Oh, God. The New Site's Live.

[filkertom]

It isn't all up yet by a long shot. I'll be finishing the conversion of lyrics and comedy all day, most likely.

But the newest incarnation of Tom Smith Online is alive and kicking.

You'll need Flash Player. Frankly, at this point in the evolution of the Internet, I don't think that's too much to ask.

Please, please let me know what you think -- what you like, what you don't like, what you think it needs.

And, Thank You for hangin' out in my corner of the 'Net.

Comments

[sdelmonte]

Greetings, Mr. Smith. I'm a fan of your music, a fan of your site, and regular LJ blogger. So let me welcome you to LJ, and compliment you on the upgrade. Looks cool so far. Can't wait to Fill-in-the-Blanks when my goof-off time is greater.

And looking forward to the new album, of course.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Thanks kindly. It'll be even better when it's all done. And the Filk-in-the-Blanks are gonna be a permanent, ever-growing feature. At least one a month, I hope one every two weeks. (The biggest challenge actually turned out to be learning to use the Javascript debugger in Dreamweaver, which solved all my problems with the script in, like, two seconds. ;)

Geometry....

[morygryn.livejournal.com]

....yeah, so that's not what that line was prompting me for....

Good morrow and nice today : ) You asked for my opinion on something. That can be very dangerous :p

It was very interesting going to your site today and getting a nice flashy-thingy instead of what I'd expected. Interesting, not bad, mind you. I thought it quite amusing, actually ^_^ The new layout is very interesting as well, including the sorting of the song titles by album/category....which methinks will turn out to be a cool thing, and strikes me as a very nifty idea. I know how it feels to totally overhaul a site after wanting to so badly for so long, so congrats on the new layout :) I can't say as I find any fault as far as navigation goes.

-Katt

Re: Geometry....

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Yeah, well, I wanted to surprise everyone. ;-D And I sincerely hope the navigation turns out not to be a problem. I tried to leave visual cues everywhere, and the navbar at the top of every page should, I think, help. (If necessary, I'll put stuff at the bottom, as well, the way I did on the old page.) And I really did think that anyone who hasn't got Flash by this point should just stick to pen and paper, y'know? So I had zero qualms about a Flash-based navigation system.

Thanks for the feedback! And there will be much more stuff in the next few days, including some brand-new stuff.

[jedilora.livejournal.com]

Greetings.

I like the new site. From what I see, it's certanly easier to find lyrics and such. Unfortunatly, can't really judge fully until it's fully up.

::hauls in bean bag:: I like this corner of the 'Net. Good spot. ::settles in to wait for the return of all the lyrics. And perhaps the king.::

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm gonna have a lot more stuff up by Wednesday noon. The lyrics conversion is going along nicely, and I have to finish the MP3s from Debasement Tapes, and... oh, you'll see.

(jots down note to buy a few BIG HONKIN' bean bag chairs -- I used to love those....)

Great new site

[dbcooper.livejournal.com]

Tom, the new site layeth the smacketh down! Great job!

Re: Great new site

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

IF YA SME- ahem. Thanks!

Did you ever write a Heinlein filk?

[galicola.livejournal.com]

Hi Tom,
Did you ever write a Heinlein filk (except for the Green Hills part in ConValescence)?

Seriously, I was wondering if you ever wrote one, since I'm a big RAH fan. So I looked over the lyrics sections, and then I thought -'Hey, there's no search engine!'
So, I suggest that you think about putting a search engine to search for songs by words that appear in them (can be subdivided into: by words in title, words in song, or both). Or even a search engine for the entire site.

Also, i noticed that in the lyrics section, you deleted the prologue where you told us how that song came to be (e.g. how you came to write "A boy and his Frog", or why 301 Ale).
I liked that part - the 'behind the scenes' is both interesting and sometimes amusing, and sometimes can give insight to things you don't think about when hearing/reading just the lyrics.

And last comment - what happened to the movie reviews? I know you didn't update it too often, but several times i looked there to get your opinion of some movies (e.g. Galaxy Quest, and several animated).

