

Albums outside the top 50 that secured 1 vote:

    Adebisi Shank - This Is The Album By A Band Called Adebisi Shank
    Adrian Crowley - Long Distance Swimmer
    Agitated Radio Pilot - World Winding Down
    Ann Scott - Poor Horse
    Ann Scott - Were Smiling
    Bell x1 - Neither am I
    Boa Morte - Soon It Will Come Time To Face The World Outside
    Cane 141 - Moon Pool
    Carly Sings - The Glove Thief
    Cathy Davy - Something Ilk
    Chequerboard - Penny Black
    Ciaran Murphy - Once Upon A Time In Ireland
    Damien Dempsey - To Hell or Barbados
    Dark Room Notes - We Love You Dark Matter
    David Geraghty - Kill Your Darlings
    David Kitt - Not Fade Away
    Delorentos - In love with Detail
    Director - We Thrive On Big Cities
    Dirty Beatniks - Feedback
    Dublin Guitar Quartet - Deleted Pieces
    Duke Special - Songs From The Deep Forest
    Frank and Walters - Glass
    Future Kings of Spain&#39;s Debut album
    Future Kings of Spain - Nervousystem
    Gamak - We are the way forward
    God is an Astronaut - The end of the beginning
    Hal - Hal
    Headgear - Headgear
    Iain Archer - Flood The Tanks
    Iarla &#211; Lion&#225;ird - Invisible Fields
    Jape - The monkeys in the zoo have more fun than me
    Jimmy Behan - Days are what we live in
    Jubilee Allstars - Lights of the City
    Juno Falls - Weightless
    Katie Kim - Twelve
    Kila - T&#243;g &#233; go Bog &#233;.
    Mark Geary - 33 1/3 Grand Street
    Martin Finke - Untended Stories
    Mic Christoper - Skylarkin
    Mick Flannery - White Lies
    Mumblin&#39; Deaf Ro - Sen&#243;r, My Friend
    Mundy - 24 Star Hotel
    Neosupervital - Neosupervital
    Nina Hynes - Staros
    Nina Hynes and the Husbands - Really Really Do
    Paul O&#39;Reilly - First Thing In The Morning
    Pony Club - Family Business
    Pony Club - Post Romantic
    Pugwash - Jollity
    Redneck Manifesto- Cut Off Your Heart From Your Head
    Redneck Manifesto - I Am Brazil
    Redneck Manifesto - Seven Stabs
    Republic of Loose - This Is The Tomb Of The Juice
    Robotnik - Pleasant Sqaure
    Roisin Murphy - Ruby Blue
    Rory Gallagher - Wheels Within Wheels (not eligible)
    Si Schroeder - Coping Mechanisms
    Skindive - Skindive
    Somadrone - Of Pattern and Purpose
    Ten Past Seven - Shut Up Your Face
    The Aftermath - Friendlier Up Here
    The Chalets - Check In
    The Devlins - Consent
    The Divine Comedy - Absent Friends
    The Flaws - Achieving Vagueness
    The Frames - The Cost
    The Jimmy Cake - Spectre and Crown
    The Mighty Stef - The Sins of Sainte Catherine
    The Moondogs - Red Fish
    The Sleeping Years - Were Becoming Islands One By One
    The Swell Season - The Swell Season
    The Things - Some Kind of Kick
    The Walls - Hi-lo
    Tooth - That Corporate Emotion
    Turn - Antisocial
    Unite Tribe - Enlocari
    United Bible Studies - The Shore That Fears The Sea
    Warlords of Pez - Warlords of Pez
    Whipping Boy - Whipping Boy
    Wilt - My Medicine
    Woodstars - Life Sparks
More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Thu, 18 Jun 2009 03:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
    <guid isPermaLink="false">f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:4402</guid> 
    <enclosure url="http://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Blogs/Promenade/tabid/75/EntryId/1064/Anatomy-of-a-writers-poll-part-2.aspx" length="23842" type="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4403/CLUAS-the-top-site-for-the-Cork-Music-scene#Comments</comments> 
    <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> 
    <wfw:commentRss>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=36&amp;ModuleID=728&amp;ArticleID=4403</wfw:commentRss> 
    <trackback:ping>https://www.cluas.com:443/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=4403&amp;PortalID=0&amp;TabID=36</trackback:ping> 
    <title>CLUAS: the top site for the Cork Music scene?</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4403/CLUAS-the-top-site-for-the-Cork-Music-scene</link> 
    <description>Perplexingly, CLUAS continues to be Ireland&#39;s number one website for jazz music (well, at least in the eyes of Google, Yahoo and Bing). Not happy with just addressing the needs of jazz aficionados, CLUAS has strived to earn it metal stripes and we are now the number 1 website for Irish heavy metal music (according to Google and Bing where CLUAS holds both the 1st &amp; 2nd slots on searches for &#39;Irish heavy metal music&#39;, while chez Yahoo we currently hold the 3rd and 9th spots for the same search).
Now we are on our way to becoming the top website for the Cork Music scene. This, er, radical development is thanks to a new page I published on the site last week without any fanfare. The page brings together links to all articles from the first 10 years of CLUAS that relate to Cork bands in addition to reviews of gigs that took place in Cork. I simply stuck a link to this new page from the main CLUAS page and then around the website I found a few instances of the word &#39;Cork&#39; and I simply changed them into a link that points to the new Cork specific page. I then sat back and let the search engines do the rest...
A week has passed and already the results are impressive for the major search engines, just see the table below:


    
        
            Search phrase
            Our ranking on Google
            Our ranking on Yahoo
        
        
            cork indie scene
             		1
            2
        
        
            cork indie bands
             		1
            7
        
        
            cork indie music
             		1
            not in  		top 10
        
        
            cork music scene
             		4
            2
        
    


&#160;
[I also checked our ranking on Microsoft&#39;s excellent new search engine Bing but it is not - at the time of writing - throwing up CLUAS as a result for any of the above searches. I expect that to change in the next week or two].
To be honest I was not surprised at this quick result. For years I have been honing CLUAS so that it is optimised for search engines and, indeed, a very significant proportion of our traffic comes from search engines. In time I expect this new page to attract a healthy and steady number of new people to the site who are interested in Cork music, and if even a fraction of them become repeat visitors, and maybe even join the CLUAS writing team, it will have been worth the effort.More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Thu, 18 Jun 2009 03:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
    <guid isPermaLink="false">f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:4403</guid> 
    <enclosure url="http://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Blogs/Promenade/tabid/75/EntryId/1065/CLUAS-the-top-site-for-the-Cork-Music-scene.aspx" length="23842" type="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4404/Anatomy-of-a-writers-poll-part-1#Comments</comments> 
    <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> 
    <wfw:commentRss>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=36&amp;ModuleID=728&amp;ArticleID=4404</wfw:commentRss> 
    <trackback:ping>https://www.cluas.com:443/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=4404&amp;PortalID=0&amp;TabID=36</trackback:ping> 
    <title>Anatomy of a writers poll... (part 1)</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4404/Anatomy-of-a-writers-poll-part-1</link> 
    <description>The CLUAS writers poll to find the best Irish releases of the last 10 years has, as I expected, sparked off quite a bit of commentary (I particularly enjoyed The People&#39;s Republic of Cork forums and the comments section of Jim Carroll&#39;s On The Record blog).
No matter what one makes of its results I can say it was a considerable, but worthwile, effort to pull the poll together. It was worth that effort alone to see the poll results reveal (definitively of course) that 2001-2002 was the vintage period for Irish music in the last 10 years. For those of you enjoyed the number-crunching that delivered such a conclusion here below are some more numbers on the poll:

    35 writers cast a vote in the poll
    9 of these writers were &quot;CLUAS Alumni&quot; who haven&#39;t written anything for the site in over 5 years but were active in our first half decade. The remaining 26 writers who voted only got published on CLUAS for the first time in the last 5 years.
    A total of 280 votes were cast, meaning...
    ...each voter cast a preference for an average of 8 albums (no writer voted for less than 3 albums, nor for more than 10)
    Approx 130 different albums were voted for.
    55 albums secured votes from 2 or more writers
    30 albums were voted by just 2 writers, therefore...
    25 albums were voted by at least 3 writers.
    9 acts managed to get two albums into the list and they are The Divine Comedy, The Frames, Simple Kid, David Kitt, Cathal Coughlan, David Holmes, U2, The Tycho Brahe and JJ72).
    Since its inception 40 albums have been shortlisted for the Choice Music Prize. Of these, 27 secured at least one vote in the poll but only 11 made the top 50.
    There was only one point seperating the no. 1 and no. 2 albums in the poll!

Next week, in the second part of this &#39;poll anatomy&#39;, I&#39;ll publish the list of albums that were outside the top 50, all 80+ of them.More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Fri, 12 Jun 2009 03:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
    <guid isPermaLink="false">f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:4404</guid> 
    <enclosure url="http://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Blogs/Promenade/tabid/75/EntryId/1056/Anatomy-of-a-writers-poll-part-1.aspx" length="23842" type="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4405/2001-to-2002--a-vintage-period-for-Irish-music#Comments</comments> 
    <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> 
    <wfw:commentRss>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=36&amp;ModuleID=728&amp;ArticleID=4405</wfw:commentRss> 
    <trackback:ping>https://www.cluas.com:443/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=4405&amp;PortalID=0&amp;TabID=36</trackback:ping> 
    <title>2001 to 2002 - a vintage period for Irish music?</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4405/2001-to-2002--a-vintage-period-for-Irish-music</link> 
    <description>There was one thing I was conscious of when I opened the polling booths for the CLUAS writers to vote for their top Irish albums of the last decade - the possibility that the final results could be biased towards releases from more recent years, considering more recently albums could well be to the fore of a writer&#39;s mind when casting their votes.
The first chart below however testifies that the CLUAS writers are not such a fickle bunch. It shows the breakdown - by year of release - of the CLUAS writers&#39; top 50 Irish albums of the last 10 years and it is encouraging to see their choices are nicely spread across the full decade (although memories apparently don&#39;t stretch too well back to 1999, with only one fin de si&#233;cle album making the top 50...).

One thing that is striking in the above chart is 2003, which saw the release of more albums in the top 50 than any other year. Before rushing to the conclusion that 2003 was, therefore, a vintage year for Irish music I thought it&#39;d be instructive to check the average ranking in the top 50 of albums released in a given year (see chart below).

First up, it shows that 2004 does not appear to have set the writers on fire in terms of memorable releases - the five 2004 releases had a low average ranking of 38 in the top 50. The other end of the scale reveals that, while 2003 may have produced the highest number of albums in the top 50, the average ranking of the 2003 albums (8 albums with an average ranking of 25.3) was lower than the releases of 2001 (3 albums with an average ranking of 16.7) and 2002 (5 albums with an average ranking of 18.2).
Conclusion? It is clear that, without any shadow of even a micro-doubt, the real vintage period for Irish music in the last decade was 2001-2002. So that&#39;s one discussion laid to rest then (until someone asks a different 35 people for their fave Irish releases of the last 10 years and get a completely different answer...)
Annex 1: The albums in the top 50 released in 2001 and 2002, i.e. the &quot;vintage period&quot;:

          
    
        
            Year
            Artist
            Album
            Ranking
        
        
            2002
            Damien Rice
            O
            3
        
        
            2002
            Cathal Coughlan
            The Sky&#39;s Awful Blue
            13
        
        
            2002
            JJ72
            I To Sky
            34
        
        
            2001
            The Frames
            For The Birds
            1
        
        
            2001
            Ash
            Free All Angels
            5
        
        
            2001
            David Kitt
            The Big Romance
            16
        
        
            2001
            Divine Comedy
            Regeneration
            25
        
        
            2001
            Snow Patrol
            When It&#39;s All Over...
            44
        
    

&#160;
Annex 2: The albums in the top 50 released in 2004, i.e. the poorest performing year in terms of rankings:

          
    
        
            &#160;
            Artist
            Album
            Ranking
        
        
            &#160;
            U2
            How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
            29
        
        
            &#160;
            The Tychonaut
            Love Life
            35
        
        
            &#160;
            Alphastates 
            
            Made from Sand
            38
        
        
            &#160;
            Damien Dempsey
            Seize the Day
            39
        
        
            &#160;
            Waiting Room
            Catering For Headphones
            49
        
    
More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Fri, 05 Jun 2009 03:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
    <guid isPermaLink="false">f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:4405</guid> 
    <enclosure url="http://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Blogs/Promenade/tabid/75/EntryId/1044/2001-to-2002-a-vintage-period-for-Irish-music.aspx" length="23842" type="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4406/Ranking-of-DNN-core-modules-in-terms-of-popularity#Comments</comments> 
    <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> 
    <wfw:commentRss>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=36&amp;ModuleID=728&amp;ArticleID=4406</wfw:commentRss> 
    <trackback:ping>https://www.cluas.com:443/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=4406&amp;PortalID=0&amp;TabID=36</trackback:ping> 
    <title>Ranking of DNN core modules in terms of popularity</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4406/Ranking-of-DNN-core-modules-in-terms-of-popularity</link> 
    <description>Note to CLUAS regulars:
The following blog post has nothing to do with music. And it may appear at first glance to be completely irrelevant. But it relates to the technology we use to run the site (DotNetNuke) which - it is sad to say - your humble webmaster is quite keen on. Read on at your peril and if you get to the end and go &#39;Er, so what?&#39; you cannot say you weren&#39;t warned.
Recent email exchanges with other DNN Blog Module team members got me thinking about how popular the DNN Blog module is relative to the other 22 free DNN Modules (or &quot;Projects&quot; as they now seem to be called) available via the DotNetNuke mothership. Measuring &quot;popularity&quot; of a piece of software is an imprecise - if not impossible - science. All the same, I made a stab at it by assuming that number of downloads of a module is an indicator of popularity.
Each of the core DNN modules has a stats page on Codeplex (from where the modules are downloaded) and it shows you the number of downloads for each module over different stretches of time (for example here&#39;s the stats page for the blog module). I pulled the number of downloads over the last 3 months for each of the 23 modules and the table below brings all the data together, with the modules listed in order of average downloads per day over the last 3 months.
The most downloaded (or popular) module? That&#39;ll be the &quot;Form and List (formerly User Defined Table)&quot; module (with an average of 51.9 downloads per day over the last three months). Biting at its heels in 2nd place is the Blog module with 42.9 downloads per day in the same period. I am not surprised to see the Blog module with such a relatively high number of downloads. But I never thought it would be the Form and List module that would top the table (even if I for one have been very keen to deploy its latest version on CLUAS.com in order to replace the - dare I admit it? - FrontPage forms that are still used on the site).

