Welcome Matrix as our newest siteop :).

Thanks to our subscribers, we’re bumping up the time a mix stays on the public server to a month. Thanks again!

We’re able to handle more bandwidth thanks to some great support over the last two months. So, the one mix per month restriction is being changed to two mixes per month.

That’s a good option for those who found the site having already made a buncha their own mixes.

There’s a few changes to b00mb0x as part of this version, which is taking a lot longer to complete than I had hoped.

Anyway, the most important one is registered user voting. If you’re registered and logged in (the links are on the right of the main page, under meta), you can vote on mixes on a scale of one to ten. This should really help us out with the awards at the end of the year, which had been getting really complicated with multiple rounds of voting and the single transferrable voting system with 3 weighted preferences, screening for fraud and the voting bringing the rest of the site to a halt for two months. There will still be a special awards vote of some sort, but it will be a helluva lot simplier and shorter because of this (I hope!). So if you haven’t registered, you may want to.

The next one is collapsing AJAX comments on any page, even the main page. Clicking the + link beside the comments, will load the comments in the middle of the page, right there, without you needing to go to the individual mix page. You still need to do that to comment, though.

The last change is clickable smilies in the comments area. Nuff said. Feedback, negative and positive is welcomed :).

April fool! Who thought it was as high-larious as I did? Who didn’t? More to the point, who got fooled? 😛

(truly sorry, really)

If you have six or more mixes posted on b00mb0x, we will give you a log in directly to the mix server if you email us at siteops at b00mb0x.org. No more waiting around for posting and if you want to post an prayer mix on Good Friday, you can (eww). It’s very easy, but like with anything, it might seem complicated at first glance. Someone can usually help you in the chat if you get stuck, hopefully this tutorial is crystal clear.

• 1. Make sure you are registered and logged in. If you scroll to the bottom of the home page and see your name under Who’s Online, you’re good to go. Email us when you have this done and we’ll give you the FTP details to the new server and bump up your account on wordpress to allow you to post on the front page.
  2. FTP your mix using the new details in the usual way. Make sure to include your mixer name in the file name, we usually add them for people that forget at the moment.
• 3. Log into WordPress. The default page is the dashboard, ignore that, it’s BS. The second link at the top is write. Choose write post.
• 4. Enter the title of your mix in title.
  5. At the right, press the plus beside Categories. Uncheck Uncategorized and check the box beside your mixer name. If it’s an alias, add the category (1 alias per mixer).
• 
• 6. Below the post field, there’s an upload field. Enter the title of the mix for title and description. Browse for your cover and upload it. In a few ticks, you should see a thumbnail representation of the cover, click it once and it will bring up 5 options. Change the second option to linked to image and close options. Drag and Drop the image into the post field. Repeat for insert, back and disc, if you use them.
• 
• 7. Under the mix cover type the title of the mix. Highlight it/select it. Click the insert link button as illustrated in the third screenshot of this tutorial. Link URL will be http://mixers.b00mb0x.org/thenameofyourmix.mp3. Leave the second option as it is. Enter the mix name as the title. Click Insert.
• 
• 8. Nearly there. Crtl + A to select the entire post field and choose the center formating tool, it’s two buttons to the left of the insert link button you just used.
• 9. Under the post body, press Publish.
• 10. View Site and test your link and cover. Click the comments link and paste your tracklist if you have one. Ctrl+a to select all and press the em button to italicise it and submit the comment. Bob’s yer mother’s brother. Fanny is your Aunt.

That’s it. All things being equal, if you follow the above steps that’s it. Here’s the solutions to common problems that might prevent your mix being displayed properly.

1. Your covers might be too large and be rejected by the upload tool. Use an image editing tool to compress them in jpg or gif format and try again.

2. Your thumbnail covers might have one bigger than the other. On the b00mb0x front page, click edit beside your mix. When the post loads in wordpress, press the HTML button and change the height of the images to the same value.

3. Bad link. Make sure you have the file name correct. A good way to do this is to right click the file in your FTP program, choose rename and copy and paste the title. Watch out for extra spaces as well as trailing characters. Make sure .mp3 is at the end of the file.

4. If the drag and drop doesn’t work with the images, click send to editor instead.
Conditions of posting your own content.

1) Don’t get annoyed if you are blog-knocked (a term assorted invented). It’s when somebody else comes along on the same day and knocks your mix off the top. If you’re peveed, go back to letting us post your mixes for you.

2) Allow comments.

3) Don’t delete anything except mistakes made by yourself.