---

And now for something else: I dimly recall that someone at our SF community translated 307 Ale to hebrew, some months ago. Would you like me to find it so you can put it on your fan lyrics page?

Re: Did you ever write a Heinlein filk?

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

No Heinlein filk. I'm one of those oddities in fandom -- I think RAH was okay, but no great shakes. Gimme Ellison and Bujold.

Search engine is something I'd like to do, and I hope to by late spring. Lower priority than other things, though.

Actually, I mentioned on the Lyrics page that, if you mouse-over the Pretzel Note graphic, you'll find the song annotations there.

Haven't transferred the movie reviews over yet. I think they're going to go into Comedy.

Funny Freudian -- I read "homebrew" rather than "Hebrew". Yeah, actually, that would be tremendous. Thanks, and thanks for the feedback.

*ahem*

[janet-coburn.livejournal.com]

Actually, I never saw that proviso on the Lyrics page, and when I tried the roll-over thing, nothing happened. Perhaps this feature doesn't work on Macs?

Re: *ahem*

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

I apologize to you both. That text was in there at one point; musta got rubbed out accidentally. I'm fixing it now.

Re: *ahem*

[galicola.livejournal.com]

I use Mac as well, and it doesn't work.
Anyway, the fault was mine to begin with, 'cause i missed that line about the pretzel.

[joecoustic.livejournal.com]

I really like the page. In general I find flash sort of annoying but you don't go overboard so it works pretty well.

I especially liked the organization and ease of finding stuff on the lyrics and links pages and am looking forward to doing more exploring (I just sort of skimmed it for right now).

Welcome to LJ :).

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Thanks kindly. I very deliberately did not go nuts on Flash on the site itself, although I couldn't resist the intro (and there may be other things like that for special occasions). And when I actually get the full Linkz lists up, your mind will boggle. ;)

[jss]

Warning: You asked for my opinion. Now, to steal from the kind folks at the Capitol Steps who bring you Lirty Dies, you're in triiig bubble!

• I see the pretzel note icon (/images/pretzelnotesm.gif) on the song-specific lyric page(s) but I don't get anything onMouseOver (MacOS X (10.2), Mozilla 1.4). Since I'm not seeing anything there, I don't know how you've got it implemented, but I hate pop-up windows so I'll say I hope that's not it.


• As others have suggested, I'd really like a single list of all the songs (I sometimes don't know or care which album, if any, it was on, I just want a list of titles so I can find it fast). Having multiple ways to find the song — alphabetical list of all songs, by category (original, parody), and by album — sounds pretty darned good to me. Perhaps an extra line break (more whitespace) between those three groups (all, category, album) would help with quick visual identification? Just a thought.
  
  I'd also recommend that you sort by titular rules (e.g., "A Boy and His Frog" under B, not under "A").


• I've noticed some song titles seem to be missing. Now I'm hardly the archivist of your entire oeuvre, but "307 Lite" just isn't there. (And it doesn't make sense to me to have 307 Ale in Original and 301 Ale in Parodies and not anywhere near each other. Yes, that's how I noticed 307 Lite was missing. See above for "Gimme a whole long list.")


• If you parody your own song, can the lyrics for one link back/forward to the lyrics for the other? That is, for example, can 307 Ale have a link to its sequel (307 Lite) and its parody (301 Ale), and similarly for the other two?


• I dislike there not being some kind of footer on the page. It's difficult to tell at a glance if the web page has stopped loading because it's complete or because the operation timed out and stopped trying. A simple horizontal rule (

  ---

  ), possibly with a link back to the copyright statement and privacy policy page, would be great.


• Speaking of the copyright etc. page, you're using a smaller body type size and different styles of subheads (black normal, not purple italicized) than the rest of the site. Please consider making it consistent with the rest of the site.


• Nice (Flash) intro. Pity I can't go back to it once I'm inside the site itself, though. Would adding an "Intro" line to the menu bar make that menu bar too long for most people? (Are you trying to stay in a limited-size window environment, e.g. 800x600, for top/left navigation? I had an enforced "The header and left navigation must fit in a 640x480 browser window" policy when doing web design for an international bank's Internet web presence. Thankfully, that ended about 6 years ago now.)


