I’m giving all my source files away…
Think Sourceforge for music…
Read and comment here: http://leestacey.com/huge-open-source-music-project
January 6th, 2009 | Tags: composition, files, FL Studio, flp, free, fruityloops, lee stacey, midi, Music, open source, Pilchard, production, samples, source, sourceforge, vst | Category: Album, Music, Pilchard | Comments (1)
I may have the answer to most of the problems on the London Underground.
Basically I want to get rid of the trains…
Think I’m crazy? Well, read this and pass it on: http://leestacey.com/ideas-to-make-the-london-under
Thankies.
December 9th, 2008 | Tags: boris johnson, lee stacey, london underground, Pilchard, pilchardmusic, tfl, tube | Category: Pilchard | Leave a comment
The names I have up for sale at the moment (and there will be more to follow) are:
audiofoolz.co.uk - £5.00
bhmy.co.uk - £1.00
bidonmusic.co.uk - £5.00
brainfuk.co.uk - £5.00
flmuseum.com - £5.00
shitfaced.eu - £5.00
tymbasouth.org.uk - £0.00
Click on each domain name to go to sedo (the reseller).
December 3rd, 2008 | Tags: bargain, domain, low, names, price, sale | Category: Pilchard, business | Leave a comment
Last week I attended Amplified 08, a network of networks with the aim of making the UK the most connected place in the world. Several topics were up for discussion but one that really grabbed my attention was the topic of social media in business. It was a good session with many valid points made but I felt it could and should run on. With that, here’s my take on the subject.
A lot of businesses these days are grabbing the bull by the horns and setting up blogs, twitter accounts, Facebook groups and the like. The problem I feel is that most of them are getting it so wrong that they might as well not bother.
One mistake that is often being made is that the job of marketing is generally left to the marketing department or worse, outside marketing consultants. Sure these people have their place but they should not be the ones blogging and tweeting. That responsibility needs to fall to the people doing the good stuff that you want to blog about. In some cases the job is even given to the IT Department… Huge fail there… Your IT guys know lots about supporting your business but as they don’t DO the business it isn’t something they can really tell the world about.
The biggest mistake being made is that businesses are generally following the traditional marketing model:
I’ll give them some credit though… Sometimes they do surveys… Hehehe… Yeah that works… NOT
The most important thing about social media is that it is SOCIAL. This means you have to engage with your market. Talk to them and most importantly LISTEN to them. It has never been so easy or cost effective to give people what they want. And what do they want? They want to be involved. Or at least to feel like they are involved in some way. Social media is about bonds and bonds have to be adhesive at both ends.
Let’s put it this way, when you meet someone you do you:
A) Hit them
B) Shake their hand
The same rules of engagement apply when communicating business to business. Oh yes, you can use social media between businesses too. There are a wealth of applications out there for creating networks and sharing information. LinkedIn is a rather good starting point for basic networking.
The problem is that businesses (or those that are at the top of them) just don’t understand social networking. Maybe the regional teams for Amplified could think about giving seminars and workshops to businesses in their areas to help them better understand and make use of the technology that we geeks have been using all this time.
December 2nd, 2008 | Tags: #20, #Amp08, Amplified 08, business, facebook, lee stacey, linkedin, Pilchard, pilchardmusic, social networking, twitter | Category: Pilchard, business | Comments (1)
Did you know that you can make money from Twitter?
Of course you did. You’re web savvy and all. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be reading my blog.
One of the ways you can make money is with the Magpie Ad network (which I use and is working for me so far). Simply put, it tweets out an ad relevant to your content every now and then for which you get paid. Actually it is more complicated than that but that’s OK, over on their info page they’ve explained it with pictures! Behold:
Magpie explained
It also goes on to explain how it works from an advertiser’s point of view too so it is a job very well done.
So if you fancy earning some dosh for doing very little, give it a go. Here’s my referrer link, sign up with this and I get a little love too:
December 1st, 2008 | Tags: advertising, be-a-magpie, lee stacey, magpie, make, marketing, money, Pilchard, pilchardmusic, pr, twitter | Category: Pilchard, business | Leave a comment
At around 21:00 GMT this evening, @tweetbomb’s twitter account was suspended after a successful hit on an account named @aaddrick.
Ryan Deal, the man behind @tweetbomb and owner of the account @rdeal1 is currently taking steps to get things back in order.
To find out more info on the suspension, follow @tweetban on Twitter. @tweetban is also an alias for Ryan Deal.
December 1st, 2008 | Tags: lee stacey, Pilchard, pilchardmusic, ryan deal, tweetban, tweetbomb, twitter | Category: Pilchard | Comments (1)
@tweetbomb
Over the past few days a new meme has popped up on twitter called tweetbombing. Basically the command comes from an account named @tweetbomb at 3.33PM EST every day for its followers to send a blank @ message to a carefully selected twitter account. The result being that the chosen one gets flooded by hundreds or potentially even thousands of messages. The upshot is that they tend to get new followers out of this.
The official instructions for tweetbombing, that can be found on @tweetbomb’s Twitter profile are as follows:
Pretty simple stuff and pretty good fun.
Ryan Deal
The man behind @tweetbomb is blogger and robophile, Ryan Deal. Ryan can apparently often be found doing crazy things like attempting to start new religions… In a way, I guess @tweetbomb is a kind of religion.
Some info about Ryan from his blog:
So give it a go for yourself and follow @tweetbomb. Go and do some bombing!
Some @tweetbomb related links:
http://ryanyeah.com/ - Ryan’s Blog
http://twitter.com/rdeal1 - Ryan’s Twitter profile
http://twitter.com/tweetbomb - Tweetbomb on Twitter
http://tweetbomb.com - Tweetbomb
http://twitter.com/LStacey - Me on Twitter (thrown in for good measure)
Ryan did direct message me to tell me to keep his identity quiet but as he wasn’t following me, I couldn’t message him back. Oh well…
Oh and lastly… Thanks, Ryan for pointing out my typos! I have a tendancy to type like a maniac at times!
