I’ve just released the March 2010 edition of the tune search – it’s reached 56,000 tunes now, clean and shiny and just itching to be played.
Chris
Archive for the ‘website’ Category
Tunes galore
Friday, March 5th, 2010Linux & multi-platform software
Friday, February 12th, 2010Minor improvement to the site …
Thanks to Sue Blake who pointed out that the software page didn’t show programs that work on Linux / Unix machines and gave me a list of those that do.
She also suggested a table showing multi-platform software – a good idea for those who use two different types of computer and want to use the same abc program on both of them.
Please do let me know if you spot any errors or there’s any software missing.
Chris
You what?
Friday, February 5th, 2010One of the joys of running a website is discovering all the different ways people find of trying to subvert it.
In particular, since the advent of the google search engine and the way it uses links to rank search results, having links pointing at your website is highly desirable.
Which means that, if you have a website and you see a blog like the abc blog which allows comments, it’s very tempting to leave an innocuous comment – like “great blog” or “nice work” … and a link to your own website.
In fact the vast majority of comments that get left on the abc blog look like this. Mostly the link is hidden away under the name of the user although sometimes its included in the comment.
Some are pretty blatant – like this one:
I like the layout of your website. Check out the graphics on my site at [deleted]
Or how about this one:
When different student are willing to read about the essay order they could essay buy related to this good post. Because the essay outline creating has to be a really serious stuff.
which contained links to an essay-writing service for students. [Though would you buy a used essay from someone who writes like that?]
Others are just complimentary:
Love the blog you have here! I find that information really interesting. :)
Or:
I have seen some crappy posts but this one really impresses me. Good work!
Some try to bamboozle – how about this one:
Solid blog. I got a lot of good info. I’ve been keeping an eye on this technology for awhile. It’s fascinating how it keeps varying, yet some of the core elements stay the same. Have you seen much change since Google made their most recent acquisition in the domain?
Fascinating.
And some are just off-topic entirely:
This is a great article. I have now left the rat race, never to look back. You’re right that the only way to make any decent money is by running your own business!
And finally, just as I was about to publish this article when, with immaculate timing, the following comment appeared:
I enjoyed the article and thanks recompense posting such valuable poop at verge on wits of all of us to conclude from, I sort out up it both valuable and communicative and I blueprint to grill it as again as I can.
Which says it all, I think.
Anyway, it keeps me amused deleting them and it’s not as if I’ve got anything better to do with my time.
And the point of this post – well, just to share some of these delights with genuine readers. And to say that, I’d love to have some more comments on the blog – I don’t even mind if it links to your own music related site – but if you do leave one, please mention abc somewhere in the comment.
Thank you!
Chris
This is a great article. I have now left the rat race, never to look back. You?re right that the only way to make any decent money is by running your own business!
The abc website
Friday, January 15th, 2010There are still loads of links out there for the old versions of the abc website address and I’m just putting up this message in the vain hope that people might correct them.
The correct address is now, and hopefully will be for many years to come, http://abcnotation.com.
Addresses you may encounter (and a brief history):
- http://www.gre.ac.uk/~c.walshaw/abc – for many years (from approximately 1995) this was the home of abc, part of my personal webspace at the University of Greenwich. It remained there until October 2006 when the University shut down all of the personal webpages on the site. Unfortunately, there are still hundreds of links to this page, none of which work.
- http://staffweb.cms.gre.ac.uk/~c.walshaw/abc – this was the alternative address (kindly provided by the School of Computing & Mathematical Sciences) that I used from about August 2002 on, once I got wind of the fact that the University might want to shut down personal webpages on its own server. It is still live but now just has an automatic redirect to abcnotation.com.
- http://www.walshaw.plus.com/abc – in November 2006, after the changes mentioned above, I decided to move the website off the University’s servers entirely and put it here (as part of the webspace provided by my ISP). At the same time I took the opportunity to give the site a complete redesign, separating out the content into several pages and introducing the blue and gold theme it has today. Although I never intended this to be the official address of the abc website, many people have used it (because of the way web forwarding works) and there are still over 700 links to this URL. The address is still live but fortunately I have managed to configure it so that it does an automatic (301) redirect to abcnotation.com.
- http://abcnotation.org.uk – is a forwarding address I set up, also in November 2006, intended as being the new official address for the abc website (unfortunately abcnotation.com wasn’t available at the time). It is still live and takes you directly to abcnotation.com.
- http://abcnotation.com – some time in late 2008, my ISP temporarily shut down the site at walshaw.plus.com because it was using more bandwidth than I was allowed. Although, I was able to alleviate the problems, I decided then to move the site to a dedicated host. I also decided to overhaul the web-wide index (a list of all the abc tunes at various websites) at the same time and launch the abc tune search instead. The development work took me six months or so and the new site was launched on 21st June 2009 with 36,000 searchable tunes initially (this had already grown to 55,000 in the December 2009 edition).
Anyway, a long article for a short plea – if you do encounter a website with any of the old addresses (or if you run one yourself) please pester the webmaster to change them.
Thank you!
Chris
Top of the Pops 2
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010I’ve just amended – slightly – the code that creates the top tune charts so that it now excludes recent winners for a week.