• Speaking of the menu bar, it's a little difficult to parse out the categories "News Buy Stuff Free Stuff Lyrics Comedy ..." Can you either add more whitespace between categories or some kind of field separator (e.g., comma, colon, or vertical bar)? The highlighting of the active (dark red) and current (bright red) items is good (and onMouseOver works on my Mac/Mozilla combo here, FWIW), but might not be sufficient for ADA compliance (if you're concerned about making the site experience happy for blind visitors).


• On Free Stuff, the creator of the Five Years movie video(s) is missing. I see "(created by )" with no name, link, or other text. That should probably get fixed.


• Buy Stuff opens in a new window (probably good), but is still an http (not https) URL. Is that intentional? If I click on the View Cart button I do get redirected to the Yahoo! cart (in a new window). Maybe you've got the target="_NEW" there too soon? It's... a bit confusing.


• You're using the pretzel note image on the Buy Stuff page differently than on the song-specific lyric pages. This is an inconsistent user interface and may confuse people. Consider replacing the pretzel on Buy Stuff with a "Preview song" button for the M3U URLs. (If you want the pretzel on every page, consider a watermark or including it in the footer, mentioned above.)

Continued in next comment...

[jss]

Continued from previous comment...

• It might be nice if the Buy Stuff page had thumbnail images of the albums (for those with cover art) and links to their contents (track list) easily accessable there. I don't want to have to jump over to Lyrics to see if the album I want is Digital Acoustic Guitar or Debasement Tapes, for example. (Oh, and for the record: Yes, I have both, thanks!)


• I assume "Fan Lyrics" on the Comedy page will include things like Dave Weingart's "404 Not Found" (the "307 Ale" parody you reference on your own 404 page). Would it also make sense to have a "Fan Lyrics" section/category/whatever back on the Lyrics page?


• In a simimlar vein (I was driven insane by a vision of... whoops, wrong song), it'd be nice to have an "All Kewl Links Ever" item in the categories list on the Kewl Links page.


• Unlike everywhere else, the Press Kit page has a box around the menu area. I know the page content is "coming soon," but it looks odd to have the navigation different on the one page.


• News used to work, but as of around 10:30-11am this morning (Eastern time) it doesn't. Check your upload.


• Awwww. No pictures! No pictures of Da Bear, or of Da Smithtones, or anything. That's... a bummer. I expect the press photo will go onto the Press Kit page, but what about any of the other people and things? Somewhere in Fun Stuff perhaps?

Aren't you sorry you asked? ;-)

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Not at all. And most of the stuff you're talking about will be put up as quickly as possibly, I'm hoping mostly later this weekend. (I wanted to have a lot up today, but I'm in the middle of emergency house cleaning....)

Not sure whassup with the Mac mouseover thingy. Anyone got any idea...?

And the Buy Stuff page is not itself secure. What happens is, PayPal is secure, and the download-link e-mail is heavily encrypted.

Older version of the navbar on Press Kit. Will be fixed.

News is still there, loads fine. Dunno.

[jss]

> Not at all.
Whew. :-)

I figured you're still working on everything, and others have suggested parts of what I did, so a lot of what was in that pair-o'-comments was/is being addressed already.

> News is still there, loads fine. Dunno.
Hrm. If I force-expire the version in my cache it does indeed load. Odd. jss1113 kicks his browser in the head.

[galicola.livejournal.com]

Wow, you're exhaustive.

But if I may add something, regarding the Filk in the Blanks:
Lazy people like me see a long list of items to put, and it doesn't say that you have to put ALL items, so we don't. And we get empty spaces in the song.
Consider adding a line saying "for full effect, fill in ALL the words."

Like the new digs

[(Anonymous)]

I visited the site after not visiting for over a month. I was surprised to find the new digs. Looks good so far, dispite a few dead links. But the site is still a work-in-progress, so I won't sick Fenton on you. Yet. :-)

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