November 30th, 2008 | Tags: lee stacey, meme, Pilchard, pilchardmusic, rdeal1, ryan deal, tweetbomb, twitter | Category: Pilchard | Comments (6)
Found this site a while back. It is basically a very simple pixel image editor for creating sprite images. It permanently saves your creations as .png images. Check it out:
Here are some that I have done:
November 27th, 2008 | Category: Pilchard | Leave a comment
So I finally went and got leestacey.com. I plan to use it as a single page site linking to my main online profiles and I want it to be really good so I put a message out via twitter (and subsequently everywhere else) asking if anyone wanted to design it for me. Within seconds I had several replies, which was nice. It does present me with a problem though… How do I choose who is to do it?
So I’ve decided to put it out there as a competition.
What is the prize?
Tricky one. What the talented one will definitely get is:
I’ll think of some other stuff to throw in there in due course.
What is required?
At this stage sketches will be fine and you can submit as many as you like but it is important that you can put your money where your mouth is and be able to build the thing to my specs.
When?
I’m not in any rush for the page to be built so I’ll set the competition deadline to Januay 1st 2009. Gives you a bit of time over the Xmas holiday to get the juices flowing.
Submission
You can submit your sketches as replies to this post if you’re feeling brave or you can email them to me: lee[at]codeaudio[dot]com
Feel free to hit me up on twitter if you want some feedback on works in progress: @pilchardmusic
The spec
It is to be a fully compliant HTML/CSS single page design. It must work in all browsers. Strictly NO FLASH or other annoying crap. Clever AJAX stuff is permitted but only if it is beautiful and not annoying.
My name must feature in nice big letters.
A picture of me would be good. You can choose one from here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pilchardmusic/sets/72157604890605564/
It needs to link to my profiles on the following sites:
The main content area will be a feed consisting of Flickr, Twitter & Blog posts. Don’t worry too much about the code for that. I can sort that myself… Unless you want to of course…
If you can find somewhere to put a few words about who I am that might be nice too. I would think around 15 to 20 words would probably be enough.
Tips
Try to make a theme that could be echoed on my other sites. This site will be a kingpin for my personal branding.
I like clean designs and I love white although anything that kicks ass will be fine whatever colour it is.
Try to make it as timeless as possible. It would be nice if it still looks fresh in five years time.
November 22nd, 2008 | Tags: competition, design, Flickr, lee, leestacey.com, page, Pilchard, stacey, twitter, web | Category: Pilchard | Leave a comment
All I want to do is move a .com domain from one host to another. Easy, right?
Wrong if it is freeparking.co.uk you are trying to transfer away from…
At the moment the company I work for has many web domains in many places, all set up by different people. I’m trying to get all of them pulled into one host in order to make things easier to manage. My chosen host is 1&1 as I’ve used them myself for many many years. In fact this very site is currently sitting in one of their racks.
Anyway, back to the issue at hand. We have one domain registered with freeparking.co.uk. It is a .com domain so the mechanical process of a transfer should be straight forward:
Not so, apparently. Here’s the workflow thus far:
I logged in and browsed around the domain mantenence page looking for the bit that allows you to generate the auth code but no joy. So I try the FAQ which tells me this:
Q: How do I transfer a Domain Name out?
A: Much depends upon the system you wish to transfer your Domain out to.
If you are transferring a .uk Domain to another host you can simply use the “Change the DNS information of a UK Domain name” section of the Maintenance page.
If you are transferring another Domain type to another host use the “.com, .net, .org Domain Name Modification” or “uk.com, .uk.net, .gb.com, .gb.net Domain Name Modification” sections of the Maintenance page.
Don’t forget that by using the Freeparking DNS Manager you should never need to transfer a Domain to another ISP. You can simply change the zone file to point your Domain Name to a new web server or mail server, and still keep ultimate control over your Domain Name.
OK, so I go back to the mantenence page and look for this magical “section”. Not found.
Time to submit a support request… So, off I go to the support area, type my request in, hit the submit button and… I get a little red message telling me that I need to enter the domain about which I am contacting them. Oddly enough there is nowhere to do this and I can’t get back to my form either. So I go to the support request area again to see if I can get my request back or to see if it has been submitted… Nothing there. It has just gone. Awesome. Time to send them an email. That should do it.
So I look around for an email address only to find that there isn’t one. Nice work. So Google it is then. I found various email addresses relating to the company and put them in the “to” field. I also threw in a few other addresses at their domain just to make sure it got there. Basically I gave them the story so far but without the informal fluffing that you have the pleasure of reading.
This morning I find a response in my mailbox! Awesome I thought. Time to get this sorted. The response read:
This is an automated response, no human will read your email.
=============================================Please note that we do not respond to emailed support requests. Please enter your request for support via our centralised support system at http://support.freeparking.co.uk/ where one of our engineers will be able to help you with your question or problem in a prompt and efficient manner.
OK. Nice. No humans, just robots. So I thought maybe I’ve got something wrong somewhere and went back to the beginning to repeat the process to start all over again. Including the support request that didn’t work… Again..
So, that’s where I am now. Where is that? Nowhere. Hence the title: Choose your domain host carefully. Basically I’m saying don’t use freeparking.co.uk unless you wish to stay with them forever.
November 18th, 2008 | Tags: 1&1, dns, domain, domains, freeparking, freeparking.co.uk, freeparking.com, host, out, Pilchard, transfer | Category: Pilchard | Comments (2)
