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New for 2009

Dan — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:09:44 +0000

Many bloggers have spent the past week or so either writing “New Year’s Resolutions” blog posts, as they do most years. Then Andrew Dubber decided to do something a little more interesting, a Review of The Year, His Year. You can read the post here.

That got me thinking about my New Year’s post. I only have one resolution as such, which is to pass my driving test (I can drive, just not when I’m being judged…), and my own Review of the Year post would be pretty short!

So, I’ve decided to do this “New for 2009″ post - a collection of notes on my ongoing and new projects. Kinda like resolutions, but more concrete. The following things will be happening in 2009, I promise…

Musoswire
We’re currently working on a completely new Musoswire website. Jamie Briggs has been doing the design work, and I’ve hired Andrew Piper of Big Citrus to help with the back end coding, and we’re hoping to launch early February. I know I’ve talked about a new site for a long while, but this time it’s really happening.

Blogging
My blogging really dropped off towards the end of 2008 didn’t it? I’m not sure if that was to do with too many blogs, not setting time aside, or what - but I’m very disappointed in myself.

To that end, I’m going to set aside an hour a day for blogging. This should give me chance to work on my main blogs (this one, NMO, AdventuresInVista and AdventuresInMacOS). The Musoswire Blog is of course part of my Musoswire work.

GoDHN.com >> DanNash.net
I’ve also decided to make this blog more officially “mine”. With my increased Twitter activity (@musosdan if you want to follow), I thought it was time I had an official personal presence.

With that in mind, I’ve repurchased DanNash.net with the idea of “evolving” this blog into the more official presence. Not sure when this will happen, but I’ll be sure to let you know!

Other Projects
I’m quite inspired and I’ve got various ideas floating around in my head that I’d like to get rolling in 2009.

On the Musoswire front, I’m looking forward to the return of MusosWireless. I can’t say too much now, but I have some great ideas for how to bring it kicking and screaming into Web 2.0 territory. I’d also like to revive Jive.to!, preferrably without the spam complaints. That shouldn’t take too much doing, with any luck…

I’d also like to create an iPhone compatible site for Musoswire, but I can’t do that until I have an iPod Tough for testing purposes (honest…)

I’ve also got several undeveloped domains kicking around, so hopefully I’ll get chance to develop those this year - some on my own, some in collaboration.

Well that’s it for my plans for 2009 - at least next year I’ll be able to do a post telling you how I got on with all this.

Wish me luck!

Experimenting with Monetisation Methods (and playing with Twessenger)

Dan — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 13:58:38 +0000

Having a geek today… redesigned this blog (AGAIN!), and have setup Twessenger, so now my Twitter account updates not only this blog and my Facebook status, but also my Personal Status Message on MSN too! Took some doing, simply because of my AD setup, but it works. Why not Get Twessenger yourself?

While I was updating the theme, I tidied up the categories and updated the My Sites / Client Sites lists.

I’ve also been setting up some different monetisation methods on NewMusicalOrder.org, mainly just trying them out to see if they work. So far I’ve setup Linkworth, and I’m trying to setup WidgetBucks too - although they say my account is suspended for some reason! Rubbish.

Google Adsense isn’t performing too well on NMO, so I’m trying these new methods to see if we can generate some more revenue. I might be tempted to try Amazon Associates as well, but that kinda defeats the object of the “free music” vibe..

New theme… again!

Dan — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:22:56 +0000

Sorry, I keep getting bored with the theme! I’ll find one eventually!

This theme is supposed to a Windows Vista style one, but to be honest, although I like the theme, if you want a Vista theme, you can’t beat the one I’m using on Adventures In Vista.

Lots going off in my life lately, so I shall have much to tell you as soon as I get chance….

Life Update

Dan — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 11:43:49 +0000

I’ve posted a lot recently about projects I’m working on, or have recently launched. But I haven’t said that much about what’s going on generally.

So, I thought I’d give you a quick update….

Last Weekend…

… I went to stay with my cousin Heather. We went round to their neighbours to watch the rugby on Friday night, and then we went shopping in the White Rose centre. A hillarious time was had, although my wallet took somewhat of a battering! Sunday we went to watch Wakefield Wildcats vs Castleford Tigers @ Belle Vue. The less said about that the better I think!

NewMusicalOrder.org…

… is coming along nicely. Mosh and myself are still posting regularly, we’re getting hits, and Google has finally noticed us, so we’re starting to get indexed. Had some great response to some of the emails I sent out, including Andrew Dubber from New Music Strategies. REMEMBER - we can’t promote music we don’t know about, so if you’ve got an album or EP available for FREE download, please emails us at newmusicalorder@gmail.com.

Tech Stuff

I’ve started learning Silverlight 2.0 this last week too. Silverlight is a new-ish technology from Microsoft which basically competes with Flash for delivering web-based rich animation stuff. The great thing about Silverlight is that you can program the back-end stuff with .NET (C#, VB.net, etc), so the learning curve is nowhere near as steep as with Flash.

