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  • Apr
    25
    2011
    • 1 comment on blog post New Usability Features Released
      • 12:01 - olivier: I'd like to add that the quick search is still a work in progress. I still want to make the suggestions more effective. Also, I'd like to extend it to the music search, based on songs you liked
  • Apr
    7
    2011
  • Dec
    10
    2010
    • 1 comment on blog post Minor Updates Released Today
      • 11:12 - SilentK: I don't know when you added (or maybe it's always been there) this feature; but the "Play next" option on the queue drop-down is really great. Thanks for a really great listening environment!
  • Nov
    23
    2010
    • 1 comment on blog post Minor Updates Released Today
      • 11:05 - Christina Horn: I just wanted to say thank you for all your work. I don't speak up enough...so I am now! There are lots of people out there enjoying this service who never will, but know we are out here! I check back regularly to see what's new! Keep it alive!
  • Nov
    12
    2010
  • Nov
    11
    2010
  • Aug
    27
    2010
    • 1 comment on blog post The Future of Uvumi
      • 10:56 - Ark Arsenal: Solid performance, Uvumi team. I've only been a member for a little while, but I am psyched to use the site every single day.

        Hope your break involves some serious vegging out, with a huge emphasis on letting your brains turn to mush. Best remedy out there.
  • Aug
    26
    2010
  • Aug
    20
    2010

  • blog post Report New Usability Features Released

    Marshall Stokes
    Posted on Apr 25, 2011 - 8:45 by Marshall Stokes
    Over the weekend we released some new features! We believe these updates make Uvumi more user-friendly and will help cut down on some of the confusion that many new users experience:

    * Player song queue now auto-expands on mouseover. For many new users, it wasn't immediately clear that the player window could be expanded by clicking a hard-to-notice icon on the black bar beneath it. So we changed the way it works, and we think it will help novice and advanced users alike. So far I am a big fan of this change, especially since the player queue can be "pinned" open (look for the red push-pin icon when expanded) and you still have the ability to re-size the queue height if you want.

    * Profile management tabs! Finally, a solution to the confusing nature of managing band profiles alongside your personal profile. Have a look at your Dash to see how this works. Basically, you always know which profile you're working on based on which tab is active at the top of the content part of the page.

    * Quick search: Olivier made the search box at the top of each page much more useful! Give it a try! It pre-loads your friends and favorites so you can get to their profiles MUCH faster when you search, completely bypassing the search results page!

    * Spam control improvement -- We updated our flagging system to help us remove spam comments faster and more effectively. Please, if you see spam comments on any profile on the site, flag the comment and flag the user who left the comment. We'll take care of the rest!

    There might be a couple of bug fixes in this update I forgot to mention, but the important improvements are outlined above. If you don't like it or you have any feedback, let us know!
    comments1 Comment

  • blog post Report Server migration this weekend

    Marshall Stokes
    Posted on Apr 7, 2011 - 15:30 by Marshall Stokes
    update: I didn't manage to make as much progress on this task today as I had hoped. As a result, the downtime will occur this weekend. I'll keep you posted!

    I'm working today on migrating Uvumi.com to a new set of servers at Amazon's EC2 cloud. This move is a cost-cutting measure -- a new cluster configuration will cut our monthly hosting fees in half, and since traffic remains pretty steady these days, we can operate with a bit less computing power than we used to require.

    If all goes well this afternoon, I hope to perform the actual site migration some time this evening, and it will involve a bit of downtime. If you try to visit Uvumi.com tonight and it's offline or otherwise broken, don't fret, we're not going dark forever, and once we go down I should have things back up and running within an hour or so.
    commentsNo Comments

  • blog post Report Bug fixes!

    Marshall Stokes
    Posted on Apr 7, 2011 - 9:45 by Marshall Stokes
    Hi everyone, wow it has been a while since we updated Uvumi, and today's update isn't major, it just addresses a few bugs that have cropped up with recent web browser releases. Here's the list:

    * Fixed broken "Leave Comment" buttons in Chrome browser

    * Improved photo cropping system so that, when managing a band profile, you won't end up back on your personal profile after cropping a photo from a personal album (for example when setting band avatar)

    * Private message system now allows replying to messages even if the sender is not in your friends list. This is useful when you're in a band but you aren't friend-connected to some of the other members, and one sends out a PM to all band members.

    * Fixed duplicated personal info fields in public user profiles (for example, displaying location or label twice). That was a bug I introduced in one of the more recent updates. I also removed the display of "gender" as I don't think it's especially necessary/helpful. Please let me know if I am mistaken on that one.

