Skip to main content

Stave Invaders

Yes I liked the name too - www.staveinvaders.co.nz .

This web site announced itself on alt.music.classical amongst others this am and for once I was pleasantly surprised and impressed.

They offer some simple and useful MP3s for early music theory - primarily aimed at new guitarists - free of charge. They also offer one of their own recordings for $0.99. However the e-commerce is a bit creaky because PayPal seems to add another dollar. It is nice to see a bit of enterprise emerging on the music scene which is different to the run of the mill and looks really useful.

Constructive criticisms would be that the site needs a bit of work on layout and link presentation. If you are going to try and sell music on line you need to have samples so that people can hear what they are getting before they part with their money. The guitar blues offered free isn't really up to professional standards but has a nice enough atmosphere - I wasn't tempted to buy the one for sale I'm afraid.

Broadband Upgrade Latest: upload speed is great - week's composer update time halved yesterday. Today download appears to be about 3.6M but not very stable - just lost this connection to Blogger - back now though and I'm going to publish while the going is good.

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).

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.

Out of Beta

Blogger is out of beta and that was pretty painless. The new features look quite interesting so we'll give them a go shortly. No collaborators on the search engine yet so I think we'll do a page on the main site and see what we can achieve from there. My news group post killed the thread I responded to - so nothing from that source either. An index page update was picked up by Google the following day so we seem to have all that part of the system sorted and I finally got round to tidying up the title and description so that might generate more responses. We are ending the year on over 2000 visitors a week on the main site but not many on this blog - I'm really doing it for my personal benefit now but it helps to imagine that anyone could come along and read it. In fact I suspect that we have far more readers of individual pages thrown up by searches than we do regular readers.