When I was setting the charts up and running a test version I did wonder if they might end up as self perpetuating … and so it proved. They worked fine when it was just me looking at them, but as soon as I published them, the same tune appeared in the top slot for a whole week.
Now I’m sure that “Acano mlada nevesto” is a mighty fine tune, but I’m not convinced it’s the most popular on the website. And what I think was happening was that people were seeing it at the top of the charts and clicking on it to see what all the fuss was.
And so it stayed at the top.
Of course, that’s kind of the way that the real pop charts work … only with the slight difference that people actually have to pay money to keep a song at the top. Whereas here on the website, a click is free.
However, with a quick modification, previous number 1 winners are now excluded for a week (with a list of the previous week’s winners stored lower down the page).
Anyway … just a little diversion in this hectic world. Enjoy!
Chris
http://abcnotation.com/charts
Top of the pops
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009I’ve been amusing myself over the Christmas period by writing a bit of code that works out the top ten tune pages visited and searches made recently.
You can see the results on the charts page (and the top 3 are also shown in the quick links panel on the home page and search page).
[For those interested in the technical details, the top ten charts are updated shortly after 6am GMT every day and are based on the previous seven days. They are filtered by users' IP addresses so that someone repeatedly visiting the same tune page or making the same search will only be counted once (unless their IP address changes). Also robots, such as the googlebot, are excluded from the results.]
Some of the results are unsurprising – for example, on Christmas Eve, three of the top ten tunes were different versions of the tune Christmas Eve.
Also several of the top recent searches are examples on various pages of this website (e.g. searches for “china”, “speed the plough”, “jig”, “6/8″, “slipjig” & “slip jig” are all linked in various pages) – presumably some these are included because curious visitors have clicked on the links.
However, some of the other results are surprising and it will be interesting to see how they change over time.
One unusual result which pops up sometimes is the tune “XVI. Doe you not know” a 16th century song by Thomas Morley – a lovely tune, but not the most obvious choice. I eventually worked out why when I looked at the Google webmaster tools statistics for abcnotation.com which revealed a number of visitors were coming straight to the page after doing a search for xvidoe. This puzzled me until I realised that they were searches made by people looking for something else entirely and who can’t spell video. Truly the web is an intriguing place.
Chris
Merry Christmas
Monday, December 21st, 2009Well, it’s been some time since I last blogged – nearly three months. Eek!
Partly, it’s because I’ve been very busy at work, writing the lectures for a new course on 3D graphics.
I’ve also been busy rehearsing and recording with my new band Angles (with Cliff Stapleton & Richard Jones) and playing with my new G bagpipes – a lovely sweet-sounding set from Sean Jones.
For anyone who’s around in Kent, Gloucestershire or Brighton, Angles have got three gigs coming up in January – my first chance to play the pipes in public.
So – not much time to work on the abc website.
However, there have been a few things going on behind the scenes so this is just a quick update – exactly six months since the website was relaunched.
First of all, the tune search has been growing all the while – I’ve just updated it today and it now includes over 53,000 tunes. I’ve also done quite a lot of work on the crawler (that searches for abc files across the web) and I think it’s much more robust now – though not much to see from the user point of view.
Secondly, I created an abc facebook page a week or so ago. Not much activity there yet, but I’m hoping people will drop by and say hi.
There is also a (long overdue) move in-hand to formally adopt an updated abc standard – check the forums for details.
Finally, although I haven’t had time to start it yet, I’ve got plans for a whole series of blog articles – watch this space.
Apart from that things are ticking along well. The crashes I was getting early on have not reoccurred so I’m confident my fix worked.
What’s more, the website has had over 54,000 visitors since the relaunch!
Looking at the logs, it’s clear that some of that is just passing traffic – perhaps arriving via a google search, taking a quick look around and leaving soon after. However, there are steady stream of returning visitors who spend a considerable time on the site, with an average of 12.5 pages viewed per visitor!
Anyway, watch out for more improvements in the New Year.
Merry Christmas!
Chris
Freeware
Friday, September 25th, 2009I’ve just added a new column to all the tables on the software page to say whether the software is free or shareware.
Let me know if you spot any errors there.
Chris
Even more
Monday, September 14th, 2009I’ve been busy out the back, working on some of the internal mechanisms of the tune search.
Anyway, the good news is that not only is the search faster now, but also it ignores accented characters. Thus a search for, say, “bourree” will also find tunes with “bourrée” in the title (and vice-versa).
Which is handy because not everyone is strict about how they add accents.
Oh, and while I was at it, I extended the scope of the search to add another 10,000 tunes which I discovered tucked away in a corner. The tune search now knows about 47,500 tunes!
Chris
Bourrée
Crashing bore
Wednesday, September 9th, 2009Well, I’m tentatively going to say that I think I’ve fixed the problem of the site crashing.
The boring technical details (for anyone else who has a servlet based website and is seeing out of memory errors) seem to be that the java inflater was not releasing memory promptly enough. (See here, and the official Sun Java bug report here.)
Anyway, once I’d figured out the possible cause, and after I’d changed the site so that it no longer needs the inflater classes, it hasn’t crashed since. In fact, the site was up for a whole 10 days between 23rd August and 1st September (when I restarted it to include another 3,000 tunes in the tune search).
The nature of this kind of problem means that I can’t absolutely guarantee it’s fixed … but so far, so good.
Chris