      
    
        
            Ranking
            Module
            Downloads per day
        
        
            1
            Form and List (formerly User Defined   Table)
            51.9
        
        
            2
            Blog
            42.9
        
        
            3
            Survey
            42.2
        
        
            4
            Gallery
            38.5
        
        
            5
            Announcements
            33.0
        
        
            6
            Events
            32.2
        
        
            7
            News Feeds
            31.0
        
        
            8
            Documents
            28.7
        
        
            9
            Store
            28.6
        
        
            10
            Forum
            28.5
        
        
            11
            Links
            24.9
        
        
            12
            Repository
            21.7
        
        
            13
            Map
            20.9
        
        
            14 (joint)
            Feedback
            20.3
        
        
            14 (joint)
            Media
            20.3
        
        
            16
            Wiki
            20.2
        
        
            17
            IFrame
            17.5
        
        
            18
            FAQ
            17.0
        
        
            19
            Reports
            17.0
        
        
            20
            Contacts
            17.0
        
        
            21
            Help
            13.4
        
        
            22
            Users Online
            12.6
        
        
            23
            XML
            10.6
        
    

&#160;More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Tue, 05 May 2009 03:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
    <guid isPermaLink="false">f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:4406</guid> 
    <enclosure url="http://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Blogs/Promenade/tabid/75/EntryId/1020/Ranking-of-DNN-core-modules-in-terms-of-popularity.aspx" length="23842" type="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4407/So-were-not-so-hot-with-the-ladies#Comments</comments> 
    <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> 
    <wfw:commentRss>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=36&amp;ModuleID=728&amp;ArticleID=4407</wfw:commentRss> 
    <trackback:ping>https://www.cluas.com:443/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=4407&amp;PortalID=0&amp;TabID=36</trackback:ping> 
    <title>So we&#39;re not so hot with the ladies?</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4407/So-were-not-so-hot-with-the-ladies</link> 
    <description>Is there less oestrogen then testosterone &#39;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&#39;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?&#160;More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Wed, 29 Apr 2009 22:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
    <guid isPermaLink="false">f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:4407</guid> 
    <enclosure url="http://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Blogs/Promenade/tabid/75/EntryId/1014/So-were-not-so-hot-with-the-ladies.aspx" length="23842" type="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4408/CLUAS-in-We-now-have-a-Facebook-page-shocker#Comments</comments> 
    <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> 
    <wfw:commentRss>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=36&amp;ModuleID=728&amp;ArticleID=4408</wfw:commentRss> 
    <trackback:ping>https://www.cluas.com:443/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=4408&amp;PortalID=0&amp;TabID=36</trackback:ping> 
    <title>CLUAS in &#39;We now have a Facebook page&#39; shocker</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4408/CLUAS-in-We-now-have-a-Facebook-page-shocker</link> 
    <description>CLUAS has always been well ahead of the curve. Sure, weren&#39;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. And if you have never heard of Facebook, remember it was right here that it first came to your attention. All part of the service m&#39;luds and ladies.
&#160;More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
    <guid isPermaLink="false">f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:4408</guid> 
    <enclosure url="http://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Blogs/Promenade/tabid/75/EntryId/1003/CLUAS-in-We-now-have-a-Facebook-page-shocker.aspx" length="23842" type="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4409/Is-CLUAS-Irelands-longest-running-music-website#Comments</comments> 
    <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> 
    <wfw:commentRss>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=36&amp;ModuleID=728&amp;ArticleID=4409</wfw:commentRss> 
    <trackback:ping>https://www.cluas.com:443/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=4409&amp;PortalID=0&amp;TabID=36</trackback:ping> 
    <title>Is CLUAS Ireland&#39;s longest running music website?</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4409/Is-CLUAS-Irelands-longest-running-music-website</link> 
    <description>CLUAS will be hitting the 10 year milestone in May 2009 and as far as I know it is Ireland&#39;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 was published to the site until some time between June 2001 and January 2002). Maybe Hotpress.ie was around a bit longer? Once again Archive.org comes to the rescue, with confirmation that Hot Press&#39; .ie incarnation only began leaving a trail on the web from Februrary 2001 onwards.
What about U2.com? Surely those innovative, technophiles (or something like that) were doing their thang on the web early on? Well, er, no actually. Their website didn&#39;t go live until some time in August 2000, giving CLUAS a 15 month headstart on everyone&#39;s favourite Croke Park regulars.
So, CLUAS.com? The longest established Irish music site on the web? Yeah?More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Sun, 29 Mar 2009 22:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
    <guid isPermaLink="false">f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:4409</guid> 
    <enclosure url="http://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Blogs/Promenade/tabid/75/EntryId/978/Is-CLUAS-Irelands-longest-running-music-website.aspx" length="23842" type="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4410/Automatic-linking-to-the-Discussion-Board#Comments</comments> 
    <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> 
    <wfw:commentRss>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=36&amp;ModuleID=728&amp;ArticleID=4410</wfw:commentRss> 
    <trackback:ping>https://www.cluas.com:443/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=4410&amp;PortalID=0&amp;TabID=36</trackback:ping> 
    <title>Automatic linking to the Discussion Board</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4410/Automatic-linking-to-the-Discussion-Board</link> 
    <description>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. I was reduced to manually putting links to recent discussions on the home page which in the hands of anyone - especially me - is a terribly inefficient thing to be doing. I did try to fix the broken code myself but, with a massively elementary understanding of SQL, I just didn&#39;t have the wherewithal to do so. 

However, at last, it has been fixed and needless to say, it was not fixed not by me. CLUAS writer Stephen McNulty stepped into the breach and strong-armed Rod, an SQL wizard colleague to update the code. I updated the home page with this code late last week and ever since the links to the latest discussion topics are automatically added to the home page.

When putting Rod&#39;s code in place I also fixed another problem on the discussion board (this one involved the content of some pages on the CLUAS disscussion board being pushed downwards so that you would only see the text if you hit the &#39;page down&#39; button on your PC). Thankfully I did not have to call in the experts to fix this one - I managed to work it out myself (to be honest it was a no-brainer, all it took a was the deleting of a single declaration in the CSS style sheet). 

The bigger picture however is that these two updates are only minor details. There is something else cooking on the site at the moment, something far bigger (some eagle eyed readers may already have stumbled on some hints of it). For full details on what I am alluding to look out for the CLUAS newsletter in your inbox some day soon. Not subscribed to the newsletter? Then you need to sign up now...More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Thu, 05 Mar 2009 22:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
    <guid isPermaLink="false">f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:4410</guid> 
    <enclosure url="http://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Blogs/Promenade/tabid/75/EntryId/961/Automatic-linking-to-the-Discussion-Board.aspx" length="23842" type="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4411/A-new-logo-for-CLUAS-Three-candidates#Comments</comments> 
    <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> 
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    <title>A new logo for CLUAS? Three candidates...</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4411/A-new-logo-for-CLUAS-Three-candidates</link> 
    <description>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:&#160;

&#160;
Candidate B:&#160;

&#160;
Candidate C:
(click on it to see a higher resolution version of it)

&#160;More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Thu, 12 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
    <guid isPermaLink="false">f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:4411</guid> 
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    <title>CLUAS, Google and Dublin&#39;s gig venues</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4412/CLUAS-Google-and-Dublins-gig-venues</link> 
    <description>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 &quot;site links&quot;,  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 &quot;site links&quot; and I recently noticed that if you run a search now on Google for &#39;CLUAS&#39;, 5 of the 8 &quot;site links&quot; 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 them among the &quot;site links&quot;.  They bring a lot of traffic to the site via all the search engines (and not just  google) and a lot of this traffic are first time visitors to the site.
In total we have pages for 8 venues and last year these pages alone were visited a total of 16,787 times,  about 50% of these visits were referred to us by - indeed - the Google search engine. In the table below I dig out (thanks to the Google Analytics service):

    the number of  visitors who were referred to these pages by search engines,
    the average numbers of pages each of these  visitors went on to read on CLUAS during their visit, and
    what percentage of  these visitors were hitting CLUAS for the first time.

As you can see the pages  have been a fruitful source of new visitors, some of whom may go on to be  regulars, increasing the overall CLUAS visitor base:


    
        
            
            Venue page
            
            Number of referrals by Google
             			Average number of pages per visit
            % of new visitors
        
        
            Olympia theatre
            1907
            2.21
            84.2%
        
        
            Vicar Street
            1651
            2.24
            88.6%
        
        
            O2 (ex-Point Depot)
            1380
            2.30
            94.9%
        
        
            Ambassador Theatre
            1366
            2.10
            92.5%
        
        
            Whelan&#39;s
            1307
            2.28
            80.6%
        
        
            Tripod
            547
            2.31
            90.5%
        
        
            Button Factory (ex-TBMC)
            316
            2.23
            92.2%
        
        
            The Village
            123
            2.46
            86.2%
        
        
            &#160;Totals
            &#160;8597
            &#160;2.23
            &#160;88.2%
        
    

More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2009 11:48:48 GMT</pubDate> 
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4413/Speed-of-light--the-upgraded-discussion-board#Comments</comments> 
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    <title>Speed of light - the upgraded discussion board</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4413/Speed-of-light--the-upgraded-discussion-board</link> 
    <description>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 (&quot;Active Forums&quot;) 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 fact that the guys who developed the software (Active Modules) started again from scratch and, for the latest version, re-built it from the ground up. The result is a discussion board that loads up in the browser so much faster than before. This is thanks, for example, to:

    a big reduction in the number of round trips the CLUAS website would have to make to the site&#39;s database each time a discussion board page is requested by a user; and
    a reduction in the memory &#39;footprint&#39; of the discussion board (i.e. the amount of web server memory that is &#39;hogged&#39; by the discussion board).

See the table below for a few examples of the reductions that have been put in place.

    
        
            &#160;
            
            old version
            
            
            
            new version
            
        
        
            Server Footprint
            &#160;
            &#160;
        
        
            &#160;&#160;&#160; Memory Utilization
            
            64-128kb+
            
            
            0
            
        
        
            &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Session State
            
            ~2kb/user
            
            
            0
            
        
        
            &#160;
            &#160;
            &#160;
        
        
            Trips to the Database
            &#160;
            &#160;
        
        
            &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Main discussion board page
            4 + 2 per forum
            
            1
            
        
        
            &#160;&#160;&#160; List of Topics View
            
            4 to 6
            
            
            1
            
        
        
            &#160;&#160;&#160; Single Topic View
            4 + 2 per reply
            
            1
            
        
    

This sort of reduction in &#39;demand&#39; on the database is vital for a site such as CLUAS that is hosted on a &#39;shared server&#39; where there are many other websites (possible even over 100 other sites) hosted on the same server. A potential consequence of this is, if CLUAS was to hog too many of the available resources (CPU, memory, etc), we could be booted off the shared server (where we are charged the modest amount of US$16/95 a month) and asked to move to a dedicated server which would cost over US$200 a month (a minimum of USD$130 for the web server + US$75 for the database). Needless to say the more CLUAS can do to decrease its use of the CPU and memory resources on our shared server, the better.
But it&#39;s not just performance improvements. There are lots of other improvements, which I&#39;ll be exposing on the discussion board in the coming while. All in all, the upgrade was well worth the approx US$100 the software cost (paid for out of the CLUAS Google Ads revenues of last year).
That said there still remain a few things that, post-upgrade, still need to be fine-tuned. For example we have always had a script of code that automatically pulls the latest discussion threads and puts a link to them on the home page. This &#39;script&#39; no longer works because of changes to how forum hook into the database but - with the help of Stephen McNulty - the script on the home page will soon be updated to work with the new version of the discussion board software.
While the last month on the board has been quieter than normal I am fully confident that with time the changes described above, and those in the pipeline, will ensure the board gets back to its usual levels of activity.
Update 15 January: Something during the upgrade broke the RSS feeds on CLUAS and I had to totally roll back the upgrade and re-apply it. This meant some of the content added to the site in the last week (in particular some discussion forum replies) was lost. For more details on this see this thread on the CLUAS discussion board.More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2009 11:45:08 GMT</pubDate> 
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    <title>Latest improvements to CLUAS</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4414/Latest-improvements-to-CLUAS</link> 
    <description>Last night I rolled out some tweaks to the navigation bar across good chunks of the site. You won&#39;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 &quot;.aspx&quot; 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 the nav bar as the bar had less space and too many items on the nav bar meant it would wrap around and &quot;break&quot; into two lines on screens of lower resolution).
    This week I also created a new &#39;interviews&#39; page containing links to all of the 50+ interviews CLUAS has done over the years (this page and its links have been spun off from the long standing Features home page, the need to do this was something I realised when I recently analysed the full archive of CLUAS content). This new interviews home page - its creation being really just a bit of &quot;content housekeeping&quot; - is now linked from the new nav bar and will make the archive of CLUAS interviews more easily accessible to readers and search engines.
    Some of the space in the top right hand corner that has been freed up by this change is now running Google Ads. The intention however is not to run Google ads here all the time but to also run ads from local acts (publicising album releases / gigs / etc) and to allow them to run these ads for free. The DotNetNuke system that CLUAS uses for managing the site already has the technology built in for uploading and rotating non-Google banner ads. I need to implement this once the new nav bar is fully rolled out across the full site. Look out for an announcement on how bands can take advantage of this.

While this change is fairly discreet - I think some regulars may not even notice it - it sets CLUAS up for a far more visible shake up of the site&#39;s look and feel in the coming months.
Update 30 October: The nav bar for album and gig reviews as well as blogs has been updated (although you may need to hit &#39;refresh&#39; in your browser to see it properly). Pages that have not yet been updated with the new nav bar are the discussion forum, Gigs of the Fortnight, the &#39;Features&#39; and the &#39;Write for CLUAS&#39; pages. They should be sorted in the coming days.More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Tue, 28 Oct 2008 22:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
    <guid isPermaLink="false">f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:4414</guid> 
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    <title>CLUAS by numbers</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4415/CLUAS-by-numbers</link> 
    <description>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 351 blog entries published by the CLUAS bloggers and 9494 discussion board topics started by CLUAS visitors.
One thing I am taking away from this is the need for a separate interviews section (currently all the interviews appear on the Features page). Their numbers merit a dedicated page, which would also make it easy for readers (and search engines) to find archived interviews.
For the full breakdown see the table below.

      
    
        
            Gig Reviews
            508
        
        
            Album Reviews
            588
        
        
            Interviews
            72
        
        
            Features articles
            80
        
        
            Blog entries
            351
        
        
            Discussion board topics
            9494
        
        
            Writers
            132
        
        
            Newsletter subscribers
            4843
        
    

&#160;Thanks to all writers and contributors for their efforts, past and ongoing. Roll on CLUAS.com&#39;s 10th birthday next year!More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Thu, 02 Oct 2008 22:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
    <guid isPermaLink="false">f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:4415</guid> 
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4416/CLUAS-doesnt-make-best-music-site-shortlist#Comments</comments> 
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    <title>CLUAS doesn&#39;t make &#39;best music site&#39; shortlist</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4416/CLUAS-doesnt-make-best-music-site-shortlist</link> 
    <description>CLUAS was one of 15 sites longlisted last week for the &#39;best music site&#39; 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&#39;s site (Enda Reilly), one local music blog (Kilkenny music), one label fansite (2tone) and one video hosting platform (the impressive Muzu TV).
So who will win? I think it is between Muzu TV and State, and that State in the end will bag it.
Although I like to think Drop-d could be a surprise on the night.&#160; Their site is very impressive with its clean design, fast loading pages and depth of content. It certainly deserves to get more traffic than it appears to get. See the to-be-taken-with-a-grain-of-salt Alexa traffic chart to the right which shows their &#39;reach&#39; (the red line running along the bottom) compared to that of CLUAS (the blue line) or State.ie (the gold line). Making the shortlist - and maybe even winning the award outright! - will at least help them get more visibility and traffic.&#160;
Anyways, congrats to the all the shortlisted sites and best of luck on the night!More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Wed, 24 Sep 2008 22:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
    <guid isPermaLink="false">f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:4416</guid> 
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    <title>Digging up discussion board nuggets</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4417/Digging-up-discussion-board-nuggets</link> 
    <description>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&#160;the depths of CLUAS.com&#39;s constantly growing database of discussion topics. Not wanting to &#39;lose&#39; 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.&#160;These new pages will make it easier for visitors to discover some great threads from our archives such as&#160;The Slow Death Of Certain Irish Bands (from 2006), Irish Bands To Get Excited About&#160;(from 2005), Best Piece Of Music Used In Film (from 2004),and Neil Young - 105 quid? (from 2003) and Smiths - most influential band of last 50 years? (from 2002). Find other great threads yourselves via the new pages which list the top topics for the last 7 years, links provided below:

Top 75 topics of 2007
Top 75 topics of 2006
Top 75 topics of 2005
Top 75 topics of 2004
Top 75 topics of 2003
Top 75 topics of 2002
Top topics of 2001

Another advantage of this is that these new pages will help search engines index more quality content on CLUAS. Indeed, Google has already&#160;indexed these new pages&#160;and I expect more traffic - in due course - to be driven by search engines to these nuggets from our archive.More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Tue, 16 Sep 2008 22:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
    <guid isPermaLink="false">f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:4417</guid> 
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    <title>Blanket Coverage of Irish Music Festivals?</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4418/Blanket-Coverage-of-Irish-Music-Festivals</link> 
    <description>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? CLUAS covered them all in 2008. And comprehensively so -&#160;we published a review of each day of the Oxegen, Electric Picnic and Cois Fharraige festivals,&#160;not to mention a whopping&#160;9 reviews and 3 diaries of HWCH (delivered by&#160;the team of 4 CLUAS writers&#160;who were covering HWCH).
Within&#160;literally minutes of their publication all these articles&#160;appeared in Google News which helped ensure they were read by thousands of visitors. For example the Oxegen reviews were read by over 3000 people within a week of their publication - setting a new readership record for a CLUAS feature (the previous record having been set by Michael O&#39;Hara&#39;s now-legendary review of REM in the Olympia which was linked to from the official REM website). The Electric Picnic and Cois Farraige reviews were read by just over 2000 and 1000 people respectively in their first week. As for the HWCH reviews, they have already been read by 974 readers and the festival ended only 3 days ago, I expect this figure will rise to 1500 by the end of the week.
A big thank goes to the CLUAS writers who covered the festivals - Christine Cooke for Cois Fharraige, Jan Ni Flanahagain at Electric Picnic, Steven O&#39;Rourke who covered Oxegen and HWCH (where he was joined by Anna Murray, Niamh Madden and Ian Wright).
Steven O&#39;Rourke deserves very special praise for securing the passes for all the festivals and badgering the writers to publish their reviews within 12 hours of leaving the venue! He was instrumental in ensuring this blanket coverage of the main festivals happened.
For those of you who missed some of our 2008&#160;festival coverage first time around, links to all the various reviews are provided below:
Oxegen: 

