It’s only been a couple of days since I launched the revamped ihatemornings.com but already I’ve made some serious changes, and am planning several more. I want to document the progress so that once it’s all perfect I can collate all the hints, tips and experience in a handy guide. For now I’ll just link from one article to the next. If you haven’t already read my plan for the ultimate musician’s blog, you should. ;o)

h3. Eventful gig listings

Having booked a last minute gig at the weekend, I needed to get some gig listings happening pretty quickly. I already had an account with Eventful, and they handily provide their widget as an XHTML Microformat, so I could easily style it to match the theme of the site. I set up an ‘Upcoming gigs’ calendar on Eventful, and now if I need to add a gig to the listing on my website I just add it to that calendar. Sometimes the events will have been created already, and sometimes I will have to create them. Most of the venues in Oxford already have profiles on Eventful, so it’s pretty easy to add a gig. The advantage over manually entering the gigs on my site is that the Eventful listings can sync with Upcoming.org and other event sites and I can subscribe to my ‘Upcoming gigs’ calendar in iCal, saving me more redundant data entry.

h3. Google Analytics

I realised that I had lost my Google Analytics reporting with the new WordPress install. After a bit of hunting I found the Google Analytics For WordPress plugin, which gave me back my stats and more. It also allows you to use Analytics to track outbound links and downloads. The setup was pretty easy, and I’ll see how it works out after a couple of weeks of data collection.

h3. Google Sitemap

My old site also had a Google sitemap that made sure that Google was indexing all the pages properly. Another WP plugin sorted that out for me, with only a couple of permission tweaks to get it working.

h3. META tags

The Google work reminded me that I needed to sort out my META tags (keywords, description, page titles etc.), and luckily there’s a plugin that does all that too! All in One SEO Pack rewrites all your page titles, creates page descriptions from your article extracts and creates keywords from your tags. A one-click install that saved hours of fiddling, now and in the future.

h3. WordPress comment spam

Feeling very pleased with myself I went to check my email, only to discover 3 spam comments had been posted on my shiny new blog. Damn. I read WordPress’ useful page on Combating comment spam, and opted for the WP-SpamFree plugin, which claims to shoot down >95% of spam ‘at the door’. That sounds pretty exciting. I’ll let you know how it goes…

h3. FeedBurner

Not long after that, I was catching up on my RSS feeds in Google Reader, and came across my latest article. Or at least a 3 line excerpt with some ugly image tags in it. Blast. I logged in to FeedBurner and changed the feed address to “ihatemornings.com/feed” instead of “ihatemornings.com/rss” (the Textpattern default) and updated the WordPress settings to include the full text of each article in the feed. I hate feeds of article excerpts. I never bother the click the ‘read more…’ links. Too much hassle.

h3. ShareThis

The ShareThis plugin neatly added social bookmarking and sharing links to the end of each post without any configuration. And that’s probably enough tweaking for one day… ;o)

h3. Still to come

Next up I need to:

• Update my Myspace page
• Create a Facebook Page
• Write a new About page for ihatemornings.com
• Figure out which songs to feature and where
• Populate ReverbNation with some useful stuff
• Migrate my mailing list from CampaignMonitor to ReverbNation
• Book some more gigs
• Write 40 more songs

Easy, eh? Watch this space, and feel free to give me any tips in the comments… ;o)

Girl with guitar and laptop

The latest redesign of ihatemornings.com incorporated some fundamental changes under the hood, most obviously a switch from “Textpattern”:http://www.textpattern.com (a trusted friend) to “WordPress”:http://www.wordpress.com (the popular kid in the class). WordPress is fast becoming the standard blogging platform for music types (and many others), so the switch had to be made. I have built a dozen sites on Textpattern over the last 5 years and it’s a beautifully versatile piece of software (once you get to know it), so it’s with a heavy heart that I let it go.

You might be wondering why I want to adopt the same technology everyone else is using. Doesn’t that make me a sheep? Where’s my character, my backbone? Don’t worry. As I’ll explain, I am infusing this blog design with just as much hand-drawn character as the old, brown Playschool version. But I want to lead by example. I want to build the ultimate musician’s blog. I want to figure out how to integrate social media widgets, music players, links, archives and videos in the best possible way. And I reckon that once I’ve managed that it will be something that musicians can copy. The copies won’t look the same because part of the ultimate musician’s blog is a very personal surface design. It doesn’t matter if the structure is similar to somebody else’s blog. Blogs are all the same anyway…

h3. The redesign that never ends

I see this as the beginning of a research process that may well last a year or so. I am getting involved with new services (“ReverbNation”:http://www.reverbnation.com/benwalker, “Last.fm”:http://last.fm/music/JB+Walker) that take a while to build up. I also plan to build an audience from almost scratch. So this is no overnight success scheme. That’s the point. I want to show how best to build an online presence as a musician over time and with plenty of hard work. A one-click template isn’t going to do you any good.

