Gig Lovers was ready to roll out a while ago and I’ve just decided to make it ‘public’.

After an initial period of testing with a few users I’ve been alerted to so many improvements I need to work on over the next few weeks. For example there is a big problem with USA - I need to use Country -> State -> City rather than the usual (for UK) Country - City… I'm currently working on that and should be finished by the end of the day.

Holding Back 

Parts of the site I haven't yet activated or I've had to deactivate for the time being while I re-work and finalise a few things.

For example; with 'find gigs by location' you choose your city and it locates concerts x amount of miles away. It works a treat but I've had to take it down due to the reworking of the database with the USA problem (see above)

Review It?

I'd appreciate any constructive reviews of Gig Lovers, I'll always be looking to improve the way in which it works, and will always take what  you say on board.

Initial Visitors

I uploaded it about 10 days ago and it’s receiving traffic from Google already - over 200 visitors yesterday -  which I know is nothing special  but for a site I’ve not yet launched and is only linked to twice it’s not too bad at all.

Anything Else?

I’ve also been working on a new version of the dated-and-ugly Rockstar Game, it's far too basic and dated at the moment. I spent a good three weeks on this, hence the delay in Gig Lovers.

Gig Website: I thought it would be ready by now, it isn't, but whatever happens it'll be up and running in some form this month.

I indicated in my last project update post that I wasn't happy with the name "mygighistory". The day after an email dropped in to my inbox notifying me of a few domain names I have expiring.

One of them was "giglovers.com", and after a few hours of trying to come up with something better I decided I actually like 'Gig Lovers' - so that's it.

The good news, even though the site is dragging on, is that my 'work lists' are getting a lot shorter and it's becoming more difficult to add jobs that need doing. Most of the things on the list are visual, for example, "Make 'post new topic' page look pretty" (etc)

I don't really have a logo so I knocked something up in Photoshop in about 2 minutes. Logos have never been my strong point and if the site takes off then I'll pay for someone to create one.

The next thing I'm to work on are the 'widgets'. Users will be able to show their upcoming gigs, or, say, the last 5 gigs they attended. I'll listen to requests for other widgets once the site is launched.

Wow, I can't believe it has been 16 days since my last post it doesn't feel like that at all!

The long hours I’ve spent sitting at the computer have been spent solely on 'the gig database/social networking site' - which does have a name: My Gig History (or should that be mygighistory?) and naturally it'll be placed on mygighistory.com. There's nothing there yet though…

"I'm not too keen on the name"

When I first started the site over a year ago (I seem to work on it in bursts every 3/4 months) it was to be a site for listing all the gigs you've been to and of course you could add any gigs you were going to in the future.

After the first night of working on it, and after purchasing the domain name, I was having ideas to make it more complicated like notification of band gigs, RSS, venues, cities, groups, forums, friends, see who's going etc. and so it quickly changed direction in to being more a social networking site based around gigs and for the people who go to them!

It's not finished yet…

There's still a bit of work to do to smooth some areas of the site over but the majority of it is seems to be working.

I'm hoping to get it up and running either this weekend or early next week for public testing as there are bound to be errors somewhere along the line and it's not possible for me to find them all! I'm still yet to decide on whether to give users invites, thus 'limiting' the amount of sign ups while (ideally) creating a bit of buzz, or have it 'welcome to all comers'.

I'll be updating the blog in a few days with details on what the site will contain…

I’ve been keeping my head down this week, working on the social networking website (based around concerts).

For the 4th time I’ve decided to redesign the site – it always looks good at first, until I realise I’ve gone off it. There’s an interesting post over on Zane Jamal’s blog regarding “designing for you” and I’ll take some of that advice for the next time.

Once the design is done I’ve just got a couple of things to add before I can start running a semi-private test of the site. I’m going to give the initial batch of testers 10 invites to give to others. Ideally this will keep the number of visitors down in the initial stages while hopefully creating a ‘bit of buzz’ – we shall see.

After reading on both Connected Internet and Techtites that Alexa had introduced some more statistics for me to look at (sorry, I like stats) I quickly rushed to check Alexa. While the stats for most of my sites seemed 'pretty normal' that soon changed when I checked the stats for The Rockstar Game.

As that shows, therockstargame.com users primarily come from Lithuania (34.6%), Portugal (26.9%), United States (15.4%). I know that's not the case, so I logged in to Google Analytics and checked the past week, and that gave me the following….

As you can see that paints a completely different picture.

Obviously the Alexa data is based upon users with the Alexa Toolbar installed but it suprises me that it can be so out. The 2% of visitors from Lithuania over the past week is a pretty solid figure over the past year… clearly Alexa is 'big in Lithuania'