    Oxegen 2008 - Day 1
    Oxegen 2008 - Day 2
    Oxegen 2008 - Day 3

Electric Picnic: 

    Electric Picnic 2008 - Day 1
    Electric Picnic 2008 - Day 2
    Electric Picnic 2008 - Day 3

Cois Fharraige:

    Cois Fharraige - Day 1
    Cois Fharraige - Day 2
    Cois Fharraige - Day 3&#160;

HWCH Day 1:

    Chequerboard, Alphamono and Fiach
    Nakatomi Plaza, Half Cousin and Lines Drawing Circles
    Super Extra Bonus Party, Groom and The Dublin Duck Dispensery
    Diary of HWCH Day 1

HWCH Day 2:

    Foxface, Bats and Others
    Frightened Rabbit, The Vinny Club and Bats
    Crayonsmith, The Parks and A Lazarus Soul
    Diary of HWCH Day 2

HWCH Day 3:

    So Cow, New Amusement and&#160;others
    One Day International, Mackerel the Cat and Others
    Autamata, Sounds Of System Breakdown and Robotnik
    Diary of HWCH Day 3

&#160;More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Tue, 16 Sep 2008 22:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
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    <title>CLUAS longlisted for &#39;best music site&#39;</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4419/CLUAS-longlisted-for-best-music-site</link> 
    <description>Yesterday the &quot;long-listed&quot; sites for the Irish Web Awards were published. I was pleased to see CLUAS has been long-listed for the &#39;Best Music Site&#39; category. There are a total of 15 nominees longlisted&#160;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&#160;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
    DownloadMusic
    Indie Limerick
    2tone
    Dublin DJs
    Muzu TV
    Nialler9
    Drop-d
    Irish Beats
    Enda Reilly
    Cluas
    Album Archive
    Kilkenny Music
More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Tue, 16 Sep 2008 22:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
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    <title>Ten advances for CLUAS in the last month</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4420/Ten-advances-for-CLUAS-in-the-last-month</link> 
    <description>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&#39;t think&#160;we do be sleeping on the job, or something like that).
Biggest readership of a single CLUAS article. Ever.
CLUAS writer / blogger Steven O&#39;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&#39;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?&#160;Google sent over 1000 visitors to the reviews the day after the festival ended&#160;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&#39;ve covered has ever attracted so much traffic, this even surpassed the number of visitors Michael&#39; O&#39;Hara&#39;s (now legendary) review of REM in the Olympia got (which when you consider that his review was linked to by REM&#39;s official site it is really saying something).
Three new writers
In the last fortnight a total of 3 new writers have joined the CLUAS crew having submitted their first reviews. Welcome on board to:

    Sig Doherty (who reviewed the Glasgowbury Festival)
    Andy Knightly&#160;(who reviewed the Sigur Ros&#160;album)
    Kevin Boyle (who reviewed the Fleet Foxes album)

Want to join their ranks? Well just submit a review!
New social booking marking tool at bottom of all blogs
The CLUAS blogging platform (which is developed by a team of chancers, myself included) was recently upgraded to the latest version, which brought in a number of enhancments to our blogging software. The first of these is that all blogs and reviews on CLUAS now have a social booking marking tool (at the end of the review or the blog entry). This will allow you to easily save the article or blog entry to the likes of Digg or Delicious.
New Avatar fucntionality for comments on blogs and reviews
Another improvement that came with the blog upgrade was the possiblity for those leaving comments on blogs or on CLUAS reviews to now have an Avatar (provided by the Gravatar service). If you don&#39;t have a Gravatar yet be sure to sign up for one.
Optimised addresses for search engines
The improvements of the blogging platofrm don&#39;t stop with Gravatars and social bookmarking.The URL (i.e. the web address) of CLUAS blog entries and reivews previously used to always end with the meaningless &#39;default.aspx&#39;. Meaningless in the sense that it did not give a reader - or a search engine - any indication what the review or blog entry was about. That&#39;s changed, as the word &#39;default&#39; is now replaced with the title of the review or blog entry. Have a look above in your browser&#39;s address bar to see what I mean.
Simplification of how bloggers can publish blog entries
Bloggers can for the first time publish their entries with the nifty Windows Live Writer tool (this means they can publish blog entries without even opening their browser - and more importantly they are no longer required to use the rather clunky CLUAS publication interface which our gold-plated readers can be thankful they have never been exposed to).
Calendars added to all CLUAS blogs
All CLUAS blogs now have a calendar so that readers can more easily navigate to old blog entries.
(Health warning: the new two adcances for the site are a bit &quot;backroom nuts&#39;n&#39;bolts&quot; in nature. My advice is that only most hardy among you read on because, if I am to be honest, they are not really&#160;that riveting...) 
Improved &#39;title&#39; tag for all discussion board entries
It is widely accepted in SEO circles (that is &#39;Search Engine Optimisation&#39;, BTW) that one of the things a search engine gives most weight to when assessing a web page is that the page has a &#39;title&#39; tag and that this title tag is unique and contains words that reflect the content of the webpage). CLUAS does a good job of this, except on our discussion board. The discussion board may indeed have unique title tags, however all the board&#39;s title tags contain superflous words that send the wrong signal to search engines. And it just doesn&#39; look pretty, here are a few exapmles:

    &quot;Ash to stick to singles&#160;&gt; CLUAS | Discussion Board |&#160;&gt; CLUAS Irish Indie Music&quot;
    &quot;MCD vs Consumer Association &gt; CLUAS | Discussion Board |&#160;&gt; CLUAS Irish Indie Music&quot;

See that&#160;comon part - &quot;CLUAS | Discussion Board |&#160;&gt; CLUAS Irish Indie Music&quot;? Does it really serve any purpose? Is it really necessary? Of course not. Last week I therefore set up some rules so that when a disucssion board page is being pulled from the database the title is given a neater, more to the point &#39;title tag&#39;. The two examples above now look like this:

    &quot;Ash to stick to singles&#160;&gt; CLUAS Music Forums&quot;
    &quot;MCD vs Consumer Association &gt; CLUAS Music Forums&quot;

This is something that many users would not notice (nor would they care) but it something the search engines will notice and I am betting that it will result in a better ranking in search engine result pages of CLUAS discussion board topics.&#160;
Faster downloading of pages
Earlier this year CLUAS started compressing the size of all pages requested by visitors and then sending the visitor the compressed version of the page (the page would usually be compressed to 25% of its usual size resulting in a faster download time, and hence happier customers). What&#39;s more the compressed page would then be immediately &#39;cached&#39; on the CLUAS server so that when the next vistitor requests that very page the CLUAS web server does not have to go and rebuild it and then compress it. The server just plucks up the copy of the already compressed file and then sends it to the visitor. It&#39;s a brilliantly effective system that ensures the CLUAS server and database are not overloaded due to the traffic levels we get. Anyways,&#160;last week I tripled the size of the CLUAS cache as the previous amount of&#160;space we had available for the cache was getting filled too quickly. This meant that many compressed pages would not get saved to the cache and each time they were requested by another user the server would have to get to work again, unneccesarily. Bottom line? Downloading should now be quicker for even more pages on CLUAS.
I have another 10 or so other improvements lined up to be rolled out throughtout September. Watch this space for the details.More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
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    <title>The biggest improvement yet to CLUAS?</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4421/The-biggest-improvement-yet-to-CLUAS</link> 
    <description>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).&#160;So in 2005 I started looking around for alternatives to FrontPage out of necessity.

I was acutely conscious that whatever choice I&#39;d make would be vital for the site&#39;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 called DotNetNuke (&quot;DNN&quot;) which, after months of testing, I finally installed on CLUAS in November 2006. 

DNN is actually a peculiar beast - an &quot;open source software&quot; project built on top of proprietary Microsoft technologies, a company considered by many to be the antithesis of Open Source Software. DNN is in fact today the biggest open source project today based on Microsoft technologies, and its active community strives to continually advance and improve DNN and oversee a release of a new improved version of the core technology every 3 months or so.

Another reason I selected DotNetNuke was that it has an extensive number of &#39;pluggable&#39; add-ons (called &#39;modules&#39;) available that introduce new features to the core DotNetNuke platform, so users are not limited to the ‘core’ functionality. Some of these&#160;&#39;modules&#39; are free and some you have to pay for (such as &#39;Active Forums&#39; which drives the CLUAS Discussion Boards). However one thing I never appreciated when I initially chose DotNetNuke was the dependency CLUAS would come to have on one of the freely available modules – the Blog Module. This module allows for basic blogging functionality and we now use it on CLUAS for publishing all album and gig reviews, in addition to maintaining all the CLUAS blogs. In a nutshell a huge proportion of new content is today added to CLUAS via this module. The problem is that the blog module lacks much of the functionality and, let&#39;s call it, &quot;visual panache&quot; that comes with leading blog platforms such as Wordpress, Blogspot and others. The DNN blog module more or less &#39;does the job&#39;, and often not efficeintly or prettily

When I came across these limitations in the blog module I would, instead of grinding my teeth, submit an enhancement request to the DNN Blog Module team via the ‘Enhancement submission’ procedure they have put in place. To my pleasant surprise&#160;some of my&#160; enhancement&#160; requests got integrated into subsequent releases. I also became a regular on the official Blog Module forums and struck up some off-forum contact with other heavy users of the Blog module, including members of the team that are developing new versions of the module. Cutting to the chase , all of this resulting in the blog module&#39;s Team Lead Antonio Chagoury offering me a slot on the official blog module team about 2 months ago (as a QA tester and not as a coder, thankfully,&#160;considering I am not capable of writing a line of code if my life depended on it).

The last month has seen a flurry of activity behind the scene as the team - which also includes the very excellent Don Wortherly, Rip Rowan, Jim Bonnie and Dario Rossa - prepares the next version of the blog module (v3.05). I have been very active in all of this (identifying bugs, scoping out new functionality that would improve the user experience, etc) and I must say that&#160;the next&#160;release&#160;is really shaping up to be an amazing improvement.
While it won&#39;t be released for another month or so I plan to &#39;dog food&#39; it here on CLUAS in the next week and the differences will be visible immediately to CLUAS regulars. While the CLUAS gig, album and blog sections will all look snazzier, some of the most important improvements will be invisible to casual visitors. There are a number of enhancements that will make the publishing of gig &amp; album reviews and - of course - blog entries, so much easier for CLUAS writers. For example, those who publish content to CLUAS today will in the future be able to do so without even opening their web browser as the new version of the blog module supports the possibility for writers to publish content direct from their desktop (using the free &#39;Windows Live Writer&#39;). The writers have for too long had to put up with a inadequate and cumbersome method of publication, now they will have a smoother route to getting content to CLUAS readers.
There are a rake of other improvements with the next release but I&#39;ve bored you long enough so I&#39;ll put on the brakes, for the moment that is. What I will say (as I allow myself to get carried away about it all) it will be one of the biggest improvements to CLUAS in quite a while. Excuse the clich&#233; but, watch this space.More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:40:24 GMT</pubDate> 
    <guid isPermaLink="false">f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:4421</guid> 
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    <title>Ireland.com to unlock its archive - Hot Press next?</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4422/Irelandcom-to-unlock-its-archive--Hot-Press-next</link> 
    <description>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? When will they also see the light and knock down what is becoming a more and more pointless pay-wall?More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:09:28 GMT</pubDate> 
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    <title>&#39;Click here&#39;: Anatomy of a newsletter</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4423/Click-here-Anatomy-of-a-newsletter</link> 
    <description>Back at the beginning of May CLUAS relaunched its email newsletter.&#160;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 with several thousand subscribers as sending such a number of emails in one go is no trivial matter with the growing number of restrictions ISPs have put in place to combat email spam). Anyways, I digress...

One of the interesting additional services these YMLP guys offer are detailed stats on how many people clicked on a link in the newsletter to reach CLUAS and what links were the most popular. As I like my numbers I thought I’d indulge a bit and provide some details below on what these stats threw up for the first CLUAS newsletter in four years. 

The first thing I was looking out for after I hit the ‘send’ button for the newsletter was how many of the 6025 email addresses we had in our subscriber list would still be active and how many would were dead. Considering some of our subscribers emails went back to 1999 my guess was that about half of them would be dead addresses. I was surprised to see that just 30% of the addresses turned out to be the virtual equivalent of a black hole (of the original 6025 only 1834 addresses turned out to be totally dead, and were automatically removed from the mailing list). Of the remaining 4191 email addresses an additional 216 bounced back to us with what they call a &#39;soft bounce&#39; (e.g. the recipient&#39;s mailbox was full). Such soft bounces will only be removed from our mailing list if there are 3 consecutive &#39;soft&#39; bounces. All in all of the original 6025 a grand total of 3975 newsletters were delivered. The number of people who choose to unsubscribe was a very low figure: only 33 people unsubscribed (less than 1% of the newsletters delivered). 

But how many people who received the newsletter bothered to open it and of those how many chose to click on a link in the newsletter to visit CLUAS? It is actually impossible to get accurate stats on how many people opened a newsletter (for a variety of valid reasons I won&#39;t bore you with here) but these YMLP guys provide us with accurate stats on the number of links in a newsletter that were clicked on. They were able to determine that a total of 462 links in the newsletter were clicked by those who read it. The most popular links that were clicked were:

    The review of Gemma Hayes live in Dublin (52 visits)
    The link to the CLUAS &#39;Gigs of the Fortnight&#39;&#160;section (27 visits)
    The blog entry&#160;about the&#160;reviving the CLUAS newsletter (25 visits)
    (the remaing 358 clicks were spread over the 32 other links that were in the newslteter)

The accuracy of the 462 links clicked in the newsletter I do not doubt and, at a first glance, it seems quite low for an email received by almost 4000 subscribers. However you need to dig a bit deeper to understand the full picture. The visitor analysis software used by CLUAS.com (the Google Analytics service) revealed that someone clicking on one of those links in the newsletter went on to view an average of was 3.3 pages on CLUAS. This means that those 462 clicks generated just over 1500 &#39;page views&#39;. Still, not massive number for a mailing received by 4000 subscribers. But my guess is that among those who chose to click a link in the newsletter there were many who would not have visited the site in a long time and, hopefully having liked what they saw, some of them will become more regular visitors to the site. It is this difficult to measure aspect of a newsletter&#39;s impact that is an important part of its real value, even if RSS feeds and the like are - for some - a more modern way to get updates on the latest stuff happening on a website.
I&#39;ll be looking out to see if this sort of figure (1500 page views, for an email received by 4000 people) holds up with our future newsletters. I guess my better judgement will again take a walk and I will end up blogging about it. You can start groaning now.More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Sat, 31 May 2008 01:39:57 GMT</pubDate> 
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    <title>CLUAS in &#39;Google-likes-us-again&#39; shocker</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4424/CLUAS-in-Google-likes-us-again-shocker</link> 
    <description>Two 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).&#160;

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&#39;s Google &quot;Webmaster Tools&quot; account and I saw that (for once!)&#160;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 for the evidence that Google is still all chummy-wummy with us.
More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Fri, 16 May 2008 18:35:31 GMT</pubDate> 
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    <title>Reviving the CLUAS newsletter</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4425/Reviving-the-CLUAS-newsletter</link> 
    <description>Up 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 to sell on to spammers. I am confident however that&#39;s not the case with the company we are using (who are a legitimate business operating out of Belgium).

It turns out that the number of email subscribers on CLUAS has in the last 4 years greatly increased - we now have just over 6000 emails (basically the original 3000 + over 2500 new registered users of the site + a few hundred who have chosen to register just for the newsletter in the last four years (either via our newsletter subscription form or via our end of year readers&#39; polls voting form when we gave voters the option to sign up for the newsletter). My guess is a very big proportion of these 6000+ emails will be dead/dormant accounts (even up to 50%, some of those subscribers do after all go back to 1999!). Thankfully the mailing list service we are using automatically filters out dormant emails (based on delivery error messages received from &quot;dead accounts&quot;) so the list will be cleaned up quick enough over time. Even so I think the revived CLUAS newsletter will regularly pull in a healthy number of visitors who otherwise might miss out completely on the CLUAS site. 