I’ve also upgraded all my blogs to Wordpress 2.6, and finished moving Jim Stretton’s website (www.orichalcum-worldofbrass.com) to the Aurora server. He’s also hired me to add a blog to the site, so look out for that soon.

Think that’s probably all for now. I’ll keep you all posted on goings on more regularly, I promise!

NewMusicalOrder.org - Free + Legal Music

Dan — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 00:31:15 +0000

Myself and Mosh, a friend of mine from Scotland, have just started a new blog promoting all the free and legal music downloads you can find on the web.

There are so many, in so many different genres! It’s amazing record labels can sell anything!

Anyway, NewMusicalOrder.org is the URL, and our aim is simply to find and promote FREE and LEGAL album/EP downloads, in any genre.

We’ve been setting it up for a few days now, we’re using Blogger - not something I’d want to do again - but everything is coming together.

We’ve got a fair few posts already, got the RSS feed sorted and tracking through Feedburner, installed Google Analytics, and I’m starting to get the hang of Blogger. I’m still not sure I like it though!

So, if you like you’re music free and legal, head over to NewMusicalOrder.org, subscribe to the RSS feed… and start finding even more great downloads.

If you’re a musician or you’re in a band who has released an album/EP for free download, give us a shout at newmusicalorder@gmail.com - we’d love to hear from you!

NicheSociety.com - my first acquisition!

Dan — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 10:07:05 +0000

For years I’ve been creating websites for my own use, for clients, and for Musoswire, but I’d never looked into buying and/or selling websites professionally.

All that changed this month with the purchase of NicheSociety.com - a social website promotion tool akin to Digg.com. From the site…

nichesociety, originally named menéame in Social Niche, is a web application that allows you to submit an Social Network that will be reviewed by all and will be promoted, based on popularity, to the main page.

I wanted to try the whole buying process, and this site with traffic and revenue seemed like a great test run. It’s gone well, and the site is now fully under my control.

NicheSociety also has a blog, which you can find at NicheSociety.com/blog - I hope to add to this with many niche promotion tips in the coming months.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the seller, Joel, for his help and patience during some domain transfer problems, and I look forward to working with him again.

So, if you have a social network, why not promote it at www.NicheSociety.com?

Introducing Jive.to! - short URLs for musicians

Dan — Sun, 11 May 2008 17:01:27 +0000

Jive.to is the first of a new batch of goDHN projects to be launched.

It’s basically a very simple short URL service. You supply a long URL you need shortening (perhaps the YouTube link for your latest video, or a synth review on a shopping site), and Jive.to will give you a shorter URL to give out to your fans/colleagues.

URLs are a randomly generated series of 5 letters or numbers, tagged on to the the Jive.to domain. Check these out…

http://jive.to/a7Fxe - AdventuresInVista

http://jive.to/o1Rxh - AdventuresInMacOS

http://jive.to/f4Jgm - Musoswire

The target market for Jive.to! is bands and musicians who need to regularly give our URLs to fans, managers and PR peeps.

I hope it’s useful! To get your own Jive.to! URL, please visit http://jive.to/ now!

Blog Roll Purge

Dan — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:00:53 +0000

I’ve been struggling a bit mentally lately, and so I’ve been thinking of ways to ease my distractions.

One thing I have noticed is that some of the many blog posts I read have a very pessimistic tone. Particularly the ones reporting on “the death of the music industry”.

So, I’ve had a purge. Cleared out the clutter. Anything I didn’t enjoy reading (you can tell when you start to automatically skip over posts) has been unsubscribed.

I’ve probably reduced my blogroll by a third, but at least now I’ll probably read most of it!

Why aren’t my sites more important?

Dan — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 23:14:02 +0000

I’ve just been playing around with this blog and noticed that I’d got the Client Sites above My Sites in the right hand sidebar.

I was wondering why my sites should be less important than the ones I do for clients? I couldn’t think of a good reason, so I’ve swapped them over. My Sites is now the most prominent list, as it should be.

Speaking of my sites, look out for a couple of new launches coming soon…!

Wordpress updated (and a new theme!)

Dan — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 08:44:23 +0000

So this is the final blog to get upgraded to Wordpress 2.5. Once again, it’s gone as well as can be expected. It’s quite impressive how Wordpress upgrades work. Or maybe it’s PHP? I dunno, it’s nice when things work though.

You’ll notice I’ve also changed the theme AGAIN. The previous one started really annoying me, as the text was too small, and the space between the paragraphs was practically non existent. I did think about editing it, but I’ve done that before… change one thing and something else looks wrong! So I decided on a new theme.

I’m hoping to add some colour to this theme gradually - obviously adding my affiliate banners back in will help, and updating the permalinks on the images.

I’ll get there!