All about alonetone

Hi!

A heavily requested feature is here: Getting comments on your songs delivered via email.

A lot of folks directly asked for this feature saying that they missed comments, or maybe were absent from alonetone for (gasp) a week or two, or simply wanted to know right away so they could stop compulsively checking their home page.

Note: Comments are by default enabled. This was a rash last minute decision that I'm bound to regret, but the reasoning was this:

1. We are not facebook emailing you some bull$*#% about being invited to an imaginary party with imaginary friends. It's real people and often your friends talking about your music, and most likely 90% of folks will not be annoyed by having the comments emailed to them.

2. Many folks who already signed up but don't visit alonetone obsessively would not actually edit their profile, see this blog post, or know that this was possible.

3. It's super duper easy to turn off, via the profile

4. It's a good default to have for new folks singing up and uploading their tunes. One less thing they have to worry about, and you know how it is after you upload your tunes to alonetone. You are sitting there waiting for a bit of feedback!

There might be a kink or two with folks who have the habit of making a comment and then deleting it to edit it. If this becomes a problem, we're probably only going to let the person receiving the comment do the deleting. (keep things simple rather than doing something crazy like having editing of comments!)

Have fun and enjoy!

Hi guys,

We're revamping the way we handle comments.

Bear with us, I just pushed a bunch of small tweaks and changes, and there are some rough spots.

Hope you guys like the ability to play the tracks that are commented on!

Also, if you signed up with a cryptic name like "mymusic3434" and now you are unhappy about your music sitting at http://alonetone.com/mymusic3434 then it is time to rejoice! You can now change your login in your profile.

And....something I thought was important since day 1, but never done until recently was the ability to show the album that a song belongs to.

(psssst. You can now add your twitter account to your profile. Twitter is like 'group chat in slow motion'. It's perfect for following what your crew is up to, passively.

If you get on twitter, be sure to follow alonetone, myself, samo, glu, Matt Mower and ACL. Anyone else I'm forgetting?

I'm happy to introduce you to someone who has been making me smile a lot over the last week:

His name is Tien Dung.

About two weeks ago he sent me an email about helping out with alonetone programming.

I've received a handful of these emails, but nothing had come from it so far. Tien was different from the start. Before I even got the chance to respond, he already had invested hours into programming for alonetone. He was unafraid to jump in and get the work done. He didn't need my help. He offered suggestions and then implemented them. He seems to be in love with making the code pretty and more maintainable (a huge benefit for alonetone in the long run) and knows his code.

Notably, he has also already made big changes (in the background) to alonetone that make it much easier for other interested programmers to check out the alonetone code and get involved.

Just take a look at the alonetone code history for the last few days. Sure, you might not understand what exactly is going on there, but one thing is clear: He is all over it.

Tien hails from Singapore and programs Ruby and Rails for a living. He keeps a blog about his programming insight and experiences.

It means a lot to me to introduce him to the musicians here. His work will be showing up shortly - in a matter of days he has fixed a number of outstanding buglets and rough corners and I can't wait to get his changes live.

For anyone interested in what goes on behind the scenes at alonetone, you can take a look at my Calendar to see when I've made changes to the code:

This is a Jerry Seinfeld inspired thing - A big red X goes on the calendar for the days I've worked on the code, and the point is to build up a 'streak' - a number of days in a row that I've put in time and energy. The calendar doesn't take everything into account, but hey, it gives a cool picture anyway. My longest 'streak' was 10 days.

As a lot of you guys know, alonetone is open source which means that

• anyone can grab the source code and help us out with development and
• the code is freely available for copying, modification, and as a reference/learning tool for other programmers

This attitude fits alonetone well. Our music is free, the home for our music is free and even the code our home is built on is free (It actually goes even deeper than this, but lets keep it there!)

Samo and I worked hard this week to clean up the rough visual edges of alonetone (that were added in a hurry by yours truly).

We are undecided about the menu at the top. On one hand I'm very happy that we've got a direct link to the radio and new users have a direct link to the FAQ. On the other hand, it's getting pretty busy up there!

I hope you guys like the changes, and keep making your great music and posting it here. We're closing in on 3000 tracks by 300 musicians. Good numbers! Numbers are not the most important thing, of course, but it warms me to visit alonetone always knowing that there will be new tracks by my favorite musicians. Listening to the new music while I work is an inspiration to keep things running smoothly.

Also, it's official - we'll be moving alonetone to the excellent infrastructure of Engine Yard, where I work during the day. I'm very excited about this opportunity and what it means for the future.