Stats

From now on I shall try to post monthly stats of the number of adverts that go through DepList. I may also include end-of-week updates on Twitter. This year's total number of adverts so far is roughly 255.

DepForMe

Amazingly, it's taken eleven years for another online singers' depping service to come into being in the UK. DepForMe has found a way of using Twitter to do what we do with email messaging. Theirs is a free and unrestricted service, and DepList members who use Twitter may like to become followers.

However, I have no plans to add a Twitter option to our own messaging service. A protected Twitter account can't do what we want without retweets. We'd need a protected account in which approved followers (i.e. DepList Members) could tweet/retweet to their fellow followers only, and that doesn't seem to be something that's possible within the Twitter model. Our members don't generally want to advertise jobs outside our membership, so a protected account would be essential for us. Quality control and a regulated, approved membership are part of what makes us different and attractive to our users. We have over the years developed quite complicated systems to ensure that only those who are sufficiently skilled and experienced should be allowed to join (and remain on) DepList. In an ideal world, everyone who wanted to join DepList would be admitted and we would never have to remove people from our List. But depping is a multi-skilled pursuit, and not everyone has all the requisite skills and experience. Employing an untried and untested dep is a risk. It's the minimisation of those risks that users of our services are prepared to pay for.

But it's good to be reminded of Twitter's usefulness as a marketing tool.

Founder Members

It's always nice when someone rejoins DepList. Today one of our founder members rejoined after an absence of several years, which had me wondering how many of these pioneers we still have on the List. I suspect it's no more than a handful. The membership tends to be pretty constant in terms of numbers, which means that newcomers join at the same rate as people leave. Some of our current members would have been 11 or 12 years old when DepList started life! I'm not even sure when DepList was born. All I remember is that it was launched as a messaging service, called "Deputies", sometime in 1999. We compiled a list of about fifty potential members and invited them to join, and about half of those took up the offer. I made the first version of the website a few months later, and the domain name "DepList.co.uk" was registered in 2000, because "Deputies" was already taken. (What a good thing, as DepList is so much better!). How strange to think that mobile phones were not in common use back then, and the standard way of booking deps was landlines and answering machines!

If you think you are a Founder Member, please let me know using one of the contact forms on the website, so that I can make a note of it.

Easter Bookings

Have you booked your singers and organists for Easter? Our members are likely to be busy over the Easter period, so if you have not yet fixed all your Holy Week services, book now to avoid disappointment.

Profile Pics in the Members' Area

Members can now upload a profile portrait and create picture and audio albums on their profile pages. I've also added an events calendar, to which anyone can contribute.

Forum Added

The Members' Area has a working Forum now. (Still no profile pics and other uploads, though. I'll chase this up next week.)

Advertising Rates

Advertisers should note that, as from 1 February 2011, our rates have increased to £2 per advert. The rate for Full Membership and Associate Membership has not changed and stands at £10 per year. Both types of Membership are now charged on the basis of recurrent subscriptions, which are automatically renewed at the end of each year unless the member terminates their subscription.

Members' Area Officially Open

The Members' Area is now formally open. I will announce here when the photo/audio uploading facility will be in place. It's beyond my control, as the software developers need to change something on our server to get it to work.

Second Stage Completed

Search engines for the Member listings are now in place and seem to be working. Everything else is functioning more or less correctly, after much trial and error — except for the profile portraits and other uploads.

First Stage Completed

The new Members' Area is up, albeit in skeletal form. There are still lots of functions to put together and pages to create, with links in all the right places. But the data are in there, and everyone's profiles have been transferred to the new system. I have left out anyone who did not complete a profile. You may find your password doesn't work, in which case simply click on the forgotten password link, and it will be sent to you. Usernames are the same as before. The photo upload doesn't work yet, but I hope it will soon.

At the same time I took the opportunity of adding a bit of colour to the front page. Computers are faster now, and most people have access to broadband. It makes sense to make our site a little bit more visually appealing.

Members' Area Progress Report

The new membership software is in place. All that remains is for me to learn how to customise it to DepList's requirements. I have played around with it and it's not as easy as it looks on the demo! I'm very busy with other commitments just now, but hope to have a basic system up and running in a couple of weeks. Meanwhile, if there are any php experts among you who'd like to help with setting it up, please get in touch with me. Your help will be more than welcome! — Corinne

Main Site Operational

Glad to report that the main website is working now on our huge new server space. Just waiting for the membership software developers to install the new program and transfer the members' database (with luck next week), after which I have to learn how to use it and rebuild the Members' Area.