Along the way I’m going to use and evaluate all sorts of advice from “blogging”:http://www.problogger.com “gurus”:http://www.skelliewag.org, “music”:http://www.stevelawson.net “gurus”:http://www.soulofsongwriting.com/, “web”:http://www.happycog.com/ “gurus”:http://webtypography.net/ and any other “gurus”:http://www.netblogsrocknroll.com I can get my hands on. I’m also going to harness as much of the power of Social Media as is possible without spending 24 hours a day with a webcam strapped to my head talking in hyperlinks while playing the guitar.

h3. What am I doing right now?

WordPress. Importing all my old articles and comments from Textpattern was super-simple, and I’m up and running on my new favourite blogging platform.

Template. My old site template was built from scratch, and it showed. I’m no designer… For this one, I’ve kept the style (hand-drawn doodles), but used the popular Grid Focus template to make the content much more attractive and readable.

ReverbNation. The old site used embedded Flash MP3 players to play each song. They were great, but didn’t do anything but play. The ReverbNation player is just a small part of a huge web backend that encompasses mailing lists, community, reporting, tactical marketing and all sorts of fun stuff. So far I’ve used none of it, so this will be a big learning curve for me. If it works out, I will end up using ReverbNation to host and play (and maybe even sell ;o) all of my tracks.

Twitter. It was on the old site and it’s here too, with a sexier plugin. I use Twitter a lot, and it’s central to my conversations with the Social Media crowd (and lately more musicians).

RSS. It’s amazing, and I love it. But very few people I know use it. I’m going to create a perfect RSS feed, with exactly the right amount of functionality, then I’m going to convert everyone on my mailing list to news feeds. It may take some time…

Integration. I’m going to try, as far as possible, to integrate my blog, Myspace, Facebook, Reverbnation, Twitter, Last.fm and the rest so I don’t have to spend my life updating 16 profiles and uploading every new song to 4 different servers. I want to streamline all of that so I can spend my time creating and communicating.

Interaction. I want people to be able to interact with me through my website. The comments on the new WordPress install are vastly easier and sexier than the old ones, so that should encourage some more conversation. Twitter should help. I’m also working on a “Suggest a song title” feature to give me some good ideas for the 50/90 Challenge.

Content. I’m going to carry on with the “Ben Walker updates” style of content, and commenting on relevant blog posts. I’m also going to post a couple of article series on songwriting technique as I write the chapters for my songwriting eBook. And my medium-term plan is to guest post on some good blogs, both songwriting-specific and more general lifestyle sites.

Songs. I’ll be writing pretty much one a day until October for the 50/90 Challenge, so I needn’t worry about pumping out the material! I’m keeping the 50/90 songs separate from the rest for the moment. When it’s over I’ll pick out the favourites and rewrite them until they are ready to join the canon of JB Walker classics. ;o)

Gigs. The old site pulled a gig feed from Eventful, which was quite handy. It didn’t help with updating listings on Reverbnation, Facebook, Myspace etc. I’ll hopefully figure out the simplest way of keeping the gigs lists up to date by the time I start playing some more gigs…

So have a look around, enjoy the new design and why not “leave me a comment”:http://www.ihatemornings.com/2008/08/10/the-ultimate-musicians-blog/#respond to get us started? ;o)

I have developed a secret career as a troubadour. I dash in, guitar slung jauntily over one shoulder, run on stage, play a wonderfully formed six song set, take a bow and get the bus home. I invite nobody, and nobody comes. Genius.

So ihatemornings.com v3 (the one you’re looking at now, with the flowers and stuff) is going to be more than the usual muso website. Not for me that life of quietly filling servers with mp3s of jaw-achingly beautiful songsmithery, nor that of ‘Latest News’ pages that are months out of date, or ‘Upcoming Gigs’ banners featuring not a single gig. No! I vow to get gigs that people will enjoy. I vow to tell everybody about them, or at least give them many useful ways of being reminded automagically by the ihatemornings machine. I vow to take photos, and write about them, and generally give this whole rent-a-crowd shenanigans a good beating out in the back garden to shake out the years of support slot dust and drag it shiny and new back into the house of Ben Walker, Legendary Swordsman, Geek Night Troubadour, and all-round musical legend. Hurrah!

As I get things sorted around here, I will keep the world (including you) posted. Let’s have some fun.