    That's it for this update, but we have much more planned. Lots more bug fixes and some major improvements, including a possible redesign of the front page and a potential major upgrade to the profile management interface. Also still in the works: Last.fm scrobbling and maybe even facebook integration!

    Let us know what you think. The team is pretty much down to just me and Olivier at this point, and since Olivier is the guy to go to for really big code changes, I suggest you all click over to his profile and leave him some encouraging messages to help motivate him to spend his off-hours working on Uvumi!

    Love,

    Marshall
    comments1 Comment

  • blog post Report Minor Updates Released Today

    Marshall Stokes
    Posted on Nov 11, 2010 - 11:00 by Marshall Stokes
    Can you believe it? We updated Uvumi.com!

    It's been a good break, we needed it. Here are some of the things that have been fixed/improved with this release:

    * Eliminated delay in loading tags and favorite status into player when a song starts

    * Added new Contact fields for Bandcamp and official label URL

    * Improved/fixed some minor issues with Group feeds (but they're still not as complete as we would like)

    * Added "Disbanded Date" setting to band profiles, for those of you who have pages for bands that aren't together anymore

    While we have taken some time away from this project, we still intend to return in full force to bust out some major upgrades in a couple of months. We're all working full time to keep the bills paid, but we're still committed to Uvumi and we promise to keep you informed about future plans and releases as details become available.

    Thanks again to everyone for being part of Uvumi! Contact us any time with questions/suggestions/complaints/whatever!

    - Marshall
    comments5 Comments

  • blog post Report The Future of Uvumi

    Marshall Stokes
    Posted on Aug 19, 2010 - 11:15 by Marshall Stokes
    As many of you probably already know (or suspect), things aren't happening quickly these days at Uvumi HQ. It takes us weeks to prepare and launch updates to the site, and we haven't had a major feature release in months.

    I think it's important to mention that without you, without the community that has cropped up around this project, we would have thrown in the towel long ago. The enthusiasm and positivity of Uvumi's many members is what keeps us motivated to stick with this project, and we want to sincerely thank all of you for that, it means a lot to us.

    There are a number of things slowing us down these days, but what it ultimately comes down to is that we are feeling pretty burnt out. We have worked on this project non-stop for nearly three years, and at this point it's hard to make time for the daunting design and programming tasks that we have planned, particularly because we also work full time at our day jobs. But knowing that there are so many dedicated Uvumi users out there, and based on so many encouraging and sincere comments from artists using the service, we have no intention of giving up on this!

    So, we're taking some time off. Starting now. Team Uvumi needs to step back and take a break from this project for a while, in order to gather our thoughts and prepare for the future.

    And what is that future? Well, lately we have spent much of our free time designing and planning new features and improvements. Things like song recommendations for listeners, a way for artists to easily sell song downloads, Last.fm scrobbling, and upgrades to the entire song management system. There are more, but I won't go into excessive detail right now.

    I hope you will all stick with us even though we're taking a break, and at least subscribe to our RSS feed, Twitter feed, or our Facebook page so you can be notified of our status when we start moving forward with Uvumi.com improvements :)

    Thanks to everyone for all the support, and for being part of Uvumi, it means a lot to us and it keeps us motivated!

    -Marshall
    comments11 Comments

  • blog post Report Uvumi.com Updates, August 18, 2010

    Marshall Stokes
    Posted on Aug 18, 2010 - 7:15 by Marshall Stokes
    We released an update to Uvumi.com last night! Here's a summary of what's new:

    - Added support for WAV format in song upload interface
    - Improved "member count" data in band and group search results
    - Added option to the Song Search page to show only songs that are downloadable
    - Fixed bug in Groups pages that caused minor browser errors under certain conditions
    - Added "Disbanded Date" field for band profiles
    - Added permanent URL system for song charts. Now you can go to http://www.uvumi.com/charts/rock and get the current Rock chart, for example
    - Fixed bug in scrolling window title in Chrome and IE
    - Greatly improved search-by-genre algorithm in the song search engine, and finally fixed the incorrect song counts on the Browse Genres page!
    - Added feeds for Uvumi Groups, so new activity that happens in groups you are a member of will appear in your Dash (only for new members and new discussions, but we'll add more soon)
    - Added email notification to let group managers know when there are pending requests to join, and also an option to disable this notification
    - Increased the maximum number of groups that can be joined to 8 (instead of 3)

    I decided to increase the number of groups each member can join because the old limit seemed to restrictive. Maybe we shouldn't even have a limit? I guess we'll just see how things go, and if group activity picks up at all once we get the rest of the notifications and dash updates in place.