As an act of curiosity I looked into the database of 6000 subscribers to see how they break down, in terms of where the subscribers come from and what email services they prefer to use. Below is a sample of some of what emerged from my rooting in the list of subscribers (without of course compromising the identity of any individual subscriber)...
Most popular email accounts / ISPs among CLUAS newsletter subscribers

    Hotmail (1761 subscribers)
    Yahoo (810  subscribers)
    Gmail (403 subscribers)
    Eircom.net (356 subscribers)
    CLUAS.com (239 subscribers)
    AOL (100 subscribers)
    Ireland.com (50 subscribers)

Most popular university email addresses

    TCD (48 subscribers)
    DCU.ie (46 subscribers)
    UL.ie (16 subscribers)
    NUI Galway (12 subscribers)
    UCD.ie (12 subscribers)
    UCC.ie (6 subscribers)
    QUB.ac.uk (5 subscribers)
    DIT.ie (3 subscribers)
    WIT.ie (2 subscribers)
    LIT.ie (2 subscribers)
    CIT.ie (1 subscribers)

Subscribers based on country of origin of email address

    .ie email addresses (895 subscribers)
    .uk (374 subscribers, although 255 are Yahoo.co.uk addresses)
    .de (32 subscribers)
    .fr (23 subscribers)
    .it (15 subscribers)
    .au (13 subscribers)
    .nl (12 subscribers)
    .ca (10 subscribers)
    .es (7 subscribers)
    .pl (6 subscribers)
    .be (5 subscribers)
    .nz (4 subscribers)
    .pt (3 subscribers)

Top companies whose employees used their work email address when subscribing

    Microsoft&#160;&#160;&#160; (32 subscribers)
    RTE.ie&#160;&#160;&#160; (13 subscribers)
    Gov.ie&#160;&#160;&#160; (11 subscribers)
    Eircom.ie (7 subscribers)
    Dell.com (7 subscribers)
    IBM&#160;&#160;&#160; (6 subscribers)
    Intel&#160;&#160;&#160; (6 subscribers)
    Ericsson (3 subscribers)
    HP.com&#160;&#160;&#160; (3 subscribers)
    Pfizer&#160;&#160;&#160; (2 subscribers)
More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Fri, 02 May 2008 12:24:39 GMT</pubDate> 
    <guid isPermaLink="false">f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:4425</guid> 
    <enclosure url="http://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Blogs/Promenade/tabid/75/EntryId/591/Reviving-the-CLUAS-newsletter.aspx" length="23842" type="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4426/How-Google-sees-CLUAS-part-1#Comments</comments> 
    <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> 
    <wfw:commentRss>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=36&amp;ModuleID=728&amp;ArticleID=4426</wfw:commentRss> 
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    <title>How Google sees CLUAS (part 1)</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4426/How-Google-sees-CLUAS-part-1</link> 
    <description>(First up - apologies for my absence from this blog in recent weeks, I won&#39;t burden you with a long list of protracted excuses, suffice to say I&#39;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&#39;s leading search engine. The number of visitors they send our way&#160;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&#160;vistors&#160;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&#39;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 and all you need to do to get this info for your website is to prove to Google that you are indeed the owner of the domain name. They then dish out all sorts of info that any conscientious websmaster would be mad for, like:

    Search queries that most often returned pages from your site, and which of them were clicked,
    Which pages on your site have links pointing to them from other sites,
    The number of pages on your site that Google indexes per day,
    The average time it takes Google to download a page,
    Pages that it has trouble accessing.

Exciting stuff, eh? 

Anyway I&#39;ve been checking in with the Google Webmaster Tools service for well over a year now to keep tabs on how Google is interacting with CLUAS. Last week when I logged in I noticed something unexpected. Google all of a sudden had dramatically reduced the number of CLUAS.com pages it crawls on an average day. It dropped from an average of thousand pages a day to about 25 a day (see the graph). My first reaction was &quot;WTF?&quot; before calming all the way down.

There are many reasons why Google would suddenly reduce dramatically the number of pages it crawls on any site: the site might not be updated often enough to merit &#39;deep crawling&#39;, the site might not be receiving enough&#160;new links from other sites, the site might have started using all sorts of frowned upon practices to deceive search engines. There could be&#160;any number of reasons. However I was reassured when I saw that CLUAS articles are still appearing in Google news within an hour of them being published. Somehow I don&#39;t think we are in the Google doghouse. 

My own feeling is that this is something to do with the fact that, starting for a 3 week period on April 5, CLUAS stopped running Google ads on the site (so that we could run a banner ad campaign for Independent Records). I&#39;m not saying that I think Google went &quot;ahhhh, those CLUAS lads, they stopped running our ads, off with their heads, etc.&quot; Here&#39;s why. See, when you visit a page with a Google ad a few things happen in the blink of an eye. Simplifying it greatly, you visit the page, the page tells a Google ad server &quot;there&#39;s a visitor on this page&quot;, Google grabs the page, checks its content and then serves up a ad relevant to content on the page.&#160;My guess is that once we&#160;stopped running Google ads for&#160;the 3 weeks, Google during this period - obviously - stopped &quot;grabbing pages&quot; to check content in order to decide what ads it should run on the page. And this is what has made our &quot;pages crawled&quot; stats plummet (background info: Google last year bundled together the task of checking a page for ad content with checking a page for possible inclusion in its search result pages). 

Maybe I am wrong and Google just thinks CLUAS is not worth crawling as often as it did before for some other reason. Now that the Google ads are again running across the site I&#39;ll soon be able to see if my theory is right. I&#39;ll report back in a few weeks with an update on what happens.
Betcha just can&#39;t wait.More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Fri, 02 May 2008 00:06:10 GMT</pubDate> 
    <guid isPermaLink="false">f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:4426</guid> 
    <enclosure url="http://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Blogs/Promenade/tabid/75/EntryId/588/How-Google-sees-CLUAS-part-1.aspx" length="23842" type="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4427/Top-Irish-Albums-Ever-the-poll-of-polls#Comments</comments> 
    <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> 
    <wfw:commentRss>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=36&amp;ModuleID=728&amp;ArticleID=4427</wfw:commentRss> 
    <trackback:ping>https://www.cluas.com:443/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=4427&amp;PortalID=0&amp;TabID=36</trackback:ping> 
    <title>Top Irish Albums Ever: the poll of polls</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4427/Top-Irish-Albums-Ever-the-poll-of-polls</link> 
    <description>Back in 2004, as part of its 5th birthday celebrations, CLUAS ran a readers&#39; 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&#160;indeed the majority of the albums that made the final&#160;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,&#160;a&#160;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.&#160;It&#39;s also curious to see that 10 of the top 50 40 albums came from the&#160;Paddy Casey-Frames-Bell-X1-Mundy-Damien Rice axis, but no surprise there considering the strong overlap of these acts&#39; fanbases in Ireland in 2004.
Then&#160;a week ago the Irish Times &quot;Ticket&quot; supplement published its own list of the top 40 Irish albums of all time, as chosen by four of their journos. Again this was a solid&#160;list but one that also had its imperfections and its own&#160;bias. For example there is a rather strong affinity with albums released in&#160;one rather narrow 7 year window (1984 to 1991) by Dublin-based bands who ploughed the Baggott Inn-International Bar-McGonagles circuit (a total of six of their top 40 albums were released in this period by The Stars of Heaven, The Blades (2 albums each), Something Happens and A House).&#160;
Reading through the two lists and noting their various strengths/weaknesses it occurred to me that a merging of the polls might just eliminate many (if not all)&#160;of their&#160;respective biases. The principle I set out with was a simple one - create a new &#39;Best Irish Album&#39; listing made up only of albums that appeared in both the CLUAS and The Ticket polls. It turns out there are twenty albums common to the two lists so I went about ranking them in order of their total score (which in turn was based on their respective placings in the CLUAS &amp; Irish Times polls, see note on allocation of scores below).
The resulting top&#160;20 is below, I&#39;ll avoid any dumb temptation to declare it as some sort of definitive list. But I do think it is a credible&#160;listing of 20 thoroughly excellent Irish releases that marries the &#39;wisdom of the crowd&#39; with the considered views of 4 seasoned music hacks. For everyone there will be at least one glaring omission in the list. For me it is Sinead O&#39;Connor. She didn&#39;t make&#160;the cut&#160;as the one album of hers that was chosen by the CLUAS readers (the quite thrilling &#39;Lion &amp; the Cobra&#39; ) differed to that picked by&#160;the Irish Times journos (&#39;I&#160;do not want what I haven&#39;t got&#39;).
Nonetheless the top 20 as its stands&#160;is properly distributed over the decades&#160;with 3 albums from the noughties, 6 from the 90s, 5 from both the 80 and 70s and 1 from the 60s. Nor does it reflect any bias I can see in terms of&#160;scene or genre. All in all, a balanced and credible list. And if you disagree, feel free to let it rip via the comments below.&#160;
The Top 20 Irish Albums Ever (poll of polls)

    My Bloody Valentine &#39;Loveless&#39;
    Van Morrison &#39;Astral Weeks&#39;
    U2 &#39;Achtung Baby&#39;
    Whipping Boy &#39;Heartworm&#39;
    A House &#39;I am the Greatest&#39;
    U2 &#39;The Joshua &#39;Tree&#39;&#160; (actually joint 5th with A House)
    Thin Lizzy &#39;Live And Dangerous&#39;
    The Undertones &#39;The Undertones&#39;
    Bell X1 &#39;Music In Mouth&#39;
    The Pogues &#39;Rum, Sodomy and the Lash&#39;&#160;&#160;(actually joint 9th with Bell X1)
    Van Morrison &#39;Moondance&#39;
    Damien Rice &#39;O&#39;
    The Frames &#39;For The Birds&#39;&#160;(actually joint 12th with Damien Rice)
    Microdisney &#39;The Clock Comes Down the Stairs&#39;
    The Pogues &#39;If I Should Fall From Grace With God&#39;
    Ash &#39;1977&#39;
    Planxty &#39;Planxty&#39;
    My Bloody Valentine &#39;Isn&#39;t Anything&#39;
    Therapy? &#39;Troublegum&#39;
    Rory Gallagher &#39;Live in Europe&#39;

Note on scoring: Scores used in the ranking of the 20 albums that were common to the two original polls were calculated as follows: if a common album was a number one on either poll it got 50 points for its entry on that poll, if it was a number two it got 49 points, etc right down to it getting 1 point if it was a number 50. For each of the albums the scores it got for its position on each poll were then added up to get its total score.
The one flaw in this approach is that there were 40 albums in the original Irish Times poll, but 50 in the CLUAS poll. I had actually initially looked for albums that were common only to the top 40 of both polls – this threw up 18 albums. By extending the &#39;comparison check&#39; to the full top 50 of the original CLUAS poll the number of common albums increased to the nice neat number of 20.More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Fri, 07 Mar 2008 18:15:12 GMT</pubDate> 
    <guid isPermaLink="false">f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:4427</guid> 
    <enclosure url="http://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Blogs/Promenade/tabid/75/EntryId/535/Top-Irish-Albums-Ever-the-poll-of-polls.aspx" length="23842" type="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4428/The-Skinny-the-Bloated--revisited#Comments</comments> 
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    <wfw:commentRss>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=36&amp;ModuleID=728&amp;ArticleID=4428</wfw:commentRss> 
    <trackback:ping>https://www.cluas.com:443/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=4428&amp;PortalID=0&amp;TabID=36</trackback:ping> 
    <title>The Skinny &amp; the Bloated - revisited</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4428/The-Skinny-the-Bloated--revisited</link> 
    <description>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&#39;s&#160;home page. As you do, like.
The results showed a huge diversity across the sites: the slimmest (that&#39;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&#39;d ever imagine (Mulley only yesterday wrote about there still being 200,000 dialup users in Ireland alone) and for such users your&#160;site will take an eternity to load&#160;if it is weighed down with 100s of kilobytes of data. It might not be terribly sexy but, until broadband is ubiquitous, keeping an eye on the &#39;payload&#39; of your site or blog is really the smart thing to do.
So how are Ireland&#39;s leading music sites doing sites doing one month on after my original, er, expos&#233;? Did any of them implement the recommendations I provided and trim themselves down? The answer, in short, is a definite &#39;yes&#39; for a large number of them.
The table below provides an update of the sites&#39; weights. Of the 32 sites originally surveyed, 21 have reduced their &#39;weight&#39; in the intervening month (several by massive amounts). A month ago only 8 of 32 sites made into the &#39;green zone&#39; (i.e. weighing in at 250 KB or less). Today 11 of the sites now merit for a privileged spot in the said zone.
At the other end of the scale, the number of sites in the &#39;red zone&#39; of the table below (i.e. sites for which visitors would have to download a whopping 1 MB or more of data to access their homepage) has dropped to 4, compared to 7 a month ago (although Indie Hour - which appears to have&#160;eaten&#160;a few proverbial pies in the last few weeks - was just 1 single kilobyte away from a spot in the red zone).
Overall, the average weight of the 32 sites is today 20% lighter than it was 4 weeks ago&#160;(the average weight of a site was 631 KB at the beginning of February, today it is 515 KB). Some sites have made amazing progress in the last month and merit a special mention:

    www.Donal.ie has lost a mind-boggling 1374 KB in the last month, allowing it to slim down from a hyper obese 1.9 MB to a cuddly 526 KB. Amazing work. No, really.
    Egocentric has lost a similarly impressive 1255 KB in the last month, slimming down from a modem-melting 2.1 MB to a mere pudgy 845 KB. Keep drinking that virtual slimfast though as 845 KB is no walk in the park for those 200,000 Irish dialup users.
    Cheebah has gone from 1.2MB to 278 KB, a huge drop of almost 1 full megabyte which has taken it out of the red zone and parachuted itself right to the edge of the hallowed &#39;green zone&#39;.
    Matt Vinyl and Asleep on the Compost Heap each having shaved off about 400 KB from their payloads.

Check out the full table below and see how your favourite music sites are doing (and I for one am pretty pleased to see that CLUAS.com&#39;s 3 entries are all in the top 5). The 4 colour coded categories correspond as follows:

    Less than 250 KB: (&quot;Optimal balance of content and page size&quot;)
    251 KB to 500 KB: (&quot;Total nightmare for dialup users&quot;)
    501 KB to 999 KB: (&quot;High risk of testing the patience of broadband users&quot;)
    Greater than 1 MB: (&quot;Clinical cases of inexcusable hyper cyber-obesity&quot;)

Ireland&#39;s Top Music Site&#39;s &amp; Blogs
(ranked in terms of page size - updated 4 March 2008)


    
        
            Current ranking
            Previous ranking
            
            Site / Blog
            
            Components of webpage (in KB)
            Total page size
            Weight loss / gain?
        
