Saturday, October 20, 2018
Outage Estimated Duration: 5-20 minutes within these windows :
1AM – 6AM PDT
3AM – 8AM CDT
4AM – 9AM EDT
Reason – Maintenance on a core router as well as placing core services back to their full redundant mode.
There will be some downtime for this site. This is expected to be brief.
Thank you for your patience.
There will be some downtime for this site. This is expected to be brief. Thank you for your patience.
Hits: 10
Hello and greetings from your friendly MFU administration team!
We’d like to inform you of our newest feature, one of many little features that we have around here. If you look up, and to the right, you’ll see something called “Easy Share.”
This link takes you to a form that you can fill out, so that we can share your stories with a larger audience and preserve them for posterity! You’re gonna be so famous. People will be jealous of your fame. You’ll see!
If you’re familiar with the site, you’ll know that we have a preference for the earliest years, the years of rock’s puberty, more than the other years. See the “about” page for more details. However, we’re not just worried about preserving our own favorite parts of rock history, we just concentrate on our favorite parts. You’re quite welcome to submit articles about newer music.
The form is pretty basic and easy to comprehend. Just use whatever name you want (and preferably an email address that actually works) and we’ll take care of the rest. We’ll edit it, format it, and maybe add to it. We’ll even fact check it, where applicable. We ain’t scared.
We are, alas, beholden to a web hosting company, so we’re going to have to keep things at the point where we’re not intentionally being offensive. Because of this, we are not obligated to publish all submissions. We will decline to publish anything that can’t be edited into material that suits the site and meets the hosting company’s rules – but I’d like to hope that is never actually a problem.
So, it’s your chance to preserve a piece of music history and be famous! If you’d like to promote your own site (assuming it’s not intentionally offensive) then we’ll go ahead and leave/include your links back to your site.
Again, we reserve the right to not publish all submissions and, as such, we maintain complete editorial control. In other words, because music is so intertwined in our lives, marking various events and having greater meanings, please try to keep any politics or social statements as objective as possible – if they must be made at all. Let’s concentrate on the positive, as opposed to accentuating the negative.
We welcome all contributions and, trust me, we’ve read some things – so we’ll read all your submission! You can fill ’em with porn links and racial slurs. They won’t get published, but we will read ’em!
So, why not click this link and share a story with not just us but posterity. Let’s keep the history alive! And, now there’s no more excuses about, “I don’t want to register!” There’s no more excuses like, “I don’t have time!”
That’s right… You don’t need to register! You can just make up any ol’ name you want and fill that little form in. No more excuses! 😉
Hits: 61
It is that time again. It has been yet another month.
Well, if we ask WordPress then it tells us that we had fewer visitors than we had the previous month – but still a ton of people. There were just about 1700 people. The total number of visits (people visit more than once) is proportionally close to the previous month.
Meh… It happens and it’s not a big deal – ’cause quite a few people do visit. These numbers also aren’t dreadfully accurate. My much better numbers tell me that we’re doing better than that – and actually had nearly 2000 unique visitors for the last complete calendar month – and look to be on target to do much the same for the month of September.
(It’d be so much easier to do these on the 1st.)
We’ve had some user submitted content and we’ve had a number of people show personal interest in the site. That’s more important than total numbers.
But, just so you know, my stats plugin for WordPress kind of lies – and I think it’s a caching issue – again. I haven’t debugged it. That probably explains the large discrepancy. AWStats is probably the more accurate of the two.
If you feel like writing something topical, don’t be shy. We’ll give it an audience. We just put stuff here. You decide what to do with it. If you want to add to the pile, go ahead!
At the end of the day, the site is coming along better than expected. It gets pretty good traffic and that’s all you folk’s doing.
Trivia: We’ve had IP addresses from 47 countries that have come to visit us. (I suspect a number of them are VPN address and I know quite a few are abuse addresses that try to harm the server.)
So, that’s a site update. We’re doing fine – thanks to you. If you’re not yet involved, jump on in – the water’s warm!
Hits: 37
I am technically two days late. It’s not that I forgot, it’s that I’ve been too busy. This is a pretty busy time of the year for me.
But, it has also been a pretty busy time of the year for the site!
Wow, have things changed. We’re now two months old and we’re growing quickly.
As you may know, I prefer to be as open as I can be with regards to information about the site. Last month, I took the time to write one of these progress reports and it was generally well received. So, I’ll do it again.
We now have 66 published articles. You get a new article every day, at 16:30 Eastern. It looks like we’ll be able to keep this publication rate up for quite a while.
These next numbers are a little fuzzy…
In the past 30 days, we’ve had just about 2,000 visitors. Yup. We’re getting a lot of views.
Those visitors have visited just about 5,400 times. Yes, we display a lot of pages and many of you like to visit more than once. We like that. We love repeat visitors.