    Sadly, things have not been moving quickly in terms of improving and upgrading Uvumi.com, and that probably won't change any time soon. I will be making an announcement about the future of Uvumi soon, so check back here for updates, or better yet, subscribe to the Team Uvumi Blog RSS feed.

    Talk to you soon,
    Marshall
    comments2 Comments

  • blog post Report Fixed: UTF-8 Support

    Marshall Stokes
    Posted on Jul 3, 2010 - 9:15 by Marshall Stokes
    Thanks to Lajos for reporting issues with UTF-8 characters in many areas of Uvumi.com. We have finally fixed this issue and I am happy to announce that Uvumi.com now fully supports UTF-8 international characters everywhere on the website.

    Example: 私たちの使命には、アーティストに力を与える広範囲の作成と芸術の消費を促進し、芸術的なコミュニティに値を追加します。

    (if the above looks like gibberish to you, your computer probably doesn't support UTF-8)

    In other news, things are not moving quickly at Uvumi HQ. Between Olivier's new full time job in Belgium, and my working full-time hours as a freelance consultant, progress on Uvumi features and upgrades are just not moving as quickly as we would like. Unfortunately, we will probably be stuck in this rut for a while, as it's going to take many weeks for us to build, test, and launch the new features we're working on, such as upgrades to Uvumi Groups, upgrades to the song management system (including increasing the streaming audio quality), and our planned platform that will enable artists to sell high quality versions of their songs from their Uvumi profiles.

    In the meantime, I hope our members will continue using the service and providing feedback whenever possible. We are still growing daily, and Uvumi remains a great way for artists to connect with new fans and to get their music heard by listeners all over the world.

    Thanks for being part of Uvumi :)

    Marshall
    comments10 Comments

  • blog post Report Really Fixed: Linux Uploading to Uvumi.com

    Marshall Stokes
    Posted on Jun 8, 2010 - 19:00 by Marshall Stokes
    A couple days ago I announced that the linux upload bug had been resolved, but that turned out to be incorrect. While we did overhaul the uploading system, it didn't actually solve the linux issue.

    Research and debugging indicated that the problem was being caused by a shortcoming in one of Amazon's cloud services, specifically "Elastic Load Balancer", which we use to spread traffic to Uvumi.com over multiple web servers in our cluster. I won't get into the dirty bits of this issue, but if there are any web developers out there having issues related to Amazon EC2, Flash, and file uploads, feel free to email me at support@uvumi.com for details on how we solved the problem.

    Anyway, tests run here at Uvumi HQ indicate that the issue has been totally resolved, but if anyone out there has a linux machine and would be willing to test song or photo uploads, we would love to know if you encounter any problems!

    Thanks, and sorry for the inconvenience to our linux members!

    UPDATE: A number of linux-using member have confirmed the issue has been resolved. Yay!
    commentsNo Comments

  • blog post Report Today: Tuning the Back End

    Marshall Stokes
    Posted on Jun 7, 2010 - 14:15 by Marshall Stokes
    Uvumi is blowing up today! We were featured on the front page of LifeHacker (here's the story), and as a result our servers are getting hammered with all the traffic. We haven't had any down time, but things were a bit rocky when this morning when the listeners started pouring in. One issue that has cropped up is our dedicated song transcoding server, which hit a snag a few hours ago and didn't recover on its own. This has left dozens of freshly uploaded songs waiting in the queue, but not to worry, it's back online and doing it's job, grinding through the uploads as quickly as it can!

    Thanks to LifeHacker.com and MakeUseOf.com for featuring Uvumi recently, and I hope that all these new listeners will keep us informed of their opinions and complaints! Uvumi is nowhere near perfect, but we continue to work hard to improve the service and implement requested features to the best of our ability!
    comments3 Comments

  • blog post Report Fixed: Non-working file uploads on Linux

    Marshall Stokes
    Posted on Jun 6, 2010 - 14:30 by Marshall Stokes
    Thanks to members who contacted me about an issue with posting songs and photos from Linux operating systems, the bug has been fixed and I am now happy to announce that (based on my testing) Uvumi members can once again upload files from Linux systems!

    The issue seems to have been introduced in a recent update to the Flash plugin for Linux, and it went largely unnoticed due to the very small percentage of members who use the operating system. If you still experience the issue, please be sure to clear your browser's cache and reload the page, as some browsers have odd caching habits and it's possible that some relevant resources won't be refreshed without a cache flush. If you still experience issues, please let us know as soon as possible! support@uvumi.com

    There is one additional update in today's release: we changed the group profile photo behavior so that owners and managers who click the photo will return to the main group profile page instead of bringing up the cropping tool to set a new group picture. To change the group profile picture, use the link near the top of the Management box in the right-hand column.
    comments3 Comments

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