folkjam.org updates, support and banter

We released some changes in our mapping features to folkjam last night. If you are not seeing map pins when you visit the site, please press the "refresh" button on your browser.

Scott

We introduced a new look for the front page of folkjam.org this morning. Since we first opened our doors nearly two years ago our front page has been strictly a map of the events local to you. In that time, we've added a lot of new capabilities to folkjam and found that folks were simply not aware of them because those features were hidden away.

Based on a lot of user feedback, ideas a few of you gave us and just watching how people use the site we've made what we think are good improvements to our main page.

A few of the folks who use groups on folkjam to coordinate jam sessions asked if we could add full address support to the location of folkjam groups. In the initial release of the functionality, we allowed for groups that were either 'global' for anybody to join or tied to a specific city, but not a particular street address within that city.

We've rolled out a change that eliminates the option to have a group without a location (nobody had used it) and now allows for a full street address for a group's location.

As a web site grows there are many milestones it goes through. We've recently hit the milestone where we are busy enough to attract spammers. In our first fifteen months there were no more than three accounts created to spew crud on the site. In the past month I've cleaned out at least one a day.

If you see something inappropriate on the site please send me a private message so that I can take care of it. We do a good job of defending against automated attacks, but there is always room for somebody with time on their hands to put inappropriate messages on a community site.

User Chord_Picker hit our feedback button this evening and reported that he was unable to create a biography page. Sure enough, this was the case. My apologies for those of you who clicked the "Submit a biography" link from your profile only to be shown an access denied error.

The problem has been fixed. Since that area of the site was getting some attention a small but useful change that had sat in the to-do list for a while was completed - your biography now appears right on your user profile where it should be.

We've just added our local musician map to the site.

The goal of this feature is to allow you advertise the instruments and styles of music you play to other users in your area.

Give it a try. If you are a registered user you can add yourself to the map from your "Jam profile" page within your user account. You can even type up a short message to display along with your map pin.

If you have not signed up with folkjam and are looking to find users in your area then sign up, type in your city, and add yourself to the map.

This may already be in place, but I haven't found it. I use folkjam entries for when I refer other people to events, but the URL that is made up of the name of the event is often very long, and awkward to paste into an email, or include on handouts. That's why you use the short "node & number" version on the pdf jam reports.

My example is:

http://www.folkjam.org/recurring-jam/us/illinois/shelbyville/illinois-ol...

clear and meaningful, but awkward.

I'd like easy access to the short version:

http://www.folkjam.org/node/4192

My wife and I drove 45 miles to find the Bluegrass shop with a sign "closed for good" posted in the window. We planned on visiting the Friday night MeetUp but I decided to check before we drove the 30 miles to it & Joe e-mailed me back saying "No More Friday night meet ups. The open mic at Sweetwater was held though and we enjoyed the tunes, not ready to do that type of thing yet (Newbies). But we'll keep trying :)

Today a new layout for the site went live, and we hope you like it.

As the site grew our previous layout was becoming increasingly cluttered and visually busy. We've been busy too giving the site's navigation and visuals some significant attention. Our primary goal with the redesign was simplicity. How did we do?

I'm personally very happy with how the menus and the city search bar turned out in the header.

Scott

PS: A big thank you to the handful of users who have been beta testing this new layout since January 1st. Your feedback and participation was very helpful.

In the past week we rolled out private message support to make it easier for users to reach out to each other through folkjam. This is a first step in a series of changes that we hope will help you not only find jam sessions, but also to find other musicians near you who may want to get together.

You'll start to see private message links appearing throughout the site over the next few weeks.