IF IT WORKS, DON'T FIX IT!

Hi, Conrad - we've gone to updating the Digital Tradition about once a year, and that has happened regularly for about three years. There should be an update coming fairly soon. There are lots of corrections and lots of new songs every year. We just don't bother to list what's new, because the new stuff has already been posted in the forum.
-Joe Offer-

In answer to Paul's post, let me say that although it has disadvantages, one of the best qualities about Mudcat is its simplicity. Maybe it's partly because I'm used to it, but I think Mudcat's forum menu is easier to read and more colorful than vBulletin and most other discussion forum indexes, and it contains more relevant information. The simplicity and lack of features of Mudcat have motivated Mudcatters to be inventive, and to use outside sources to provide what Mudcat hasn't provided. It even motivated one Mudcatter, Jon Freeman, to create an ideal forum for folk music information, http://www.folkinfo.org.

There was a time when we had a technician, Jeff, working on Mudcat almost full-time. He and I would chat into the wee hours of the morning, and we'd try all sorts of new features he'd develop and he often permanently added several features overnight. And at the beginning of Mudcat, we had an entire company, Onstagemedia, available to work on Mudcat. Alas, our technical staff has dwindled to one person, Mudcat's owner, Max, who has to take time out to make a living and care for children. So, our main technical priority these days is simply to keep things running.

Still, Paul has some good suggestions, and many of them can be done with just a little bit of help. You'll find that we have many talented Mudcatters who are very willing to help. And if you can't find something, contact me by personal message or e-mail (joe@mudcat.org) - I'm the contact person and I can direct your request to the right place.

So, let's look at Paul's list and see what we can do:

- ability to post recordings of songs, videos, music scores etc.
People post recordings on MySpace and videos on YouTube, and music scores and photos on a huge number of free online services - and then they post links to that stuff in the Forum. And if you can't do it yourself, contact me and I'm happy to find somebody to help you.


- simpler method of entering links ("blue clickies")
Try the Make a link ("blue clicky") tool at the bottom of the message entry box. It works quite well. And if you have trouble, just post the URL you want people to see. Oftentimes, Mudcatters will come along and post a link in the next message, or a moderator will change your URL to a link. Note that we've recently had a problem with clickable links within the texts of personal messages. Probably best not to try links there unless you test them with the "preview" function.

- better text formatting without having to enter HTML code
Our biggest HTML problem was lack of line breaks, so Max did put in automatic line breaks (which you can switch off if you need to do something fancy). The automatic line breaks do cause a problem with links in personal messages. I have notified Max about that.
You can use most HTML functions within Mudcat messages - but you have to learn the functions. They're not all that hard, and many of us have learned a lot of HTML here. I learned all the HTML I know, right here, and now I use it to maintain three different Websites. There's a Mudcat HTML guide listed in the PermaThread Index, and you can experiment with HTML all day using the "preview" function in any thread.


- show pictures / thumbnails of Mudcatters, like on Facebook. A Mudcatter came up to me at Sale Folk Club last week and said it was nice to put a face to the name
Our regular Mudcat photos section is not being updated, due to database corruption problems, but it has photos of lots of Mudcatters. You'll find it in the QuickLinks dropdown menu on most Mudcat pages. Katlaughing worked up a temporary Mudcat Photos page on MyOpera, and you can send photos to her or to me for posting - details in this thread. You may not be able to post your picture in every message, but you can post a link to your photo wherever you want.

- a spel chekker!!
Well, this once would have been a very good idea, and we did experiment with some options. But nowadays, why bother? If you have almost any browser other than Internet Explorer, there's a spellchecker built in. So why should Mudcat bog itself down with a spellchecker, when browsers have them built in?

If it ain't brok DON'T fix it

I really miss our intercontinental song circles. We used to gather singers from Europe, North America, and Australia, and sing all night. I was living in a duplex at the time and my next-door neighbor didn't always like it, but I thought it was wonderful. We used PalTalk for our singarounds, and I don't think PalTalk is available anymore. Is there an other service that would allow a singaround, and is there somebody who'd like to organize it?

-Joe-

The downloadable DT is a problem. The online DT gets updated regularly, but we've had technical problems with Windows version of the database and haven't seen much interest in the DOS version.
-Joe-