Now you can watch all of the action at the top of the Elbows Charts by following us on Twitter. Get the latest top artist, track and video updates with more updates to come as we build them in.
You can also check out NM3′s post about the Post to Twitter addition to Elbows video pages.
We recently launched an Elbows fan page on Facebook. You can chat with other Elbows users and get updates on new features. Check it out here.
Over the last few weeks we’ve been making silent updates to Elbows. Here are some of the more important enhancements and, as usual, if you have any suggestions, please let us know.
Faster Searches
We’ve implemented the full-text search engine, Sphinx to replace our previous MySQL full-text search. This has lead to much faster searches and also the ability to sort results by relevance rather than by date.
Complete History
Elbows started in late April of 2005, but due to performance issues, we were forced to archive a good chunk of posts. Thanks to some creative database changes and the addition of the new search engine, we were able to restore the complete archives back into the site.
Artist Feeds
This is something that people have been requesting for quite a while. The current artist pages are ‘/artist/artist-name/’. Simply append ‘feed’ to that in order to get artist feeds. Eg: http://elbo.ws/artist/radiohead/feed/ .
Video Searches
When you perform a search on the site, you’ll see an option in the middle bar to view video results for that search string. Eg: http://elbo.ws/videos/?q=radiohead
Larger Images
We were getting sort of tired of trying to make out those tiny 72×72 images that we’re been using for the posts, so we’ve switched to a smarter format that will show images in their original aspect with a height up to 125 pixels. Check it out and you’ll see what we’re saying.
After several long months of design and coding, itMayBe Media is proud to launch the redesign of Music Blog Aggregator, Elbows. Special thanks to graphic designer, Joe Jordan, for the fresh look.
What’s Hot
The redesign includes an expanded Hot Artists section that includes a thumbnail from a random post as well as some teaser text to draw readers to the artist’s page or to the blog featured. The Hot Videos section allows visitors to view top videos embedded into the middle bar.
Searching
The search functions have been consolidated to allow visitors a single screen which includes search results from posts, artists, mp3s, and blogs.
The Future
The redesign has been taking up quite a bit of our time. Now that it’s finished, we can focus on adding new and interesting features throughout the site.
If you have any questions or requests, please email us at info@itmay.be.