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.

Well, it's the end of the month and so I thought I'd fire up Google Analytics to take a look at the stats for a couple of my websites. I didn't really find anything out of the ordinary until I decided to see how many users were using Vista.

Analysing data of the past two weeks gave me the following result (!)

So apparently more users are visiting the website with Windows 98 installed than Vista! and I can't believe people are still using ME. eww

Is this the same with anyone else? or just me?

As regular readers will know I'm close to finishing my latest project and so I've been testing it across multiple browsers on my PC: IE7, Firefox and Opera.

However, I don't have access to web browsers running on Linux or a Mac.

This is where browsershots.org comes in, it.

"Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server here."

A very handy free tool.

Supported browsers/operating systems:

• Linux: Dillo 0.8, Epiphany 2.14, Epiphany 2.16, Firefox 1.5, Galeon 2.0, Iceweasel 2.0, Konqueror 3.5, Mozilla 1.7, Opera 9.2, Opera 9.10
• Windows: Firefox 1.5, IE5, IE5.5, IE6, IE7
• Mac: Firefox 2.0, Safari 2.0

Visit browsershots.org.

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…

What Have I Been Doing?

You may have noticed I've been pretty quiet lately. I haven't even gotten around to reading blogs - never mind writing!

I've been working on the gig website, it's now so so close and I really want it to be at the public testing stages so that's been my priority. I'm going to have to hold back some of the 'features' as to begin with I want to make sure the 'gig adding' process is as smooth as possible but to be honest I can't remember the last time I made changes to that.

Agloco Comment Spam

I'm slowing starting to see Agloco comment spam working its evil way into my blog comments. I'd leave in the link to their "ALL ABOUT AGLOCO" blog if their name wasn't "Agloco" - so… use your real name.