On the Move Again

After discovering to my dismay that our new servers will not let us use either the old or the new membership software, I have had to move the DepList website to a different service provider on the advice of the software developers. This is a huge pain and a large amount of work (not to mention an extra expense I could have done without), and I've spent the best part of three days grappling with it all. The good news is that least the new servers will give us a whopping 150 GB of space! Means we'll definitely be able to let members post audio clips on their profiles.

I hope that the main site will be back online within 24 hours. Again, our messaging service is not affected.

Members' Area Update

Please bear with us while we fix the Members' Area. It stopped working after we transferred to new servers, and the fee that's being asked by the programmers to examine the problem would be better spent on some more flexible and user-friendly software, as outlined in Saturday's post. It's made by the same outfit (which also provides the facilities we use to make our forms), but unlike the free, basic program we've been using up to now, this one is a features-packed piece of kit that I think will be well worth its price. In view of this, I have decided to go ahead with buying the package and to rebuild the Members' Area from scratch. I will keep you updated on progress.

Members' Area Is Down

Unfortunately, during the transfer to our new servers, access to our Members' Area was disabled and I am waiting for help from the software providers to fix this. These things always happen on a Friday!

The all-important email messaging part of the service (googlegoups) is unaffected.

I have put the change of address form and sponsorship form for recommending new members on the front page of the Members' Area so that members can still access them without having to log in. Associate Members can also access their advertising form from there (if we get spammed we may have to think of another temporary solution). I hope that normal service will resume soon.

New Servers for DepList

Yesterday we transferred DepList to new servers, giving us 1 GB of space instead of the 100 MB allowance we have had until now. This will give us a lot more scope for future expansion and enable us to add many more facilities. The extra space will mean that members can put a photo and possibly audio clips on their profiles.

The plan for 2011 is to upgrade the membership and listings part of the site to a more visually appealing and user-friendly interface, both for members and visitors to the site. I hope this will give the site a more modern and streamlined appearance as well as providing more functionality. For the curious, this is the software that I propose to use to rebuild the site, which can be tested here.

DepList Google Service

Our messaging site will soon cease to support pages and uploads. Files and information pages will therefore be transferred to a companion site, open to and viewable only by Full Members who have an active subscription. This will provide extra facilities like pages for chatting, blogging, advertising and general discussion, as well as the facility to add widgets, gadgets, calendars and all sorts of gizmos for those who have the time to fiddle. The messaging part will not be affected and should continue as normal.

Eventually, I hope to implement these facilities into our own DepList site so as to bring everything under one roof.

Music Lists

Someone pointed out a broken link on our church Music Lists page. That page is looking very sparse. Surely there are more music lists out there. I haven't time to look for them, but if you sing at a church that has a web link to its music lists, please send me the link. Please send links to permanent pages that are regularly updated, not one-off events. Keeping abreast of membership matters means researching new links comes pretty low down on my list of priorities, but I'm happy to add any links that come my way if I think they're worth adding! The same goes for photos.

New Colour-Coding

Along with reorganisation of the Members' Area I have given the site a good spring clean. There were far too many confusing colours and far too many words. I'm gradually tightening up the wordiness. Much of the redundant stuff stems from a time when the Internet was fairly new to many people and browsers didn't have cursors that turned into pointing fingers. Nowadays, people really don't need to be told that "if you click here you will be taken to a page where you will find...". It's now fairly obvious what buttons are for!

Interesting to see how the language has evolved too since the site went up. The word e-mail with a hyphen is beginning to look very dated so I'm changing these to email. Whether to log in or to log on with a login name or a log-in name is another source of inconsistency. I'm settling for login as a noun or adjective and to log on as a verb.

As for the colour-coded buttons, they seemed a good idea at the time but are now merely irritating and confusing so I've rationalised and simplified them. Traffic-light colours are all very well in food packaging, but here they just looked garish. Anything clickable is now in sky blue (except on the homepage). That way, it's easy to see at a glance what's a link and what's not.

New Members' Area is Live

The new members' area is now live. It's pretty self-explanatory, but if anyone has any problems they should contact me.

I have imported everyone's existing passwords into the new system. Those who didn't already have a password have been given new passwords that they can ask to have emailed to them. Once logged in, they can change their password by following the instructions.

Login names (formerly Usernames on this site) are now real names where possible — e.g. Ludwig van Beethoven — so are easy to remember. Only alphanumeric characters are allowed, and the names must be unique. So far, however, we haven't had two members with the same name.

A big vote of thanks to the team at Interlogy for making it all possible.