This page is for posting about status items about azn.play, personal hiatuses, or other random things.

October 26, 2008 - Fall Break!

Time to get to work - lots of stuff to maintain and keep up to date… If you’ve visited us before, you’ll see that I spruced up the design to make it look much more consistent and professional. Hope everyone likes the new design!

September 23, 2008 - Popularity

This is the end of September, and I have to say this is pretty much the time when so much Chinese music comes out, and so as such I think the next Japanese and Korean stuff will be up early October - it’ll be a little bit late, but better later than never right?

Hope everyone is enjoying fall, I know I am. azn.play’s popularity has recently begun to exponentially grow, and I hope it stays there. I’m also working on some modifications to the overall feel of the site, and add some more interesting features, so please stay tuned!

August 22, 2008 - Breakneck Speed

Anyone’s who’s been checking up on us lately must notice we’re posting at a really fast clip - mainly because it’s summer, and also because we’re bored. Mainly, however, it’s because I’m acutely aware we’re behind on a lot of summer things, and so we’re rushing to get them up as fast as we can, and we’ll go back and fill in the gaps later.

When the school year starts (for almost everyone contributing, that’s early September), we’ll of course post at a much slower speed, but I anticipate posting about twice a week, or about 8-10 posts a month, more on weekends of course. Hopefully it’ll be much more steady than last year, and I know we have a lot of regular visitors, so I’ll make sure that azn.play remains your best source of Asian music information.

August 12, 2008 - Important Changes

Since getting our own server, we have had much more space to do things, and to host the files on our site. As a result however, we have to make changes in the way we do things:

• Shift permanently to streaming only - we’re going to have full albums streaming, but streaming only.
• No more download links - even though all the download links are not on our server, and we have no control over their removal and such, but in the interest of keeping the site acceptable to all, we will take away links to them. If people really wish to download stuff, azn.play never was the place anyways, we had a long standing policy against linking to album downloads.
• We’re going to keep the links we already have up, but there won’t be new ones…

I hope this is fine with everyone.

August 10, 2008 - What’s New

This is by no means an exhaustive list of what’s new or improved in azn.play over azn.music, but it should help everyone get an idea of what’s changed.

• Streaming audio will work fine, all the time now. Future albums might have the option of full album-streaming. One flash audio player handles all the songs in an album and plays them in order. You can also fast-forward or rewind.
• Self-hosted music videos, mainly because YouTube constantly deletes them, and causes havoc with our pages. They’re all in a nice custom player that makes it easy to watch all the songs from an album.
• Featured album art - to get an idea, click on a picture. Ooh and awe at what happens.
• Larger, cleaner design, with more space for posts and content.
• Ratings system on the front page - readers can rank the posts they like the most, or not.
• Better, nicer RSS feeds, thanks to FeedBurner. (You can even play the songs inside Google Reader)
• Lyrics hide/show button, so they don’t take up the ginormous amount of space that they used to in the old site.
• Interactive polls for readers to vote on what they like best.
• A “similar posts” plug-in which allows readers to see - similiar posts.
• A wall for readers to post comments - kind of like Facebook, which I know we all use.
• Ads. Yes, we have ads in order to help cover costs - mainly they consist of four Google text ads on the left, and one YesAsia banner ad on the very bottom of the site. I hate ads as much as you guys, so I’ve really tried my best to make them as unintrusive as possible. If you’re interested, please check out our “sponsors”.

August 9, 2008 - Entire Site is Up and Running

I was a day off schedule, but I finally finished transferring all of the previous azn.music material over, and got everything linked together properly. It took a whole two months - wow. I’m now focused on writing a new “About” page, and constructing some sort of an Index, but the writers of azn.play can finally get to posting new music we like. Sit back, and enjoy the site!

June 28, 2008 - The New Site is Under Construction

Well, we now have a new hosted domain! Oh man, I can’t even begin to describe the improvements and amazing extensibility afforded to us by having WordPress.org and our own server. First of all, no more stupid YouTube and their deleting of hosted videos. Second, no more file expiry for hosted MP3s. I’ll go into a more detailed list later when everything’s fixed and ready to go.