In the past 30 days, Little Eva’s song “Loco-motion” has surged into the number one spot. In those 30 days, that article was viewed 153 times.
The spam (you don’t see it, ideally) has dropped significantly now that I banned an entire block of IP addresses originating in Russia. This doesn’t mean it was Russians. It just means that’s where the servers are located.
In the past month, we’ve been attacked 101 times. Yup… We’ve had 101 attempts to break into the site. From the logs, none of them were successful. No, I will not be going into details about the specific methods we use for protection and detection.
The forum has been a bit sluggish. There have been some excellent comments added by our guests. Our visitors are pretty awesome and their stories are very much appreciated. Their stories are exactly why this site is here. This site is for telling those stories and keeping that history alive.
So, don’t be afraid to tell us your story – even if you think it might be insignificant. We have pretty loose standards for publishing comments (the first couple of times you comment, it may need us to review them). So far, we’ve published all of them – except for spam.
At the moment, we’re not in need of donations or any financial support. We have ads and they don’t look like they’re going to cover the expenses, at this time. But, they do seem to be improving and, for the time being, there’s no need to donate.
If there’s any major interest in donation, or if we do decide we need to go that route, we’ll figure something out. For now, that’s not a concern. The main goal with the ads is to make the site self-funding, that way it can keep running in perpetuity and if something should happen to both of us.
Google’s Ad rules specifically prohibit me from asking you specifically to click an ad. However, I will say that it’d be pretty awesome if you’d whitelist us in your ad-blocking software.
Surprisingly, only about 50% of you appear to be using ad-blocking – at least that’s what Google tells me. I don’t let them collect the full metrics, just the ads. They compare page views with the number of displayed ads, and that’s how they get that number.
I’d like to use Google’s analytic stuff, but it’s a bit intrusive, so I just have a more rudimentary form going on here. We absolutely don’t track you off the site – but we can see where you visit while you’re on this site. We kind of have to know where to send the packets, so we know what pages you viewed and we know what IP address you’re using.
We don’t really have a whole lot of information about you and that information, inasmuch as is possible, stays here with us. When we link to a video, they’ll know you watched it. When we display an ad, they’ll know you saw it. When you leave a comment, your data stays with us. When you sign up for an account, your data stays with us.
And, if you haven’t noticed, we take security pretty seriously. We take protecting your information as a great responsibility. That’s partially ’cause I’m lazy – and I really don’t want to have to clean up that mess! It’s also because we don’t want to know more than you tell us.
For a good example, I don’t know your passwords and couldn’t figure them out if I wanted to. I have no way to know your password if you sign up for an account. We don’t store passwords. Your password is salted (given a random element) and hashed (adjusted by an algorithm) and then it’s stored in the database. We don’t store passwords in plain text.
That also means I can’t tell you what your password is, should you forget it. Nope. I can help you reset it (you can also just do that yourself). I can change it to something on your behalf, but I’m probably not going to unless you can demonstrate that you’re really you – and you’d have to use your email to do that. If you can use your email to do that, you can reset your own password!
But, I guess my point is that the site is going well.
Last month, when I wrote this, we had just 1200 visitors and this month we’re at 2000. We’re only two months in and we’re already getting traffic that similar sites would love to have. I see no reason why we won’t continue to increase our number of visitors.
If you do want to help, you can share the site with other people. I’ve tried to facilitate this with those silly icon things. If you click ’em, they do stuff and make it easy for you to submit the site to other sites. I haven’t actually done it… But, I have it on good authority that it works and is easy!
So, that’d help. The more eyes and stories, the more the history comes to life. If you know people who might be interested, send ’em here to read the site.
Finally, if you’ve written an email and I’ve not gotten back to you – that’s because I’m insanely busy. It’s 03:00 and I might get three hours of sleep tonight, before I’m out of the bed and hard at work again. This is a VERY busy part of the year, for reasons we won’t get into because this site is not meant for that.
I’ll continue to do these progress reports for as long as people are interested in seeing them AND so long as I have time to do them.
Thank you for taking the time out of your busy lives to visit us daily and to read the information that we’ve shared with you. That’s what makes this all worthwhile.
Hits: 48
I like the idea of being open and sharing as much information as is needed, while still respecting people’s privacy. I’m not sure if I’m going to do these on a regular basis, but I figured I’d do this one and see how it went and what sort of reactions it got.
First, the site is now officially 1 month old! That’s right, we’ve been at this for a whole month. Time flies when you’re having fun! Here’s our first article:
Shake Rattle and Roll (Which seemed like a fitting starting song.)
In the past month, we’ve about 1,200 visitors and displayed 3,700 pages to you, our guests. That’s actually fantastic growth and shows that there’s quite a bit of interest in the subject.