4) Keep additional info and comments to the comments, not the post body.

5) All the current site rules about submitting mixes apply.

Known to some as Bong. Welcome!

Radio b00mb0x is back. Click here and open in Winamp to listen. To DJ, check out this tutorial.

First of all download the shoutcast plugin here and install it.

Then log in to our chat here. You need to be in the chat to DJ and while you are on air so we know who’s on and have a way of contacting you without kicking you off, which is pretty blunt.

Right Click winamp and go options>preferences and set up your plugins as below.

Configure the plugin as below. In encoder choose a setting that matches your upload speed. If you are on a 128k or 256k upload speed, choose something in the region of 56 kbps-80 kbps. If you have a higher upload than that, you can choose to broadcast at the full 96 kbps. Turn off any apps that might interfere with your upload, especially P2P applications.

Ask in the chat for the password. Press Connect. Press Play.

We’re only posting new Christmas Mixes this December, that’s why it’s so festive :). The awards will be bumped next week, when we’ll email the mailing list about em and make the horizontal mixes public. Merry Merry!

Hey, hey it’s nearly that time again! As there are so many mixes this year, we are going to run two rounds of nominations before posting the finalists for best mix.

The first phase of nominations, starting from today until the 14th of November involves those mixers with multiple mixes posted in the period between the 1st of November, 2004 and now nominating one of their mixes to be put forward to the second stage. Mixers with only one mix posted between those dates need not nominate. If a mixer fails to nominate, we’ll just enter the last mix they put forward.

The second stage of nomination involves b00mb0x mixers choosing eight mixes from the ones put forward to go through to the public vote. This begins on the 15th of November. Public voting begins on the 1st of December.

Update: Mixers that haven’t registered on the forum should if they want a vote in the second round.

Update 2: Categories in this years awards:

BEST MIX – (self/mixer nominated)
BEST MIXER – (out of those mixers with three + mixes submitted in year)
BEST NEWCOMER – (out of those mixers who first submitted a mix in year)
BEST SITE COVER
BEST COVER – (admin nominated)
BEST HORIZONTAL MIX EVER! – (admin nominated from complete archive)
BEST BLOG – (admin nominated)

The mixes that win get permanent public hosting forever. Probably won’t be able to do that for best mixer and best newcomer because of bandwidth, so those guys will have to settle for the classic rimjob from a senior citizen.

Update 3: 54 self nominated mixes are listed in the awards section of our forum. Other mixers will nominate 8 out of these mixes to go forward into round 3, the public vote. In the event of a tie in first preference votes, theres a second preference ballot there too. These polls expire after 10 days. In the event of more ties after both ballots, we will add extra rounds of quick fire ballots between the polls ending and the public vote to separate the mixes tying.

b00mb0x version 8 is now live. Version 7 was only launched three months ago and we like to leave it at least 6 months between site upgrades. Version 7 became painfully slow, up to 45 seconds a comment, and the spam filters were bloated and not working very well. We tried to upgrade the Movable Type software to no avail and had a fair bit of downtime. So we reluctantly went down the route of making a new version

The major changes to the site are to the backend, it now works on WordPress, which is a vast improvement in terms of speed and in anti-spam measures. If the spam gets bad on this version, there are moderation and registration options that will address them. It also has a lot of features that movable type never supported, such as scheduled posting (we can post a mix and not have it appear until a certain time).

We made a few cosmetic changes to the forum too.

There are a few drawbacks which we’ll eventually address.

1. B00mbl0g still runs on Movable Type. We’ll transfer this to another installation (it can’t go on this installation safely) when there’s more time.
2. Thumbnails need to be created in Movable Type and the code of the post needs to be copied into the WordPress code for now. (Admin)
3. The design is less malleable. The biggest problem here is that we have only one hugely long column to post the navigation and the links. We’ve made it so more mixes are posted at once to even it out visually.
4. The notification list is on hiatus. I’ll send one more notification about the release through Movable Type, but there won’t be a new notification list available until we find a WordPress Plugin for that purpose.
5. The chat is flaky.
6. The RSS feed to the forum was working but isn’t now. RSS feeds for comments and b00mbl0g are fine tho.

So it’s a little bit of a half-assed upgrade, but the pros should out-weigh the cons until we can sort out the remaining niggles. Which won’t be for a while because we’re working on the awards! Let us know if you have any problems using the new site. New mixes will be published tomorrow, thanks for your patience while we sorted the site out.

Happy Halloween!

Update: thumbnail test