        
            HTML
            Images
            CSS
            Flash
        
        
            
            1
            
            (1)
            CLUAS (*)
            16
            39
            12
            3
            0
            71 KB
            -26 KB
        
        
            
            &#160;2
            
            (4)
            Thrill Pier
            22
            1.5
            74
            4
            1
            102 KB
            -75 KB
        
        
            &#160;3
            (2)
            Test Industries
            18
            80
            1
            17
            0
            117 KB
            no change
        
        
            &#160;4
            (7)
            Key Notes
            21
            90
            59
            13
            0
            182 KB
            -52 KB&#160;
        
        
            &#160;5
            (6)
            French Letter
            19
            107
            56
            13
            0
            198 KB
            -27 KB&#160;
        
        
            &#160;6
            (3)
            Music Road
            16
            160
            16
            2
            8
            204 KB
            +43 KB
        
        
            &#160;7
            (13)
            House is a Feeling (*)
            66
            118
            24
            2
            0
            211&#160;KB
            &#160;-135 KB
        
        
            8
            (8)
            Hot Press (*)
            62
            144
            6
            7
            0
            219 KB
            -29 KB
        
        
            &#160;9
            (10)
            Thumped
            7
            130
            51
            32
            0
            220&#160;KB
            -50 KB&#160;
        
        
            &#160;10
            (18)
            The Red scrapbook
            20
            146
            75
            4
            0
            245 KB
            -194 KB&#160;
        
        
            &#160;11
            (12)
            Phantom FM (*)
            50
            144
            34
            13
            9
            250&#160;KB
            -53 KB&#160;
        
        
            &#160;12
            (5)
            On the Record 
            19
            175
            38
            26
            0
            259 KB
            &#160;+70 KB
        
        
            &#160;13
            (28)
            Cheebah
            19
            232
            12
            16
            0
            278 KB
            -922 KB
        
        
            &#160;14
            (19)
            Muse (*)
            41
            166
            94
            19
            1
            321&#160;KB
            -153 KB&#160;
        
        
            &#160;15
            (14)
            Kilkenny Music (*)
            46
            178
            24
            26
            52
            328 KB
            &#160;-26 KB
        
        
            16
            (16)
            State
            7
            264
            86
            31
            0
            389&#160;KB
            &#160;-33 KB
        
        
            17
            (17)
            Nialler9
            17
            280
            96
            22
            6
            420 KB
            -6 KB
        
        
            &#160;18
            (9)
            Sinead Gleeson
            16
            411
            0
            7
            2
            437 KB
            +184 KB
        
        
            &#160;19
            (23)
            I Prefer the Obscure Mix
            18
            583
            33
            2
            6
            444 KB
            -194 KB&#160;
        
        
            20
            (20)
            Indie Limerick
            17
            314
            81
            4
            28
            445&#160;KB
            &#160;-87 KB
        
        
            &#160;21
            (25)
            Asleep on the Compost Heap
            16
            394
            69
            4
            0
            484 KB
            -416 KB
        
        
            &#160;22
            (15)
            MP3 Hugger
            132
            183
            151
            4
            40
            510 KB
            +118 KB
        
        
            &#160;23
            (26)
            Matt Vinyl
            18
            340
            70
            4
            82
            515 KB
            -485 KB
        
        
            &#160;24
            (31)
            Donal O’Caoimh (*)
            32
            405
            81
            8
            0
            526 KB
            &#160;
            -1374 KB
        
        
            &#160;25
            (11)
            Una Rocks
            33
            400
            75
            4
            15
            527 KB
            +234 KB
        
        
            &#160;26
            (21)
            The Torture Garden
            17
            551
            13
            4
            3
            588 KB
            &#160;+4 KB
        
        
            &#160;27
            (32)
            Egoeccentric
            28
            530
            198
            4
            84
            845 KB
            -1255 KB
        
        
            &#160;28
            (24)
            The Indie Hour
            15
            946
            35
            5
            2
            999 KB
            +162 KB&#160;
        
        
            &#160;29
            (27)
            Magoo (*)
            43
            1010
            16
            11
            2
            1.08 MB
            +80 KB
        
        
            &#160;30
            (29)
            Off the Rocker (*)
            54
            1387
            65
            11
            2
            1.5 MB
            -100 KB
        
        
            &#160;31
            (22)
            Cubik Music
            30
            702
            16
            12
            832
            1.6 MB
            +400 KB&#160;
        
        
            &#160;32
            (30)
            Stuart Bailie (*)
            220
            1756
            1
            0
            0
            1.98 MB
            +180 KB
        
    


Note on the above:
Figures above are the sizes of each site&#39;s main page as surveyed between 29 February&#160;2008 and 1 March&#160;2008 (according to the Web Page Analyser service). It just represents a snapshot in time. The sizes above are dynamic and will fluctuate whenever new content is added to, or older content removed from,&#160;these sites&#39; home page.More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Tue, 04 Mar 2008 19:36:19 GMT</pubDate> 
    <guid isPermaLink="false">f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:4428</guid> 
    <enclosure url="http://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Blogs/Promenade/tabid/75/EntryId/528/The-Skinny-the-Bloated-revisited.aspx" length="23842" type="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4429/The-Skinny-the-Bloated-part-II-Technology-blogs#Comments</comments> 
    <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> 
    <wfw:commentRss>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=36&amp;ModuleID=728&amp;ArticleID=4429</wfw:commentRss> 
    <trackback:ping>https://www.cluas.com:443/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=4429&amp;PortalID=0&amp;TabID=36</trackback:ping> 
    <title>The Skinny &amp; the Bloated (part II): Technology blogs</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4429/The-Skinny-the-Bloated-part-II-Technology-blogs</link> 
    <description>Yesterday I posted a blog entry ranking Irish music web sites, from the skinniest, to the most bloated. For those of you who missed it (or don&#39;t have the time to check it out) I basically started off riffing about how, despite the growth in broadband penetration in Ireland, website owners and bloggers should remain acutely sensitive to the size of their blogs as: a) there is still about 7% out there who are on a dialup modem and b) broadband users are an impatient bunch you don&#39;t want to annoy with bloated pages that test the outer limits of their download capabilities. I then ranked the top 30 or so Irish music sites and blogs in terms of their page size.
Today I&#39;m turning my (weight-obsessed) attention to Irish technology blogs, namely the the 21 blogs longlisted for the category of &quot;Best Technology Blog&quot; in this year&#39;s &quot;Irish Blog Awards&quot; (this blog is also one of the longlisted technology blogs).
The table below ranks all these blogs in terms of their total size of their main page. As I did for the music sites, I have also in the table broken out the &quot;payloads&quot; for each different &#39;component category&#39; that typically makes up a web page (i.e. the HTML part, images, Javascript files, Flash files and CSS files). The results are then clustered into 4 colour-coded categories, based on overall page size:

    Less than 250 KB: (&quot;Optimal balance of content and page size&quot;)
    251 KB to 500 KB: (&quot;Total nightmare for dialup users&quot;)
    501 KB to 999 KB: (&quot;High risk of testing the patience of broadband users&quot;)
    Greater than 1 MB: (&quot;Clinical cases of inexcusable hyper cyber-obesity&quot;)

Topping the list is here is Bill de h&#211;ra super slim blog, barely detectable on the scales with its impressive&#160;39 KB. And&#160;hats off to to James Corbett whose blog is the only other one to come in under 100 KB. At the other end of the spectrum are Ina O’Murchu and Matt Vinyl&#39;s blogs, both of which strain the scales with their 1 flabby megabyte of content (a payload that would require a poor dialup user to hang in there for about 4 minutes to complete the download).
All in all, these technology blogs are a slimmer bunch than the music blogs: over 3/4s of them coming in under 500 KB, a feat only 3/5s of the music sites were able to do. The average weight of the technology blogs is 390 KB, compared to a 630 KB average for the music blogs.
The 5 tech blogs falling into the orange and red categories below would do well to reduce their payload by pursuing tactics I yesterday recommend to the music bloggers i.e., reduce the size of images (or in the case of Tom Raftery and Ken McGuire remove the Multimedia flash content that massively bulks out their blogs) and then reduce the number of blog entries on their blog home page. All of them (except Ken McGuire&#39;s blog) have &#39;server side&#39; compression already activated, the other piece of advice I offered yesterday.
Ireland&#39;s Top Technology Blogs
(ranked in terms of page size)


    
    
        
            Rank
            
            Blog
            
            Components of webpage (in KB)
            Total page size
        
        
            HTML
            Images
            Javascript
            CSS
            Flash
        
        
            1
            Bill de h&#211;ra
            18
            15
            0
            5
            0
            39&#160;KB
        
        
            2
            James Corbett
            11
            27
            45
            4
            0
            87 KB
        
        
            3
            Dave Northey
            14
            20
            63
            14
            0
            112 KB
        
        
            4
            Karlin Lillington (*)
            30
            85
            0
            7
            0
            123 KB
        
        
            5
            Chris Horn
            34
            2
            89
            4
            0
            129 KB
        
        
            6
            John Collins
            14
            65
            71
            11
            0
            161 KB
        
        
            7
            Haydn Shaughnessy (*)
            49
            117
            3
            6
            0
            175 KB
        
        
            8
            Michelle Gallen
            68
            114
            26
            2
            5
            215 KB
        
        
            9
            Niall Larkin (*)
            67
            173
            0
            7
            5
            252 KB
        
        
            10
            Michele Neylon (*)
            57
            165
            17
            15
            0
            255 KB
        
        
            11
            Inside View
            13
            236
            26
            11
            0
            286 KB
        
        
            12
            Donncha O’Caoimh
            17
            309
            26
            18
            0
            371 KB
        
        
            13
            Promenade
            25
            257
            85
            13
            1
            381 KB
        
        
            14
            Robin Blandford (*)
            77
            307
            37
            16
            0
            438 KB
        
        
            15
            What I think (*)
            94
            287
            62
            9
            0
            451 KB
        
        
            16
            Pat Phelan
            15
            343
            58
            18
            39
            473 KB
        
        
            17
            Ken McGuire (*)
            66
            95
            51
            8
            447
            667 KB
        
        
            18
            Tom Raftery
            18
            274
            38
            20
            358
            707 KB
        
        
            19
            Alexia Golez
            127
            579
            6
            10
            62
            785 KB
        
        
            20
            Ina O’Murchu
            15
            960
            41
            2
            17
            1.03 MB
        
        
            21
            Matt Vinyl
            26
            746
            71
            4
            195
            1.04 MB
        
        
            
            (*) These sites/blogs do not have compression activated on their web server, for more detail on server-side compression see note 2 below.
            
        
    


Notes on the above:

    Figures above are the sizes of each site&#39;s main page on the morning of 7 February 2008 (according to the Web Page Analyser service). It just represents a snapshot in time. The sizes above are dynamic and will fluctuate whenever new content is added to, or older content removed from, these blogs&#39; main page.
    Of the 21 sites in the above list, 15 are configured so that text files (such as HTML) are compressed by the webserver before being sent to the requesting visitor (whose browser then automatically decompresses them when the file is received). The advantage of this being that the amount of text data to be downloaded is reduced (the reduction in size of a HTML file that can be expected with such compression is usually in the order of 70-80%). In such cases it is the size of the HTML file after it has been compressed that is cited in the table above. The 10 sites who do not have this function activated (indicated above with an asterisk) are strongly advised to do so.
    The above list does not include the &#39;Digital Sole&#39; blog (one of the 26 blogs longlisted for the Best Music Blog at the Irish Blog Awards 2007) as it was inaccessible at the time I was checking the sizes of the blogs / websites.
More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Fri, 08 Feb 2008 12:08:03 GMT</pubDate> 
    <guid isPermaLink="false">f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:4429</guid> 
    <enclosure url="http://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Blogs/Promenade/tabid/75/EntryId/504/The-Skinny-the-Bloated-part-II-Technology-blogs.aspx" length="23842" type="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
</item>
<item>
    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4430/Irish-Music-sites-The-skinny-the-bloated#Comments</comments> 
    <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> 
    <wfw:commentRss>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=36&amp;ModuleID=728&amp;ArticleID=4430</wfw:commentRss> 
    <trackback:ping>https://www.cluas.com:443/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=4430&amp;PortalID=0&amp;TabID=36</trackback:ping> 
    <title>Irish Music sites: The skinny &amp; the bloated</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4430/Irish-Music-sites-The-skinny-the-bloated</link> 
    <description>In Ireland&#160;recent years have seen progress in the availability of broadband services (in July 2007 it was up to 15.5% penetration, according to the European Commission). However that does not mean that dial-up as an access route to the web has gone the way of the Dodo. CLUAS.com&#39;s experience is that about 7% of our visitors in 2007 visited the site via a dial-up modem (based on Google&#39;s web traffic analytics service we use). If you ask me, many website and bloggers targeting Irish readers would do well to keep it in mind that a decent chunk of their readers are still dependant on a dial up connection to access the ould internets, and that flabbing out their site (or blog) with hefty images and bandwidth choking Flash is going to be counter-productive.
But it&#39;s not just about ensuring sites &amp; blogs are quick and snappy for unfortunates stuck with dialup modems. Those of us with bandwidth connections are also sensitive to download times. And arguably more so than someone using a dialup modem who, in order to have any chance of maintaining some sanity, is obliged to demonstrate super human levels of patience. Having a broadband connection means our patience goes out the window: expectations of loading times for any web page are hugely raised, God help a site that is slow to load when we have that big juicy broadband pipe at our disposal. Bloggers and webmasters: ignore this at your peril, especially if you are trying to reach music fans (as&#160;their broadband connection may already be under heavy pressure at the moment they try and visit your site considering&#160;they are more likely than most to be listening to streaming music or downloading&#160;recent MP3 or digital video purchases).
So how are the main Irish music blogs and websites doing in terms of keeping the flab off? Who within the well established eco-system of Irish music sites is going to test the patience of their readers, be they in dialup hell or broadband bliss? And who is successfully keeping the weight down? To get some answers I checked out the size of the main page of over 30 established Irish music sites and blogs. As a starting point I took the 26 blogs longlisted for the category of &quot;Best Music Blog&quot; in this year&#39;s &quot;Irish Blog Awards&quot; (two of which I am pleased to point out are from the CLUAS blog family - French Letter and Key Notes). To this list I then added in another bunch of music sites picked out at my own discretion, the sites I added were: State.ie, Hotpress.com, Thumped.com, the Thrill Pier blog, Muse.ie, Phantom FM and the CLUAS.com home page.
The table below ranks all these sites in terms of their total download size. For all sites I have also broken out the &quot;payloads&quot; for each different &#39;component category&#39; that typically makes up a web page, i.e. the HTML part, images, Javascript files, Flash files and CSS files (for the non-geeks among you a CSS file - Cascading Style Sheet - is used to style and position web page content).
There is a massive variation in the list. The lightest site steps in at a lean 97 KB (that&#39;ll be CLUAS.com&#39;s home page, thank you) and the heaviest being a broadband busting 2.1MB (stand up Egocentric).&#160;In terms of time, a 1Mbps broadband connection would take over 30 seconds to download the 2.1 megabytes that constitute Egocentric&#39;s main&#160;page&#160;(only the hardiest digital souls are advised to click the link). It doesn&#39;t bear thinking about but the 7% out there still on a 56 kbs dial up connection would have to wait for over 8 minutes. There should be a law against that. Or something.
Anyways I&#39;ve clustered the results into 4 colour coded categories, based on overall page size:

    Less than 250 KB: (&quot;Optimal balance of content and page size&quot;)
    251 KB to 500 KB: (&quot;Total nightmare for dialup users&quot;)
    501 KB to 999 KB: (&quot;High risk of testing the patience of broadband users&quot;)
    Greater than 1 MB: (&quot;Clinical cases of inexcusable hyper cyber-obesity&quot;)

Those falling into the orange and red categories would do well to assess their site&#39;s content and see what they can shave off to reduce the payload. Three tactics I&#39;d recommend are:

    Reduce the size of images: A quick glance in the &#39;Images&#39; column in the&#160;table below confirms that&#160;it is images which carry the most blame for the bloated sites. Using even images with slightly reduced dimensions can reduce an image file size by 75%. It is vital to understand that reducing the size of the image as it appears on the page does not automatically mean the file size is reduced. To reduce the file size the image must be &#39;resampled&#39;&#160;to reflect the reduced dimensions of the image. Finally, there is little point pursuing the next two suggestions if this first one is not addressed.
    Reduce the number of blog entries on blog home page: The obese blogs should also reduce the number of blog entries listed on the blog&#39;s home page. Take Stuart Ballie&#39;s blog for example (weighing in at 1.8 MB). His has a massive number of entries appearing on his blog home page. If his blog were configured so that the older half of those blog entries were systematically moved to an archive page, the blog would probably leap out of the depths of the red zone and into the healthier echelons of the yellow.
    Activate &#39;server side&#39; compression: 4 of the 13 sites in the orange and red zones do not have automatic file compression activated on their web servers (for more info on this see note 2 after the table). This can help reduce the size of the HTML file but, to be honest, the effect on the overall payload of any heavy site will be insignificant if the excessive image files are not first addressed.

