The days just keep flying by, don’t they? It seems like just yesterday I promised to post a progress report on how Silent Sound Waves has been doing. Which is of course why I am posting it today. To get straight to the point, SSW has been doing quite alright since we started posting regularly back in November.
First out my TimeMachine backup failed for some reason. I did a reboot and tried again though, and it updated fine it seems. I should probably do a restore and see that it isn’t corrupted or anything, I think.
Actually I didn’t, because I’m not a musician by any measures, and technically it was just a bunch of MP3 files, but still! What I mean is that someone actually bought a record through a referral link at Silent Sound Waves, for the first time.
It was this review of the Right Away, Great Captain! album The Eventually Home that apparantly made someone click the link at the bottom and purchase the album from Amazon, and that is pretty awesome in my book. The way I see it, it means I’ve already reached the goal of the blog, which is to let someone discover new, great music. The obvious next step seems to be to become influential enough to have the ability to kickstart an artists career.
Anyways, I’m couldn’t be more thrilled about the fact that the first referral the site actually made lead to a sale of Right Away, Great Captain!, because Andy Hull is one of my absolute favourites, and I think his work deserves all the attention it can get. The new Manchester Orchestra album is certainly among the top albums I can’t wait for in 2009!
If you’re wondering if this means that SSW is soon to be raking in big dollars, I can give you a firm no on that. This was actually one of the more expensive digital downloads, but it still only resulted in a whopping $.36 to be credited to my Amazon account. I wonder if that’s about as much as Andy Hull made from the sale as well?
Nevertheless, I don’t mind, because I don’t have any big plans to monetize SSW in the foreseeable future. At this point, it’s just fun managing a website again, and on a topic I really enjoy engaging myself in. As the new year comes around, and we get to see how much effort I’m able to actually put into it, we’ll know quickly enough whether or not it will amount to anything more than that at any point.
Just wanted to share that little piece of information with all of you. Now I should really try and get some sleep before I have to go to work in three hours. I accidentally woke up ca. 12 minutes after falling asleep an hour ago. Just three more days of work until the real Christmas break starts though, so I can take it!
After almost a week off after the end of the semester, I just started my work marathon yesterday. Will be working 8 hour shifts every day up until Christmas, mostly between 4PM and midnight. Can’t say I’m really looking forward to it, but it’ll give me a good financial start to the new year, and I can hopefully finally get some new clothes and stuff. Seen so many cool things, especially t-shirts and shoes, on the intarwebs recently, I can’t wait to actually do a little shopping.
Other than working, I’m hoping to get quite a bit a work over at Silent Sound Waves. Looking at the stats, I’m actually surprised by how well we’re doing in Google already. It accounts for most of our visitors right now, and we’re getting decent ranks for pretty much all of our reviews almost instantly. This is pretty great, and I think it speaks volumes about how great WordPress is for SEO purposes.
With this in mind, I want to give our reviews section some extra padding by hopefully writing up a new review per day for the next week. I don’t think there’s much purpose in reviewing old albums, so I’ll be focusing on 2008 albums, and in particular those who will most likely make it to our best-of-the-year list, which I hope to publish sometime between Christmas and the new year.
I’ve also decided to take one new person on the team, and I’ll be giving him a quick introduction when we both have the time, and hopefully he’ll start contributing after that. I’m excited to have him with us, and I think he’ll be able to write some great posts and articles that will be interesting for our readers, and hopefully draw in some new ones as well!
I’m also working on a monster of an article that I am certain will do really well in the various social sharing sites, but it’s not exactly top priority at the moment. Aiming to get it ready and published before the end of the year though.
Yesterday at work I think I heard through Day & Age at least three times, maybe four, because of a lack of alternatives. It’s actually better than my first impression suggested, and a few of the tracks are every bit as good as I had expected the album to be. Right now I’m loving Joy Ride and Neon Tiger, great songs! One interesting thing about the album though is the lyrics, which are much more cryptic and less acessible than those on Sam’s Town.
Oh and if you didn’t get it from the headline, Okkervil River is still near the top of my playlist. The Stand Ins is such a fantastic record, one of the best of the year for sure!
Edit: I think I have made the structural changes I want to the theme. It isn’t exactly polished yet, but knowing my own limitations based on lazyness, there’s no telling when it will be. Hope you like it. If not, you can always just subscribe and read it in your reader anyways.
As you can see, I found a theme to base my new theme off of. What you are looking at right now however, is a completely unaltered version of the Blass theme. It’s extremely simple and to the point, and just what I was looking for. I will be modifying it quite a bit however, because I like my blog to have some sense of uniqueness in terms of look, even though it probably doesn’t matter all that much.
Among other things, I want to find a way to display my lifestream on the frontpage as well, but I need to find a plugin that actually works with WordPress 2.7 first. I should have the finished result ready in a couple of days, but don’t expect a drastic departure from what you are looking at right now.
Spent this weekend relaxing and not doing much, except for last night when I went out with a few of my friends, had a few beers (too much) and generally just had a good time. It was a nice celebration of the end of our semester! Yeah, the exams are finally over and done with again, for now.
Because I took the weekend off, I haven’t had time to evaluate the potential new writers over at Silent Sound Waves, but I just briefly reviewed their writings, and it looks like we’ll get at least one new writer on our team. Hopefully I’m as lucky with this time around as I was when I found Matt, because he’s delivered high quality articles that have really helped with gaining attention for the site.