New is not always better

Emm Gryner’s webmaster recently recreated her site. It looks fine, I suppose, but he’s dropped the news and tour updates feeds. Worse, because the site is now Flash-based, it’s impossible to link to any of those pages directly.

At least the journal remains outside of Flash space, although it would have been nice to put a redirect in place for the feed instead of requiring people to a) notice, b) find the new site, and c) resubscribe.

Emm has done very well as an independent artist because she’s got a clue about dealing with her fans; it’s too bad that Dirgework Productions doesn’t.

Published by

Peter

4 thoughts on “New is not always better”

  1. peter,

    The flash half of the new site is a promotional tool, and for first time visitors to Emm’s site.

    For the fans –
    Emm and Dirgework are re-creating the Emmbassy/Journal to be a fan collective including user photo galleries, news, etc etc.
    It is still a work in progress right now, but you can get feeds and Mac users can synch iCal with Tour Dates.

    Here is the Journal Feed:
    feed://www.emmgryner.com/emmbassy/?q=rss.xml

    the news feed:
    feed://www.emmgryner.com/emmbassy/?q=taxonomy/term/11/0/feed

    the tour dates feed:
    feed://www.emmgryner.com/emmbassy/?q=taxonomy/term/10/0/feed

    We actually care enough about fans to reach out to them, and we’d love for you to post your comments and feedback on the Emmbasssy forum – that way we can make sure we have a clue 🙂

    peace
    Liam
    Dirgework Prod. / Dead Daisy Records

  2. Thanks Liam.

    What I was getting at, though, is that the newbies now have a pretty (but unlinkable) new site, while longer-term fans (we’re talking 1995 here) who have made it a point to link to the site and subscribe to the feeds in order to keep updated are now left with a bunch of things that no longer work. In fact, every link out on the web to Emm’s bio or her tour schedule or the journal or a particular entry or the updates page or the discography or the articles page is now effectively broken. In a nutshell, the point is that Cool URIs Don’t Change.

    I am glad to see the feeds are present at least, and I guess I’ll update my aggregator to get to them. It’s too bad they’re software-specific and will break yet again the next time the site is redesigned or something else changes behind the scenes. (By the way, how do I subscribe to the tour schedule from the Flash “tour dates” panel, or the news feed from the Flash “news” panel?)

    As for posting on the contact the staff forum (or was that the Emm Team forum?)… there used to be hundreds of members and thousands of messages over there and now there are 30 posts and fewer than 50 users. Plus my login and password don’t work any more. Looks like a tornado hit that community.

    Yes, I’m a demanding fan, but I don’t think an unreasonable one: I’d never ask for anything I wasn’t already doing myself. And I’m sorry if the post above and this response sound overly critical—I know Emm wanted an overhaul of the site, and it does look nice. I just kinda wish it had been more plastic surgery and less heart and lung transplant.

  3. Since you’re running Apache, try this in a .htaccess file:

    RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule journal.xml http://www.emmgryner.com/emmbassy/?q=rss.xml [R=301]
RewriteRule news.xml http://www.emmgryner.com/emmbassy/?q=taxonomy/term/11/0/feed [R=301]
RewriteRule tour.xml http://www.emmgryner.com/emmbassy/?q=taxonomy/term/10/0/feed [R=301]

    (Also, for what it’s worth, feed: is an invalid URI scheme.)

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