These sort of steps can also have longer term&#160;benefits when you consider that an&#160;iPhone-inspired era of sophisticated mobile web access is on its way. You can bet someone trying to access your site via their future all-singing, all dancing mobile phone - be it a snazzy&#160;iPhone or a more modest non-Apple device - won&#39;t be prepared to wait 30+ seconds for a 1 or 2 megabyte&#160;web page to download.
Ireland&#39;s Top Music Site&#39;s &amp; Blogs
(ranked in terms of page size)


    
        
            Rank
            
            Site / Blog
            
            Components of webpage (in KB)
            Total page size
        
        
            HTML
            Images
            Javascript
            CSS
            Flash
        
        
            1
            CLUAS (*)
            16
            39
            39
            3
            0
            97 KB
        
        
            2
            Test Industries
            17
            82
            1
            17
            0
            117 KB
        
        
            3
            Music Road
            16
            92
            43
            2
            8
            161 KB
        
        
            4
            Thrill Pier
            16
            88
            68
            4
            1
            177 KB
        
        
            5
            On the Record &#160;
            24
            97
            42
            26
            0
            189 KB
        
        
            6
            French Letter
            19
            107
            85
            13
            0
            225 KB
        
        
            7
            Key Notes
            21
            116
            85
            13
            0
            236 KB
        
        
            8
            Hot Press (*)
            61
            141
            21
            24
            0
            248 KB
        
        
            9
            Sinead Gleeson
            18
            227
            0
            7
            1
            253 KB
        
        
            10
            Thumped
            7
            155
            78
            32
            0
            271 KB
        
        
            11
            Una Rocks
            24
            173
            89
            4
            3
            293 KB
        
        
            12
            Phantom FM (*)
            52
            196
            34
            13
            8
            303 KB
        
        
            13
            House is a Feeling (*)
            71
            249
            24
            2
            0
            346 KB
        
        
            14
            Kilkenny Music (*)
            49
            179
            48
            26
            52
            354 KB
        
        
            15
            MP3 Hugger
            24
            168
            146
            4
            40
            382 KB
        
        
            16
            State
            7
            302
            82
            31
            0
            422 KB
        
        
            17
            Nialler9
            18
            233
            112
            22
            42
            426 KB
        
        
            18
            The Red scrapbook
            19
            328
            89
            4
            0
            439 KB
        
        
            19
            Muse (*)
            41
            278
            106
            19
            30
            474 KB
        
        
            20
            Indie Limerick
            17
            392
            91
            4
            28
            532 KB
        
        
            21
            The Torture Garden
            16
            534
            28
            4
            2
            584 KB
        
        
            22
            Cubik Music
            29
            148
            34
            12
            378
            601 KB
        
        
            23
            I Prefer the Obscure Mix
            17
            583
            33
            5
            1
            638 KB
        
        
            24
            The Indie Hour
            16
            781
            33
            5
            2
            837 KB
        
        
            25
            Asleep on the Compost Heap
            19
            808
            69
            4
            0
            900 KB
        
        
            26
            Matt Vinyl
            26
            704
            71
            4
            195
            1.0 MB
        
        
            27
            Magoo (*)
            44
            1044
            16
            11
            1
            1.1 MB
        
        
            28
            Cheebah
            22
            1116
            27
            16
            0
            1.2 MB
        
        
            29
            Off the Rocker (*)
            55
            1517
            21
            9
            3
            1.6 MB
        
        
            30
            Stuart Bailie (*)
            216
            1568
            1
            0
            0
            1.8 MB
        
        
            31
            Donal O’Caoimh (*)
            36
            1746
            149
            8
            0
            1.9 MB
        
        
            32
            Egoeccentric
            30
            1838
            194
            4
            23
            2.1 MB
        
        
            (*) These sites/blogs do not have compression activated on their web server, for more detail on server-side compression see note 2 below.
        
    


Notes on the above:

    Figures above are the sizes of each site&#39;s main page on the evening of&#160;4 February 2008 (according to the Web Page Analyser service). It just represents a snapshot in time. The sizes above are dynamic and will fluctuate whenever new content is added to, or older content removed from,&#160;these sites&#39; home page.
    Of the 32 sites in the above list, 22 are configured so that text files (such as HTML) are compressed by the webserver before being sent to the requesting visitor (whose browser then automatically decompresses them when the file is received). The advantage of this being that the amount of data to be downloaded is reduced, the reduction in size of a HTML file that can be expected with such compression is usually in the order of 70-80%. In such cases it is the size of the file after it has been compressed that is cited in the table above. The 10 sites&#160;who do not have this function activated (indicated above with an asterisk) are strongly advised to do so (Aside: the CLUAS home page is not compressed - yet still manages to top the list - but the two CLUAS blogs in the above list have compression activated).
    The above list does not include the &#39;Digital Sole&#39; blog (one of the 26 blogs longlisted for the Best Music Blog at the Irish Blog Awards 2007) as it was inaccessible at the time I was checking the sizes of the blogs / websites.
    CLUAS.com&#39;s three entries in the list above are all well tucked into&#160;the green zone. Hooray!
More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Wed, 06 Feb 2008 19:59:09 GMT</pubDate> 
    <guid isPermaLink="false">f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:4430</guid> 
    <enclosure url="http://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Blogs/Promenade/tabid/75/EntryId/502/Irish-Music-sites-The-skinny-the-bloated.aspx" length="23842" type="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
</item>
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4431/CLUAS-is-getting-ready-for-the-iPhone-era-are-you#Comments</comments> 
    <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> 
    <wfw:commentRss>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=36&amp;ModuleID=728&amp;ArticleID=4431</wfw:commentRss> 
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    <title>CLUAS is getting ready for the iPhone era, are you?</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4431/CLUAS-is-getting-ready-for-the-iPhone-era-are-you</link> 
    <description>For years people have been talking about the day when we&#39;d be able to access the internet on our mobile phones. The first technology that had a stab of bringing the web to a mobile phone was WAP (&#39;Wireless Application Protocol&#39;). It raised its clumsy head in 2000 or so and was - to be polite - an excruciating experience for users. In any case only a tiny number of sites (bless &#39;em) went to the trouble of providing a WAP enabled version of their website. 

 &quot;Fret not&quot;, we thought back then, &quot;glorious pocket-based browsing is surely just around the corner now that the telcos have splurged all these countless billions on 3G licences&quot;. Well it never really worked that way, did it? 3G is with us and a 3G-enabled phone is indeed quite likely sitting in your pocket right now. And how was the experience the last time you used it to browse the web? If your visit was to one of those mobile portals such as Vodafone Live (which have limited range of content on offer) the experience could be logged as something approaching &#39;tolerable&#39;. Stepping out of the clutches of such a phone company&#39;s portal often gets very unpleasant, very quickly. One way out is to type in a web address on the phone but the less said about the complexities of doing so on many mobile phones, the better. The more usual route from a mobile phone to more interesting edges of the web is to run a simple a search on a search engine but, invariably, you end up quickly hitting some pretty ugly web pages that try to squeeze themselves into the tiny space on your phone’s screen (and any site that does look okay it is only because they have gone to the considerable lengths of creating a mobile compatible version of their website, something that is beyond the financial, time and technical resources of most webmasters, myself included).&#160;
Boiling it down to its essential: browsing the internet with your mobile sucks. But that all changed recently with the arrival of Apple’s iPhone. 

Thanks to the iPhone the &#39;internet-in-your-pocket&#39; (well, a 13cm x 7cm pocket) is - at last - becoming a reality. With one glorious step Apple managed to do what so many previously could not: they managed to suss the &#39;how to get a website looking as decent on a mobile phone as it does on a computer&#39; conundrum thanks to some very elegant and imaginative flourishes when it comes to the user interface and web navigation.
Much of the press has been (quite rightly) falling over itself singing the praises of these advances for users. But for me the real stroke of genius with the iPhone is not how it benefits users but how it benefits website owners: if your site’s design is smart and adheres to some well established best HTML practices you won’t have to create a second parallel version of your site for it to be accessible on the iPhone. Touch&#233; – all of a sudden the mobile web can now encompass, in very real terms, a significant proportion of the most interesting websites out there.

So how does the Apple iPhone do this? Here’s the quick answer. When you visit a website with your iPhone it downloads the page, as you’d expect. The browser built into the iPhone (Safari) then works out what the page would look like on a PC browser that is 980 pixels across. It then scales down the page as it would look on such a PC so that it fits into the iPhone screen. For most sites this means the iPhone user can then see the full webpage on their phone in one glance. The downside however is that for many sites some individual words will be difficult to read (as they will be too small after the page has been ‘shrunk’ down to fit on the iPhone screen). Apple have, of course, got this covered: all the iPhone user needs to do is just ‘double tap’ on different parts of the page and - if the web page adheres to established standards and best practices - the iPhone will zoom in and the user can now easily read the text / see the images on that part of the page.

While Apple is leading the way with these innovations, it’ll only be a matter of time before they inspire other handheld manufacturers to deliver a whole range of mobile devices that will, in similar, ways make it straightforward for the non-Apple masses to browse the web while on the move. I think it is finally safe to safe that the mobile internet is going to happen. Big time. 

Those who run websites or blogs would do well to ensure their sites are ready for this iPhone-inspired era that is on its way. A few questions that any conscientious webmasters should be asking themselves...

    How does your site look on an iPhone?
    Does it adhere to established best practices? For example if you want the &#39;double tap&#39; interaction described above to work you need to divide your web page&#39;s text into meaningful blocks using the &#39;div&#39; tag.
    Is the full payload of your webpage reasonable or is it still going to take an age to download? Download times really matter on the mobile web, make no assumptions about your users&#39; patience. Or the data limits set by their telephone company.
    Do you have content of your site embedded in a Flash file? Careful as the iPhone does not load Flash based websites.

With all this in mind I last month started to look into what it could all mean for CLUAS. While the CLUAS.com traffic stats showed that only 24 people visited CLUAS using an iPhone in the last 2 months of 2007 I knew that this figure could grow hugely in the future as the numbers of iPhones (and iPhone inspired handhelds) in circulation increases, but only if CLUAS has tweaked things to make it better for such visitors. 

So in early January I focused my efforts, as a first step, on revamping the HTML code behind the most important page on CLUAS – the website’s home page. The result of this effort is that the CLUAS home page now not only loads perfectly in an iPhone but a &#39;double tap&#39; on an iPhone screen will work as it should. There are other positive consequences of the change. For example this conversion meant that the HTML file of our home page was reduced about 25% in size (from a previously modest 20 KB down to a super slim 15KB). The content of the page is also better structured - logically and semantically - which means that search engines can more easily understand what our content is about and determine the relative importance of all text and links on the page (all the better for our permanent goal of getting CLUAS content to rank better and more widely).
I don&#39;t expect this to result in a massive increase in traffic to CLUAS from iPhones. However when mobile browsing&#160;&#224; la iPhone takes off CLUAS aims to be well placed to capture a decent part of the action.
Do you you have a website or a blog? If so you too should look into its readiness for the sophisticated mobile web of the coming years. Excuse a brief descent into some technical details but here&#39;s a few quick concrete checks any webmaster serious about having an iPhone ready website needs to do:

    First up the obvious one: visit your website on an iPhone if you have access to one and see how it looks.
    If you don&#39;t have an iPhone but you own a Mac, no problem, you can test it using the iPhoney application (which partly emulates the browser function of an iPhone, but it can only be installed on Mac computers).
    If you have a Windows computer my advice would be to:
    
        Download and install the Safari browser for Windows
        Open up the Safari browser, visit this page which if you follow the instructions below will allow you to see how your website would look on an iPhone. On the page you just need to:
        
            Enter your site&#39;s URL (i.e. web address),
            then enter &#39;980&#39; for &#39;width&#39; (i.e. this corresponds to the number of horizontal pixels the iPhone uses when it initally presents a web page),
            in the &#39;height&#39; box enter something like 700 or so,
            Then click &#39;Test&#39;.
        
        
        This will then resize your browser to 980 pixels across and load up your site. What you see is how you can expect your site to look on the iPhone (i.e. 980 pixels across).
    
    
    Once you have seen how your site will look on an iPhone you may see changes you need to make in terms of its layout. Keep in mind:
    
        Your site should not have key content embedded in Flash files, the iPhone will simply not be able to access such content. Same goes for Java applets (but Javascript is supported).
        You should structure your web page&#39;s content in line with established best practices for laying out and structuring text on web pages (e.g. avoid HTML tables, instead use div tags to create blocks of content, lay it out using CSS styling and then structure the text using tags such (h1, h2, h3 tags for headings, p tags for main bodies of content and li tags for lists).
        Check the size in KBs of the main page of your website using a web page analyser service. Ideally the main page of your site (its HTML + images + style sheets + Javascripts) should weigh less than 150 KBs. Anything more than that may easily test the patience of your visitor (especially important for new visitors, first impressions count, and all that).
    
    

These are only a few of the most basic guidelines. Those looking for more detailed guidance should go to the horse&#39;s mouth: Apple have put together an extenisve &#39;Designing Content&#39; chapter in their iPhone Developer Centre.&#160;
Okay, time to wrap this up. The mobile web is going to explode. Not in the next month, not even in the next 6 months. But 2-3 years from now the web will be a radically different place and huge numbers of people will access it in ways - and with a frequency - that they do not do so now. If you have a website or a blog the time to get ready for this is not next year but now.
CLUAS is far from being where it needs to get to, but we are getting there. Want to join us?More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Fri, 01 Feb 2008 23:53:02 GMT</pubDate> 
    <guid isPermaLink="false">f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:4431</guid> 
    <enclosure url="http://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Blogs/Promenade/tabid/75/EntryId/498/CLUAS-is-getting-ready-for-the-iPhone-era-are-you.aspx" length="23842" type="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
</item>
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4432/Choice-Music-Prize-Drop-the-Flash-into-the-pan#Comments</comments> 
    <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> 
    <wfw:commentRss>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=36&amp;ModuleID=728&amp;ArticleID=4432</wfw:commentRss> 
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    <title>Choice Music Prize: Drop the Flash into the pan?</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4432/Choice-Music-Prize-Drop-the-Flash-into-the-pan</link> 
    <description>Something that never fails to get up my nostrils is websites that use Macromedia Flash. Used when appropriate Flash can create nifty looking and often informative websites - I&#39;ll concede that - but such niftiness comes invariably with a pretty hefty downside for both user, and for the website.
In a nutshell Flash based sites break all sorts of well established best practices for user navigation in addition to making the website, for all intent and purpose, &#39;invisible&#39; to search engines (i.e. invisible to one of most important WWW &#39;launching pads&#39; for surfers around the world). A few years ago on the CLUAS Discussion board I let rip about such sites, pointing out the numerous shortcomings of this technology before I went on to name and shame various Irish music websites guilty of using Flash.
In the last week another prominent Irish music site that uses Flash came to my attention and, in so doing, gave me an opportunity to resurrect my Flashy rant. I&#39;m talking about the official website of the Choice Music Award&#160;(www.choicemusicprize.com). The website is, if you ask me, the one weak link in an otherwise&#160;well organised, professionally executed and credible music award initiative. It is unfortunate though that when it comes to its official presence on the interweb the Choice Music Prize has fallen short. Big time.
For me there are five key reasons, all of them detailed below, as to why it has fallen short. I should note that while the reasons below are presented with regard to the specific case of choicemusicprize.com, each of these reasons remains valid for any music website tempted by the - er -&#160;seductive, skin-deep charms of Flash:

    Non-standard user navigation: Normal WWW navigation practices go out the window with Flash. For example on the Choice Music Website if, after viewing the home &#39;page&#39; you then click on &#39;Shortlist&#39; on the horizontal navigation bar you will, as you&#39;d expect, be brought to the Shortlist&#160; &#39;page&#39;. Once you&#39;ve read that to your satisfaction and you want to, say, go back to the home page you may – out of habit – click on the browser’s ‘back’ button thinking it will bring you back to home ‘page’. Wrong. It will bring you back to the previous website you were on before you hit the Choice Music Prize website. Why is this? Basically because your browser treats a flash-based site as a single web page, no matter how many ‘pages’ it has. It may look like it has several ‘pages’ to a human visitor, but it’s only got one in the eyes of the browser (and also in the eyes of search engines for that matter, which brings me nicely to the next point…)
    Website content is invisible to Search Engines: While humans can read any text content of a Flash based website search engines still have major difficulty in doing so. In recent years Search Engines have started to work out how they can index content of such websites but they don&#39;t always do so and if they do it is done inefficiently and superficially compared to how they handle HTML based websites. For example the only bit of text that Google can read of the Choice Music website is the first sentence of the &#39;content&#39; meta tag that appears in its HTML file. That&#39;s it. As a consequence the official Choice Music Prize website is not even in the running for many relevant searches for which it would - normally - be the number 1 result.&#160;For example try a search on Google for &#39;previous choice music prize winners&#39;.
    Very slow download speed for some 1 in&#160;16 users: The usual practice when trying to access an individual page on the WWW is to tell the browser the address of the page you desire by either clicking on a link or typing in the address. The browser then scuttles off and downloads that single page, it certainly does not download every page of the website you are trying to access. However ChoiceMusicPrize.com insists you download, in the form of a 215KB Flash file, every single &#39;page&#39; of the site in their entirety before you can see anything. That&#39;s kind of okay if you are one of the many who nowadays have some form of broadband connection.&#160;However it is a bit of a nightmare for the 7% of users who still use a dial-up modem when visiting an Irish Music website(*). For them they will typically have to wait a full 44 seconds for the website to appear in their browser (according to www.websiteoptimization.com). Does a website owner really want 1in&#160;16 of his or her visitors to wait that long? This would not be an issue if they had used standard HTML, as CLUAS does. By comparison the CLUAS home page appears in a web browser after a super light 15KB HTML file and a 3KB CSS file are downloaded. There are also 38KB of images to download on our home page but, once the HTML is downloaded, all text-based&#160;content of the home page is visible to a visitor who can read it while the browser heads off to fetch the images (which, for someone on dialup connection, takes about 15 seconds). The rule of thumb to take from this? Flash websites often take much longer to download, and websites that take a long time to download are really, really annoying.
    Plug-in Requirement: Today it is typical that 1 in 50 visitors to an Irish music website (**) do not have the plug-in installed in their web browser necessary to view a Flash based website. Straight off the bat, if you choose Flash for your website, you are excluding 2% of your potential visitors. Granted, many web owners are prepared to put up with such a loss of potential visitors if it means they can have a snazzier, more attractive website that a normal HTML based one, which brings me neatly to the final - and most preplexing - point...
    Choice Music Prize&#39;s use of Flash brings no advantage over basic HTML: Every single ounce of content on choicemusicprize.com could have be presented in exactly the same way using standard HTML and CSS positioning. I would even go so far as to say that it could look even better using HTML+CSS. There was simply no need to use Flash for this website. Its use here was akin to cutting a piece of paper using a chainsaw - yes, it will probably do the job but a scissors would have been so much easier and more effective. The decision to use Flash, in this case, has not just brought zero design advantage but it&#160;brings all this other baggage outlined above.

