It’s been a little over a year in Austin for me now. I now live downtown on East 6th street, which is pretty dope, i have to say.
This has been a very interesting experience for me. Since moving here, I have gotten very interested in Software Development and began evolving this platform into a pretty advanced thing.
It is still under construction, as anyone around here would know.
But for Austin, this means that I’m hoping to reach more people in this city. I’m older now than I was when I first started this platform. But I also have a lot more skills.
The hope is that Extra Chill will become a staple of the music scene here in Austin, just like it is in Charleston. And over time, as I build out the platform, it will become a staple of the music scene across the country.
Anyway, there is still much work to be done. Thanks as always to anybody who comes around this forum and browses/posts.
Keep on coming back and see it improve and evolve over time.
I was driving the other day, listening to the new Live at the Warfield release from the Garcia Band.
While I wasn’t blown away by a lot of it, there were a lot of great moments. One such moment is “Cats Under The Stars”. When they first go into it, you can hear how stoked the crowd is.
Note that this came on at 3am, when I had about 2 hours left on the road from Charleston to Austin
the calendar will be back up and running soon and so will the festival wire
over the past couple of years i have learned so much, and even over the past year alone
the systems i built even a few months ago are nothing compared to what i’m creating now
except i did burn a lot of it down in the process, and really stopped writing articles.
but that is okay. because this platform is about to change significantly.
to anybody who is reading this, if you are worried that i’m no longer focused on Extra Chill, i really am. i’m just behind the scenes doing the best i can to keep everything rolling
i know this is more of a rant than an informative post. but trust me, extra chill is on its way
if i had money right now i would hire developers to help me scale the platform the way i’m envisioning. but since i dont have any money, i’m here building it myself
i feel a little shitty about the fact that my calendar has been busted for two months, but the new system i’m building is going to make up for that, so it doesnt matter.
i’ve worked on this website for so long, over 10 years. i will take this time to create the platform i’m envisioning.
i’ll never give up on extra chill
i know i could make this forum pop more if i posted on it more, but i havent had the time
Things were broken around here for a few days, as I had been rebuilding the artist platform from the inside out. I made the forum homepage much simpler, and gave the Artist Platform its own homepage
In the process, i busted the whole platform in terms of the link pages and artist profiles. But everything is now fixed, and the groundwork has been set for the next phase of development.
I will continue to polish a few more elements, and make the forum a lot less confusing over time. This has been an ongoing learning experience for me over the past year and a half.
One thing i’ve noticed latey, as i’ve gotten more into the coding side of things, is that i’ve let the music journalism and writing side of Extra Chill slip a bit. I haven’t sent out a newsletter since May, when i launched the artist platform.
That’s alright. It’s not ideal, but it’s okay. I’ve been busy, because i really need money. I’m trying to make this site a whole lot more useful to attract a much wider audience.
I am going to do this mostly through automation, but there will be other elements to this as well.
Upgrading the calendar will be a huge part of this. More on that soon, as it is the next thing on my list, as part of the build for my new Data Machine plugin.
Oh, and P.S. – Extra Chill is now open source 🙂
That means anyone who wants to get into WordPress development is welcome to contribute to the project. Check us out on Github here: https://github.com/Extra-Chill
it’s been another while since i posted here. But this log keeps expanding over time.
Next in line is the events calendar getting a total overhaul. This is going to be powered by my custom WordPress plugin, Data Machine. The calendar is going to list events from all major markets in the most easy to filter way i can possibly come up with.
The Data Machine plugin also powers the festival wire.
Data Machine will also help me establish email campaigns to attract more users to this place over time.
That’s what i’ve been working on behind the scenes, if anybody wondered where i’ve been focused.
This forum needs a decent amount of work to get back on track. I need to start posting here more often and overall get back into music journalism.
The final thing i wanted to mention was the extra chill app, which is coming soon. It will be a single-location touchpoint that allows interaction with the entire ecosystem. In the process, i am going to re-think the way that this website is organized.
My buddy mentioned trying to implement a twitter-like system where it becomes a lot easier to spew content. i think that could work by allowing users to post replies to their own profile. and then surfacing these replies on the recent page
and on the recent page, instead of showing the grid of topics, i will show the latest replies to all topics all put together
this site has been my passion project for a long time. I will not give up on it any time soon. I’m just not really interested in doing so many music writeups like i used to. I’m interested in platform-building, and writing when i have something to actually say.
