Skip to main content

Back to the Grindstone

The level of pages requests has remained at it's new high level for over a week despite the fact that our testing effort on the new shop has been in abeyance over that period.

Although requests on the blog directory are very high there is no indication that individual pages, apart from the blog/index, are receiving many hits - so this is still a bit of a mystery.

It is also gratifying to see that a few more people are downloading the free hifi samples we offer to demonstrate the full audio quality of all our tracks but it is still not sufficient to make us feel comfortable so we are going to offer them here for a few days. These hifi files are obviously much larger but if you have a broadband connection you will scarcely notice the difference - on narrowband there will be a short intermission. So here is a HiFi streaming sample from our percussion arrangement of Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto.

The atmosphere here in London is a bit odd this morning - it is the first day of the school holidays and so is much quieter than normal, we are all coming to terms with the shock of an innocent man being shot by police on the tube and there are bombers on the run - it must be a coincidence that the Funeral March has become the second most searched for track this month.

Popular posts from this blog

Adding to the collection or ...

There are more opportunities to add to this collection but we think that it is now time to make some additional payment options available. For low cost items, credit card transactions are rather expensive so we will need to trade the benefits to us of larger orders against a premium for individual track purchases. This means adding shopping cart facilities along side the simple BitPass functionality and is going to be a bit of a programming challenge. More of this anon - in the mean time here is another Brandenburg Concerto LoFi streaming sample - first movement of No3 from Johann Sebastian Bach himself and our arrangement on steel drums and marimba - full HiFi track only 0.99$(US).
Read more
Persistance does it It is now 15 years since this website was launched. In that time we have had ups and downs - some associated with Google algorithm changes but this year we seem to have seen steady growth in visits and some dramatic download volumes. It looks as if we might reach 1000 giga bytes of download this month for the first time ever.  Our global reach is wider - although Indonesia and India still account for over 25% of visits we had visits from 126 countries in the last week exceptions include Uragauy and some sub sahara countries. The bulk come through organic Google searches with the next largest share coming from our daily tweets. 
Read more

Shop Re-opens

The PHP upgrade on my server precipitated closure of the shop for a couple of weeks but I finally found the time to work through the backlog of OS Commerce upgrades that I had been putting off and Lo and Behold the shop is working again. I still need to do a bit of testing on the shopping cart arithmetic and make sure that the downloading is still working properly after the changes I have made. I'll also have a look at the recent contributions to see if there are any other improvements I should be making. In the mean time there has been another surge of Ranking changes on Google as reported on Rankpulse and it is evident that our rankings continue to swing around on a daily basis but our overall position and visitor numbers seem pretty stable - even the shop closure didn't seem to have much of an impact.
Read more