Okay enough riffing about the problem. Time to talk&#160;solution. The period for the&#160;most intense activity on the site is going to be in the days/week just after the winner is announced, i.e. after February 27. A goal should be set to have the site converted to HTML by then at the very latest but ideally by mid February (in order to give the search engines the time to index any new version of the website).&#160;Doing this should not be too difficult as the site has, as far as I can see, a total of 11 &#39;pages&#39; embedded in the Flash file. Converting these into 11 HTML files (with a bit of basic CSS styling and positioning) should be a reasonable goal in the next four weeks for Red Berry, the design company who created the current site in Flash (who I am assuming have HTML &amp; CSS expertise in-house).
So let&#39;s see it then, a revamped Choice Music Website that is primed and ready for a surge in traffic (both human and search engine) from February 28 onwards.
Final point: any bands or business out there who are thinking of launching a website where the content is embedded in a Flash file, think carefully. Very carefully. And those of you who are already lumbered with a Flash-based site? Time to start converting it to good ould reliable HTML.

References:
* Over the entire course of 2007 6.6% of all visitors to CLUAS.com for whom a connection speed could be identified used a dialup modem.
** Over the entire course of 2007 1.8% of all visitors to CLUAS.com had no Macromedia Flash plugin installed in their broswer.
(Both these percentages were then rounded up to nearest interger for purposes of this blog entry).More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Wed, 16 Jan 2008 20:04:24 GMT</pubDate> 
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    <title>CLUAS in 2008, a time for change</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4433/CLUAS-in-2008-a-time-for-change</link> 
    <description>In the last few years it has been as clear as crystal to me that there were - and continue to be - so many things that CLUAS needed to do better (or, for that matter, just simply start doing). Finding time to do them for me has always been a problem.
Thankfully 2007 saw some essential building blocks finally get put in place - the launch of the CLUAS blogs, rolling out the ability for writers to directly publish reviews to the site themselves and optimisation of the site for search engines (one result of which is that Google now features new CLUAS articles usually within - literally - minutes of them being published). The last 12 months also saw CLUAS secure thousands of valuable new links to the site (of which several hundred links were from authoritative international websites).
Important and all as it was to make these advances - and those that I mention were were only part of the site&#39;s 2007 story - there remains a ton of stuff that needs to be done. 2008 should see us make many necessary strides.
Building on the solid foundation we now have following the progress made in 2007, CLUAS&#39; goals in the coming year include getting the following (non-exhaustive) list of things sorted (and many of them are already getting off the ground). Read on...
Increase the number of interviews of Irish bands on the site: It&#39;s a bit of an understatement but CLUAS needs to greatly increase the number of interviews of Irish bands that we do. Up to now it has been a bit ad hoc: a writer decides of their own initiative to interview an act and goes and does it. The CLUAS writing team needs to get more systematic about this. First step towards this is to get someone to take on the role of coordinating all our interview efforts. I am not talking about someone who actually does all the interviews but someone who ensures that writers are systematically identifying interesting bands to interview and organising the interviews (with the interviews being done in the main via email considering the amount of time a face to face or telephone interview can take to finalise for publishing). Ken Fallon, who recently interviewed God is an Astronaut for CLUAS, has since agreed to take this coordination role, starting in February. Nice one, Ken.
Ensure we review every Irish album of note released in 2008: We need to be sure we are systematically reviewing all Irish album releases of note. This is something we have - alas - not been doing well enough. Some basic steps towards achieving this are already taking shape behind the scenes.
Get more copies of albums to review: We need to get more albums to review than we did last year from labels and PR companies. A number of initiatives on this front have already been taken in the last week.
Review more gigs: In 2007 CLUAS writers Steven O&#39;Rourke &amp; Daragh Murray set things up so that CLUAS writers can get press passes for CLUAS writers to most of the quality gigs happening around the country. Problem has been that CLUAS writers have not taken full advantage of this. Steven has plans to sort this out in the coming year. Encouraging music nuts to go to quality gigs for free shouldn&#39;t be too difficult a task, should it?
A new blog focused on the most interesting corners of the Irish music scene: This is something that has been in the pipeline for a while - a new blog about interesting acts on the Irish music scene that all the CLUAS writers can contribute to (with Anna Murray overseeing it). This will finally happen. Watch this space.
Refresh of the website&#39;s look and feel: CLUAS could do with a new wash of virtual paint, a freshening up of its look and feel, however one that does not abandon completely the look and feel that has got us to where we are today. This will be a fairly major project and is one I have already started doing some ground work for. For example you may have noticed a change in the last week to the CLUAS home page. In techie terms I migrated the layout from a &quot;table-based&quot; layout (i.e. what should really be called &quot;web layout for the lazy&quot;) to a pure &quot;CSS positioning&quot; layout. I plan to elaborate on this in more detail in a seperate blog entry as what I did brings many, many advantages and improvements to the single most important page of the site. Anyways, this shift to CSS positioning is one I want to (nay, need to) spread over the rest of the site before slapping on a new look and feel. (Aside: an additional consequence of this shift to CSS positioning is that the full CLUAS site will, in due course, be browsable by the iPhone and other cutting edge phone-based browsers as they emerge).
Regularly upgrade the technology the site uses: I&#39;ll share a dirty little secret. When over a year ago (at the end of 2006) I migrated the site to the new technology we use (DotNetNuke) I had some doubts if it was the right choice (there were many other Content Management Systems I could have chosen, DotNetNuke was not the perfect fit for us but it seemed to be &#39;good enough&#39; and I had to stop waiting for perfection and just pick a system). One year on I am now convinced it was not only the right choice but - long term - the best choice for the site. DotNetNuke has really matured since we first started using it in Nov 2006. There is an extremely busy and skilled community of volunteers that are constantly improving the core technology and adding useful new functionality. The following are just a few of the improvements you can expect on CLUAS in 2008 thanks to advances in this technology:

    Improved interface to the CLUAS blogs: a new version of the blog module we use has been released. I have not yet installed it on CLUAS but, as you will see, it makes for a more attractive blog interface (and it also sorts out the issue of carriage returns in any blog comments being ignored).
    Ability for writers to directly publish features &amp; interviews: new functionality scheduled for Spring 2008 will allow us to have writers publish interviews &amp; features direct to the site without any need for my intervention.
    Improvements to the discussion board: A new improved version of the discussion board will be out in the coming 2 months, another update is then foreseen 6 months later.

Securing more links to CLUAS: On the WWW one of the most valuable currencies for a website is links. 2007 was - without doubt - our single most successful year ever in securing links, both in terms of number and quality of links attracted. However a fair chunk of our future success depends on not just continuing this but also increasing the number of links we attract. We&#39;re on it.
Increase the use of polls on the Discussion board: Towards the end of 2007 we tested the waters with the poll function of the CLUAS Discussion board. Used properly it can be a nifty little addition to the board and in 2008 we should use it more often (but not over do it). The most recent poll we added to the site is for who you think should win the Choice Music Prize from the shortlisted albums (be sure to vote!) Expect more of those in the coming year.
Finally.... preparing for CLUAS.com&#39;s 10th birthday in 2009: CLUAS will be 10 years old in 2009. The plan is to mark the occasion in an ambitious fashion. There are a number of possible routes we could take but as the year progresses we should have a clearer picture of what we&#39;ll be doing. Once again, watch this space.
Would you like to be part of all this? Then all you need to do is submit an article, even a 200 word review of an album or a gig will do the job! You can then expect to receive free albums to review and access to press passes to gigs around the country of your own choosing.
In a nutshell, we&#39;re in great shape but - as you excuse the clich&#233; - the best is yet to come.More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Sun, 13 Jan 2008 20:17:52 GMT</pubDate> 
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4434/Tom-Waits-for-Xmas-No1-Do-your-bit#Comments</comments> 
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    <title>Tom Waits for Xmas No.1? Do your bit!</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4434/Tom-Waits-for-Xmas-No1-Do-your-bit</link> 
    <description>Journalist and blogger Adam Maguire has kicked off a campaign to get Tom Waits classic &quot;Christmas card from a hooker in Minneapolis&quot; to the top of the Irish charts this Christmas. Quite right too.
For a purchase of the song to count for the chart you need to buy it by this coming Thursday (Dec 20) from any of the outlets listed below (all of which are used by IRMA when they compile the charts each week). I&#39;ve culled these links from the Official Blog Adam has set up for this initiative, I&#39;ve just split out which services work with what type of platform.
Indulge me a moment as I have a moan. It pains me greatly to see there are no DRM-free (Digital Rights Management) downloads that are recognised by IRMA when they compile their weekly charts. But that I am sure is a temporary state of affairs. By next Christmas I suspect things will have changed on that front as the music industry progresses, as it has begun to do, towards the realisation that using DRM to restrict what music consumers can do with a purchased download is a mug&#39;s game.
iPhones &amp; iPods:

    Apple iTunes* - 99c, works on any iPod or iPhone (please note the link will launch iTunes)

Windows PCs only:

    Eircom Music Club - €1.20, works on any &#39;Plays for Sure&#39; device / €1.40, works on mobile phone.
    Sony Connect* - €1.29, works on any Sony device (please note the link only works in Internet Explorer and you will need to install the SonicStage application to download song).
    EasyMusic - €1.35, works on any &#39;Plays for Sure&#39; device (please note you may have to change your location to Ireland before purchasing as the site&#39;s default is for the UK).
    Wippit - €1.39, works on any &#39;Plays for Sure&#39; device (please note you may have to change your location to Ireland before purchasing as the site&#39;s default is for the UK).

Get downloading! And once you&#39;ve done that you can check out the Facebook page for getting Tom Waits to number 1 in Ireland this Christmas.More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Mon, 17 Dec 2007 13:00:01 GMT</pubDate> 
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4435/MBVs-Loveless-as-youve-never-heard-it#Comments</comments> 
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    <title>MBV&#39;s &#39;Loveless&#39; as you&#39;ve never heard it...</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4435/MBVs-Loveless-as-youve-never-heard-it</link> 
    <description>Back in 2003 I stumbled across an internet-based radio station called Accuradio. As can often be the case with internet radio &#39;stations&#39;, to call it radio was a bit of a stretch - there were no DJs and with a click of your mouse you could move onto the next track they had lined up. Anyways, back then over a period of about a week I tuned in regularly to their American indie channel and discovered a whole bunch of acts that up to then I had been oblivious too such as The Shins, Modest Mouse, Blonde Redhead, Death Cab for Cutie, Built to Spill and Daniel Johnston. One other act that caught my ear that week on Accuradio was Japancakes. 

Hailing from Athens, Georgia, Japancakes - on paper - sound like they’d be your worst sonic nightmare: at their outset they were performing full 45 minute gigs using only a D chord. As you do, like. Once they got over such flights of pretence they settled into a country laced, post-rock, instrumental ambient groove and between 1999 and 2004 released 5 albums. Central to their sound was their use of cello and pedal steel guitar. Once you’d heard them once you’d recognise their stuff a mile off. Not for everyone but I immediately fell for their charms. 

Over the years I managed to get all their albums but there was always precious little up to date info about them to be found on the interweb. Certainly they had no website or MySpace page that I could find. I just assumed they had split up and the only electronic trail they left behind was a few reviews on the likes of Pitchfork, the (very occasional) album that would crop up for sale on eBay. The last thing I expected was a brand new album from them. 

So it came as a bit of a surprise to me earlier this week when I heard that Japancakes were still in existence and they had released, back in October, not one but two albums. But the real jaw dropper was to read that one of these albums was a complete cover, from head to glorious toe, of what CLUAS readers voted to be the second greatest Irish album of all time: My Bloody Valentine’s ‘Loveless’. We&#39;re talking a cover of the entire album. I was floored (and also gutted at my latent inability to keep up with the cool&#39;n&#39;happening, it taking&#160;two whole months&#160;for it to appear on my radar?) &#160;I quickly made up for lost time and, like a good disciple,&#160;within 10 minutes of the news getting to me I was listening to the tracks on their MySpace page and had duly&#160;ordered the CD. 

As their take on Loveless has yet to arrive in the post I’ve so far been exposed only to a handful of tracks from it that are knocking around the internet. It was never going to eclipse the original but, rest assured, this record is no gimmick, certainly not a case of The-Mike-Flowers-Pops-Orchestra-does-MBV. It&#39;s an intriguing, painstakingly arranged record with moments of occasional brilliance. Faithful to the original it also manages to tease new sides out of Kevin Shields&#39; labour of love. One of the most interesting things was to see how well Japancakes version of &#39;Loomer&#39; (check it out on the Japancakes MySpace page) would fit alongside Kevin Shields&#39; tracks on the Lost in Translation soundtrack. 

If you&#39;re holding your breath waiting for&#160;the recently&#160;reunited MBV to announce a few Irish dates in 2008 you could do worse than&#160;kill a bit of time checking out a few&#160;tracks from this record. You will either love it or loathe it. And my bet is on the former.More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Fri, 14 Dec 2007 18:49:44 GMT</pubDate> 
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    <title>Rock stars seeking slice of tickets resold online?</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4436/Rock-stars-seeking-slice-of-tickets-resold-online</link> 
    <description>Not happy with pegging concert ticket prices at ever increasing prices, some of the biggest names in the music industry now want to now get a slice of profits made on tickets resold on the web. They are proposing that a &#39;Resale Rights Society&#39; (RRS) is established that will slap a levy on the sale price of every ticket resold on sites like eBay. 

Apparently Radiohead, Robbie Williams and Arctic Monkeys are among the 400 artists who think this is a good idea. With a straight face the chairman-elect of the RRS Marc Marot (a former chief exec of Island Records) tried to claim that the move was not to pad out the already fleshy wallets of millionaire rock stars but instead to help new artists who have a greater dependency on gigs for their income.&#160;Yeah, right. If that&#39;s the case then why not come out and say that no money pulled in by the RRS will be given to a wealthy established artist? In any case any new artist who finds tickets to their gigs being resold online for more than face value will be well chuffed and can start considering themselves as having made it, secure too in the knowledge that financial worries are to be a thing of the past. 

But the most outrageous justification given by Marot was that &quot;it is unacceptable that not a penny of the &#163;200m in transactions generated by the resale of concert tickets in the UK is returned to investors in the live music industry.&quot; Following the same logic a property developer (i.e. an investor in the property industry) could claim it is entitled to a cut of any profit made when a house they build and sell is subsequently sold on. Brass as monkeys property developers may be, but they know that they&#39;d never get away with such a scam. However, this loose affiliation of millionaire rock stars who &#39;invest in the live music industry&#39; think they can do just that. Who do these guys think they are? 

As far as I know absolutely nobody out there in the free market&#160;is offering something with a price tag that says &#39;it costs this amount, but if (because I don&#39;r offer a possilbity of a reimbursement ) you then go and sell it to someone else, you must give me a&#160;slice of your sale price&#39; (Update: Aidan puts me straight on this point below in the comment section where he points out that a % of a painting sale or a soccer player transfer is passed back to the artist / original soccer club). That sort of mentality is more at home with pyramid schemes than the free market. 

Yes, it is true that there are some problems with the reselling of tickets on the interweb but trying to just grab a slice of an illicit&#160;cake is simply not a credible way of addressing the issue. If they were really serious about this,&#160;these artists &amp; their management teams would get together to put in place preventative measures to stop, or at least reduce the numbers of, tickets being resold online (such as a mechanism for reimbursing&#160;a fan who has bought a ticket and unexpectedly finds s/he cannot go to the gig, this being something that could be provided for a modest charge offered on an opt-in basis at the time of the booking, just like it is with many airlines). 

