Four cool features added TODAY
We just pushed our first set of website updates since launch on 8/8/8 and a few bug fixes in the subsequent week. You can now:
— Listen while browsing
— Embed a mix
— Update your profile
— Edit your uploads
More on each, below.
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1. Listen while browsing.
One of the annoying things about the first version of the 8tracks website was that you couldn’t browse around the site without losing the music. Now you can. Our Flash player automatically re-connects as you move from one page to the next, with only a split-second skip in the music.
If you’re on another page and want to return to the mixpage that’s playing, just click on the track/artist name or mix/DJ name.
2. Embed a mix.
From the get-go, we’ve imagined that most listening on the 8tracks network would happen “on the edges” — on your social network profile, on a blog, on a label website. You can now embed a Flash player for a mix on your personal webpage.
The embed code for any mix is located just below its mix description. Click in this area, copy the code, and paste it in your Myspace page or blog. (This won’t work for Facebook or Wordpress.com, but we’ll have solutions for these platforms in due course.)
3. Update your profile.
Rather than try to build yet another social network, we want to keep your profile page (as in 8tracks.com/[username]) super simple, with appropriate links.
So we’ve added a 1-line bio field (yes, not unlike Twitter) that you can update from your Account settings in the upper right-hand corner.
At your option, you can also add a link to your personal webpage on another site (social network profile, blog, etc), so listeners can learn more about your non-music self, beyond that bio.
4. Edit your uploads.
Previously, if you uploaded a track with missing metadata (e.g. artist name), the track would “disappear” and there was no way to update the metadata. Now, if an element is missing, clarifying metadata is added (e.g. “[Artist missing]” is displayed if artist name is missing).
To support this, we’ve added a little edit link next to each track that’s finished uploading, so you can click it and add (or correct) any missing info for your track.
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These are the most noticeable changes; there are a number of others. Search has been improved (so you now can, for instance, type in the name of a city or neighborhood and find all mixes created by DJs in those locations). We’re also presenting “Followers” (in addition to “Following”) on a user’s profile page so that user (or others) can readily see who’s following him or her. And we continue to address bugs (e.g. IE nonsense).
A big congrats to the team for knocking these out. As always, please let us know of any issues you encounter or improvements you envision.
