January 19, 2009 by gabechouinard
Back when I announced the formation of Making Mixtapes, I received an email from another former AotM-er who was kind enough to laud the new community I was making. Alas, the only problem was, he too had been working on creating an alternative to AotM... and he'd been doing it the hard way, coding it all himself! We exchanged a few emails, discussed site creation and community building, and then Todd went back to work on his own website.
Well, Todd has finished that website, and I am more than pleased to announce that it is up and running. But why take my words for it? Here's what Todd sent out to some people:
"For the past several weeks I've been at work developing a mixtape
website. Art of the Mix has been important to me, as I'm sure it has
been for all of you, but minor issues have given way to major problems
for that site. I've been thinking about how to build on the strengths
of AotM for a long time, and the website is now ready for you to use.
I'm inviting everyone to visit http://www.zenrunningorder.org to
sign-up and become part of the community.
The new site is called Zen Running Order. The name Zen Running Order
is partly a nod to Art of the Mix (I was thinking along the lines of
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, if you follow me), and
partly from thinking about what it means to make a mixtape in the age
of MP3 players. That is, it's all about the running order of the
tracks, as opposed to just throwing together a playlist and putting it
on shuffle play. Zen Running Order also has the nice acronym ZeRO,
which I use throughout the site.
Some of the features of the website include:
Easy, intuitive entry of mixes
The requirements for submitting a mix are:
* A title
* A category (to give people an idea of what sort of content is on
the mixtape)
* A format (choose from a drop-down list: CD, cassette, playlist,
"best of" list)
* A track list having at least three tracks, with each on a single
line
On the "Submit Mix" page you see one large text field rather than
individual edit fields for each piece of track info. The tracklist is
just the artist and title of each track listed in the order they
appear on your mixtape.
Basic track list entry. The simplest entry would just be
artist 1 - track 1
artist 2 - track 2
artist 3 - track 3
...
You can include line numbers at the start of each line, but they
aren't necessary. The only requirement is that you put a delimiter
(the default is a hyphen followed by a space) between the artist and
the track title. There is no limit to the number of tracks you can
include in a mix. Also, you can add optional annotations for each
artist, track title, or for the track as a whole.
You can submit multi-part mixes. If you have a 2-CD mix, say, all you
need to do to indicate the second disk is to put a line with at least
three hyphens in a row between the last track on the first disk and
the first track on the second disk. Here again there are no limits on
the number of parts you can have in your mix.
Ability to navigate to older mixes
You can specify a variety of numbers of mixes to display, and easily
move back and forth through the list.
Democratic Mix of the Week selection
I did away with the five-star ratings because from my experience no
one really used it the way it was intended. I replaced that with a
"thumbs up." When you give a mix a thumbs up you're essentially
nominating that mix for mix of the week. At the end of a week, I'll
take the five or so mixes with the most thumbs up and put them in a
poll on the main page of the site. That way, everyone will have
another chance to see the standout mixes, and everyone will be able to
vote on the mix of the week.
The ability to link to other mixers
You can select any user as a "favorite mixer", and you can add (or
delete) anyone to this list whenever you want. When you bring up the
"Recent Mixes" page, you can choose to view all recent submissions or
select an option that shows only those mixes submitted by your
favorite mixers.
Flexible searching of mixes
This page is still under development, but it will offer an easy,
intuitive means to find mixes.
Interesting articles, forum and user blogs and other features are
integrated into the site
Website security
I'm not an expert on Internet security but the website is built on
Joomla, which has a number of built-in features designed to maintain
the security of any site built using this software.
Thanks very much. Hope to see you at Zen Running Order."
Now, if you hadn't noticed, I've been in the trenches a lot over the past month, working spectacularly long hours and horrible long shifts, which has curtailed my ability to be here as much as I'd like. So please, go to Todd's site. He worked his ass off to set it up, and he's done a bang-up job. The interface there is very clean and reminiscent of AotM but well-updated to make it even more smooth and easy to navigate. Furthermore, it's built on Joomla, and it's a wonderful piece of database-driven work. I've already created an account there.
What does that mean for Making Mixtapes? Sincerely, I don't know! I think (know!) there's room for many mixtape sites. For now, I plan on contributing to both sites... when I have the time to contribute at all, that is! But no matter how it works out in the end, whether both can be thriving communities or whether everyone migrates to one site or the other, I would appreciate it if EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU would head over to Zen Running Order and sign up, and show Todd some love.
He deserves it, after working so hard.