We’ve added a forum, where you can get help or offer to help other people in their quest to keep the stories alive. There’s more to come on this front, and the goal is to facilitate collaboration within our little community.
If you haven’t already done so, now would be an excellent time to go ahead and register for the site. Registration is painless and you can use any ol’ information you want in the fields – though a real email address is required. Registration also automatically signs you up as a participant in our forum. After some testing, there’s some hope of adding more features to that – but it’s chock-full of features already.
We take your personal information pretty damned seriously. If you’ve missed it, then you may wish to see this notice. We have an obligation to keep your data private and secure, and that’s a priority.
Our most popular page was a user contributed forum post. You can see it here and it was posted by user 65n85tunes. We’d like to take a moment to thank them for their contribution and it’s great to discover new music, the history behind it, and another chapter in the history of the music we all love.
To date, we’ve published some 30 articles (with 3 additional meta articles), 13 forum topics with 22 replies, and have 8 registered users.
If you’re not interested in joining us, but would like to receive notifications when there’s an article posted (every day, at about 16:30 Eastern), then you can sign up for notifications on your right. Just insert any old valid email address and whatever name you’d like the software to call you, and then check your junk/spam folder to confirm the email address really belongs to you.
To avoid spamming people, we use the double-confirmation method and you’ll have to click a link to show the software that the email address really belongs to you. We do our best to be good Netizins and it is a hassle, but we’re willing to do it. If you have trouble confirming your email, let us know and we’ll help you out.
So, here’s to a good first month and to many more months of keeping the music alive.
Hits: 75
Admin Notice:
In the server logs, I noticed some traffic going to the non-encrypted URL (site address). Some people were using http://musicfor.us instead of using the encrypted URL of https://musicfor.us.
Using the SSL enabled site (the https:// domain) ensures the data only comes from authorized domains (else your browser will give you a warning), ensures your data can’t be spied on by parties intercepting your data in transit, ensures you’re on the correct domain and that the site hasn’t been hijacked, and keeps your privacy intact.
If you used the http:// URL, you will be logged out and need to log back in. This is pretty painless and now you’ll at least know you’re logging into the correct site and nobody is stealing your credentials.
The http:// address simply will no longer work. You can try it. You can try it until the cows come home. What it will do is redirect you and this will happen behind the scenes.
If you want to see this in action, go ahead and click this link:
That tells the server to rewrite your address and deliver you to:
This does nothing to, or on, your computer and the site will continue to function exactly like it used to – with the exception of now ensuring you’re connected to the secure domain. Your browser will show the lock icon in the address bar and you’ll be able to have confidence that you’re properly connected to the site.
If you’re curious about the code, it’s a simple .htaccess modification that looks like this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please leave a comment below. We take our obligations to give you a safe experience, and the obligation to protect your data, seriously. Thank you for taking the time to read this.
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Good morning. I just wanted to let you all know that I’m currently working on adding ads to the site. Yes, I know… Nobody likes ads. That’s why I’m pretty sure it’s going to be pretty ugly for a few days.
See, I’m going to keep tweaking until I get ads that are appropriate and they’re placed in such a way so as to not break the site’s flow.
It shouldn’t be ugly for long, but it might be ugly for a couple of days – at least until I work things out and actually figure out what the hell it is that I’m doing.
However, I pretty much suck at layout and design. No, really… Don’t try to argue and give me compliments. If you like the layout of the site, that’s largely because this isn’t a theme that I wrote. Nope, it’s one that I found that was minimal and doesn’t get in the way of the content.
I don’t even know how to make images and banners! I haven’t touched CSS in pretty much two decades. I haven’t ever added ads to to a site with WordPress.
So, it’s gonna be pretty ugly for a little while. Sorry about that.
Why ads? Well, the truth is that we don’t really need the money but the goal is to have ads that will automatically pay for everything. In other words, should something happen, the site should keep going in perpetuity. That’s the goal, at any rate.
I can’t tell you to click ads. It’s against the rules set out by Google. If I break those rules, they can take away the ads. I can say don’t click on ads that aren’t interesting to you!
If you use an ad-blocker, that’s okay. It’d be nice if you whitelisted the site, but it’s your choice to allow them or not. As long as I have the keys to the kingdom, we will never force you to allow ads. We will also only use ads that aren’t going to rape and murder your PC. We will use simple ads from Google, without loading dangerous scripts.
There’s ethical lines and the ones we have are pretty set in stone – at least as long as I’m in charge of putting stuff here. They won’t be crossed.
If you have questions or comments, do feel free to respond. There’s multiple people involved in this site but I’m pretty sure we’re in agreement about things like monetizing and the ethical considerations involved.
David (aka TheBuddha)
Hits: 37