In the meantime anybody thinking of buying a ticket online via the likes of eBay just needs to do as they would for any other purchase: research what is being sold, who is selling it and for what price. If they are comfortable on all levels then go ahead and make the purchase. The same&#160;Caveat Emptor approach is valid&#160;be it for the purchase of a tube of toothpaste, a semi-d in Leopardstown or a ticket to see Led Zep in London.More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Fri, 07 Dec 2007 00:58:27 GMT</pubDate> 
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    <title>CLUAS End of Year Poll, the story so far...</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4437/CLUAS-End-of-Year-Poll-the-story-so-far</link> 
    <description>
Last night the voting booths for the 2007&#160;CLUAS end of year readers&#39; poll were opened. Keeping things simple we are this year only having one category: best album of the year. 
Unlike previous years readers will not be able to vote for absolutely anything they want, instead there is a shortlist of 40 of the best albums released in 2007 from which readers can pick their favourites of the year.&#160;The shortlist of 40 was&#160;picked by the&#160;CLUAS writers&#160;(or to be more precise, 38 were chosen by the writers, and 2 slots were decided on by members of the CLUAS discussion board were, more info below). We&#39;re doing it this way as, quite simply, in previous years the counting of votes took an absolute eternity. Streamlining it with a fixed shortlist will make it a relative breeze.
In the interest of transparency and all that here&#39;s&#160;a bit of background about how the final shortlist was arrived at:


    All the CLUAS writers were invited to submit their top 10 albums of 2007.
    A list of favourite albums was then received, before the internally set deadline, from&#160;a total of 19 writers.
    Ten of these writers&#160;cast votes for a full top ten.
    A total of 159 &#39;votes&#39; (or album preferences) were received (i.e. on average 8 fave albums were voted for by a writer)
    Among these votes a total of different 100 albums were declared as a favourite.

From these votes a shortlist of 38 albums was drawn up as follows:

    The 30 albums that got voted by more than 1 writer (2 of these albums were Irish releases)
    The 5 Irish releases that got 1 vote (i.e.&#160;making a total of 7 Irish albums in the shortlist, a healthy number in my opinion)
    The 3 albums that were only voted by one writer but that writer gave it their no. 1 vote


That left two slots to be filled. To fill them I took all the albums that were voted for by only one writer, but which was voted as either that writer&#39;s no.&#160;2 or no. 3 album of the year. This gave a total of 14 albums (subsequently reduced to 12 when it emerged that two of were actually released in 2006). We then ran a poll on the discussion board for users of the board to decide what&#160;2 of those albums would make the final shortlist. In the end it was Iron and Wine and Explosions in the Sky who got the most votes for their 2007 release.
Why 40 and not 50 shortlisted albums? A shortlist of&#160;40&#160;was chosen as&#160;a sweet spot between providing coverage of a good number of the year&#39;s best releases and keeping to trying to keep to some sort of minimum the quantity of stuff to fit on the voting page. To be honest this is all a bit of an experiment in the sense I have never put a voting form with so many fields that voters can choose between. Will it intimidate readers and they then decide to stay off in droves? It&#39;s a possibility, we&#39;ll just have to wait until the results are counted.
At the last minute I also slipped in an extra category: &quot;Best song of 2007&quot;. If anything meaningful in terms of a result emerges from votes cast in this extra category, great. But to be honest, based on past experience, I expect votes to span a huge range of songs and no real consensus to emerge. May I be proven wrong!

Here is the final shortlist of&#160;40 albums, from which readers can now&#160;indicate their&#160;favourites (a minimum of 3 albums need to be selected by a voter for the vote to be valid, they can&#160;also indicate&#160;in their vote a maximum of 10 albums).

    &#160;A Lazarus Soul - Graveyard of Burnt Out Cars
    &#160;Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam
    &#160;Arcade Fire - Neon Bible&#160;
    &#160;Battles - Mirrored
    &#160;Blonde Redhead - 23
    &#160;Bruce Springsteen - Magic&#160;&#160;&#160;
    &#160;Cathy Davey&#160; - Tales of Silversleeve
    &#160;Damien Dempsey - To Hell Or Barbados&#160;
    &#160;Editors - An End Has A Start
    &#160;Elvis Perkins – Ash Wednesday&#160;
    &#160;Explosions In The Sky &quot;All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone&quot;
    &#160;Feist &#39;&#39;The Reminder&#39;&#39;&#160;
    &#160;Future Kings of Spain - NervousSystem&#160;
    &#160;God Is An Astronaut &#39;&#39;Far From Refuge&#39;&#39;&#160;
    &#160;Handsome Furs - Plague Park&#160;
    &#160;Headgear - Flight Cases
    &#160;Interpol, Our love to admire
    &#160;Iron and Wine &quot;The Shepherd&#39;&#39;s Dog&quot;&#160;
    &#160;Jens Lekman - Night Falls Over Kortedala
    &#160;Laura Viers &#39;Saltbreakers&#39;
    &#160;LCD Soundsystem - Sound Of Silver
    &#160;Low - Drums and Guns
    &#160;Manic Street Preachers - Send Away The Tigers
    &#160;Mark Ronson - Version
    &#160;MIA - Kala
    &#160;Modest Mouse - We Were Dead Before the Ship Sank&#160;
    &#160;Mumblin&#39;&#39; Deaf Ro &#39;&#39;The Herring And The Brine&#39;&#39;&#160;
    &#160;Nina Hynes - Really Really Do&#160;
    &#160;Of Montreal &#39;&#39;Hissing Fauna, Are You Listening?&#39;&#39;&#160;
    &#160;Panda Bear - Person Pitch&#160;
    &#160;PJ Harvey White Chalk&#160;
    &#160;Radiohead - In Rainbows
    &#160;Robert Plant and Alison Krauss - Raining Sands&#160;
    &#160;Robert Wyatt - Comicopera&#160;
    &#160;Sunset Rubdown - Random Spirit Lover&#160;
    &#160;The Field - From Here We Go Sublime&#160;
    &#160;The Kings Of Leon - Because Of The Times&#160;
    &#160;The National - Boxer&#160;
    &#160;The Shins - Wincing The Night Away
    &#160;Wilco - Sky Blue Sky
More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Tue, 20 Nov 2007 17:21:39 GMT</pubDate> 
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4438/CLUAS-Irelands-no1-Jazz-website#Comments</comments> 
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    <title>CLUAS = Ireland&#39;s no.1 Jazz website?</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4438/CLUAS-Irelands-no1-Jazz-website</link> 
    <description>It would come as a surprise to regular visitors but CLUAS is - for the moment - Ireland&#39;s no. 1 website for Jazz music. Official.
Well, official at least in the eyes of Yahoo, or Microsoft&#39;s &#39;Live&#39; search engine because, at the time of writing, those two search engines are ranking CLUAS as the number one result for searches for &#39;Irish Jazz Music&#39; (see Yahoo&#39;s results here, Live.com&#39;s here). What&#39;s more Google was also ranking CLUAS as the number one result up until last week when they (getting a dose of common sense or something) decided to rank another website for these vital key words (Update: After dropping CLUAS from the no.1 spot, in fact dropping us from their&#160;entire list of top 100 &#39;Irish Jazz Music&#39; websites, Google has decided that CLUAS is, once again, a top&#160;website for Irish Jazz Music).
How did this happen? It is the result of an experiment I undertook at the beginning of October to see if I could get CLUAS to rank highly for a genre of music we usually do not focus on. Jazz music was a good candidate I thought. While it is certainly not something the site focuses on, there have been a tiny number of articles published in our 8 years history that can be classified as being about jazz (or something vaguely&#160;jazzy), so there was something to work with.
So what did I do? It was just a few simple steps. I first created a brand new page on CLUAS for Jazz music, let&#39;s call is the CLUAS &#39;Jazz Music home page&#39; (this is the page now appear as the number one result for Yahoo and Live). I then set about making this the strongest page about jazz on CLUAS by doing the following:

    I put a link to each of the jazz articles on CLUAS on this &#39;jazz home page&#39; (there are a total of about a 10 articles for jazz, definitely not comprehensive coverage).
    I then added on each of these articles a link back to the CLUAS &#39;jazz home page&#39;.
    I&#160;did a site wide search for all occurrences of the word ‘jazz’ on CLUAS and then linked each of them back to the &#39;jazz home page’. I also added a link as well to the CLUAS sitemap page (a page the search engines visit regularly, this meant I could be confident the search engines would find the jazz home page).

I then sat back and waited for the search engines to do their stuff. Within a week I started to see results. Google was the first to rank CLUAS as no. 1 for Irish Jazz Music (and also the first to drop it! Update Nov 19 - it&#39;s back as the no.2 site now). The Yahoo and Live search engines soon followed.
But once I saw the result I set about creating other thematic &#39;home pages&#39; using exactly the same method, with a view to getting them to also rank well for relevant key words (and so drive more traffic and new users to CLUAS).
The first &#39;thematic target&#39; I set was Dublin gig venues. A lot of people search for info on gigs by searching for the venue name. Maybe CLUAS could grab some of that search engine traffic by creating some relevant pages that could rank highly for different Dublin venues? With this in mind a month or so ago I set about creating a home page for each of the main Dublin venues where, over the years, the CLUAS writers have reviewed gigs. There is now a page on CLUAS for Tripod, Whelan&#39;s, The Village, Vicar Street, The Point Theatre, Olympia, Ambassador and the former Temple Bar Music Centre). Each page has links to the gigs we have reviewed over the years in that venue.
The result? Across all three of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and Live) CLUAS is now one of the top 10 sites for various key word searches relating to these Dublin venues. The only downside is that we are not appearing in the top 5 results (where most people click on a result), when we&#160;appear it is&#160;more typically between the 6th and 10th spots.
Nonetheless this is bringing a healthy and steady level of brand new first time visitors to the CLUAS site. For example the traffic analytics service that CLUAS uses show that over the first two weeks of November 2007 a total of 44 visitors (i.e. an average of 3 a day or appox 100 a month) reached the site after they searched for something relating to Vicar Street. Not a huge number at first glance but is encouraging&#160;is that 97% of these visitors had never visited CLUAS before and once they get to the site they, on average, ended up choosing to view 2.8 pages on their initial visit. I am seeing similar levels of new visitors (and pages that they then go on to view) for people searching for info on the Point Depot, Whelan&#39;s, the Ambassador and Olympia.
In a nutshell these new venue pages are bring a minimum of 300 brand new first time visitors to CLUAS every month and these visitors don&#39;t just bolt for the door when they hit the site, they hang around and browse an average of about 3 pages each.
Expect some more themed &#39;home pages&#39; on CLUAS that aim to rank highly in the search engines and, in so doing, rope in more first time visitors to the site. If even only 10% of them then go on to be regular visitors, it will result in a long term growth in our visitor base.&#160;More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Mon, 19 Nov 2007 13:15:16 GMT</pubDate> 
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4439/CLUAS-accessible-again-the-road-ahead#Comments</comments> 
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    <title>CLUAS accessible again (&amp; the road ahead)</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4439/CLUAS-accessible-again-the-road-ahead</link> 
    <description>Anybody who tried to access the CLUAS home page, blogs or discussion board this morning (from about 6am GMT to 1pm GMT) would have seen a big fat &#39;sorry you can&#39;t access this website, mate&#39; error.
These sort of errors happen once in a while around these part&#160;so it&#39;s - normally - no big deal, just a bit of an inconvenience. However this time around it was the first time that the ability to access parts of the site was deliberately blocked by our hosting company because there was too much traffic to the site (to be perfectly precise, access was not blocked to CLUAS but our website was disconnected from the database that contains the content of our blogs and discussion board; the other parts of the site not depending on the database were still accessible).
Being blocked for attracting too much traffic is good news (hey, hey we&#39;re attracting more users!) and bad news (&quot;damn, we&#39;re going to have to toughen up the hosting infrastructure to deal with the increased levels of traffic&quot;).
While sorting out the problem in conjunction with CLUAS.com&#39;s hosting company I was curious to see that the increase in traffic was less becuase an increase in humans accessing the site and more because of a (big) increase in visits of the search engines &#39;bots&#39; accessing CLUAS to retrieve our content for their own purposes (i.e. knowing what&#39;s on CLUAS so that they can present relevant results for their users when they search for various key words).
So what did I have to do to persuade our hosters that we would no longer completely hog access to the server which hosts our database (and databases of other websites) and so they would be confident enough to allow CLUAS to reconnect with its database? Basically I reduced the traffic the site will get from search engine bots by:

    Reducing the frequency with which the Google &#39;bot&#39; visits CLUAS from the default of &#39;Normal&#39; to &#39;Slower&#39; (it&#39;s possible to set this via CLUAS.com&#39;s account on Google&#39;s rather good Webmaster Tools)
    Adding extra lines into CLUAS.com&#39;s robots.txt file&#160;that instruct the Yahoo bot (called &#39;Slurp&#39;)&#160;to stop crawling any files in the parts of the site that are database-driven.
    To be sure I also barred another major&#160;Yahoo bot (&quot;Yahooseeker&quot;) from crawling the entire website.

Following these steps the site was reconnected by the hosting company and, bingo, CLUAS was working again around lunchtime today.
The steps I had to take have their obvious downsides - some CLUAS pages will be indexed either less frequently or not at all by major search engines, which in time is going to compromise the amount of traffic we get from search engines (which has always been very good). But it is a short term solution until I move the CLUAS site to a more robust hosting environment.
But one encouraging lesson I have learned from this is that the migration of CLUAS from its previous dated environment almost exactly one year ago is (finally!) paying dividends - at least if when I note that the search engines have decided what we have merits them to go and increase significantly the rate and frequency at which they trawl our site. I always knew it would be a long road but that, in long run, CLUAS would be much better equipped for the future. We are certainly not there yet. There is a ton more to do. But the tools to do what we need are at our disposal.
Anyways. To mark the 1 year anniversary of the beginning of the massive (and ongoing) operation to bring CLUAS (kicking and screaming) into the 21st century I am going to, this week, start a series of blog entries that outline what CLUAS has done in the last year, with what technologies, why, and where this all may lead the site in the future (and, er, you can wake up from your slumber now).
Fret not, though I will also be getting back into posting, in parallel, some more blog entries about music and technology and what is going on out there. Watch this space, etc.More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Fri, 16 Nov 2007 00:28:34 GMT</pubDate> 
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    <comments>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4440/Bob-Dylan-in-ad-for-gas-guzzling-SUV#Comments</comments> 
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    <title>Bob Dylan in ad for gas-guzzling SUV?</title> 
    <link>https://www.cluas.com/indie-music/Home/ID/4440/Bob-Dylan-in-ad-for-gas-guzzling-SUV</link> 
    <description>Bob Dylan has (cue mass rumbling of moral indignation) gone and done an ad for Cadillac to help them sell one of their top-of-the-range SUVs.

It&#39;s easy to get outraged by this sort of carry on, especially when you consider the anti-establishment line that defined his first decade as a performer. But, it&#39;s really no big deal. 

Dylan nailed his colours to the corporate mast many a year ago (hell, there&#39;s probably some pompous heads out there who would try and tell you he did so back in 1961 when he signed to Columbia Records). There&#39;s been plenty of huffing and puffing at the various points when Dylan made it clear that cutting deals with various corporations was fine for him. There was that corporate gig Dylan did for Applied Materials employees back in 2002. Then in 2005 he got into bed with Starbucks for an exclusive deal to distribute &#39;Bob Dylan: Live at the Gaslight 1962&#39;.&#160;And then last year he lent his hand (and silhouette) to Apple&#39;s iTunes division for some exclusive terms with the release of his last album &#39;Modern Times&#39; (that included a pre-sale ticket tie-in with&#160;the devil incarnate TicketMaster). 

But while he looks after the business side of things, Dylan also keeps his eye on the artistic side: there have been many a gem on his studio releases of the last decade, and recent years have seen him get his fingers dirty in some notable ventures (such as the &quot;No Direction Home&quot; documentary &amp; the great read that was his book &quot;Chronicles Volume I&quot;). Nonetheless it&#39;s important to draw the line at his live performances of the last decade. The ones I saw were, to say the least, a bit touch and go.

Yeah, he doesn&#39;t need the money and&#160;flogging SUVs is well dodgy. But - and now I turn into a complacent crank - so what? Last time I checked life was&#160;a bit too short and, sure, we&#39;d all be better off if we kept our outrage bottled for more worthy stuff than a gruff genius&#160;who is creaming a bit off a few corporations.More ...</description> 
    <dc:creator>eoghan</dc:creator> 
    <pubDate>Wed, 24 Oct 2007 15:50:35 GMT</pubDate> 
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