Song of the Week NEEDS YOU!
 

With Mo0's resignation after Song of the Year, and _DH_'s leave to spend time with his new wife (or husband; hey, I don't know), Song of the Week is low on staff members. So we need some new ones! Here are some of the tasks that can be taken care of (and by multiple people, too):

• Thread creation and upkeep at one or more forums.
• Nomination management: Culling all forums for nominations, updating the Nomination Queue, restricting nominations in co-ordinance with the thread manager(s), and taking care of week rollovers.
• Vote tallying at all forums: Need to be able to use Excel, OpenOffice Calc, or another spreadsheet type.
• Information researcher: Making sure each track has all the correct information for artist, album, track title, catalog number, etc.
• Voting tracks preparation: Properly tagging all of the tracks with ID3v1/ID3v2/APE and MP3Gain.
• General wiki maintenance: Update the front page as needed, keep an eye on recent changes, ban spammers, clean up dusty old articles (the "Song of the Week" article still needs to be properly divided up into smaller articles).
• Programmer to clean up my n00b php code and/or add more functionality to the site.
• Graphic designer to add more styles to the site and/or create a redesign if able.
• Someone to create the Song of the Year award graphic (yes, this still has gone unaccomplished).

And of course, being on staff means working with CHz and TCK. They run a tight ship, so you'll need to co-operate with (and learn from) both of them.

Also, since they're really in charge (I don't do much more for Song of the Week than the average participant), they can fill you in better on the details of what duties they really need or don't need, as well as adding to or modifying this list. They can answer all of your questions as well (if not better) than I.

So that's about it. If you're interested in helping out with Song of the Week, just post here, let us know what you're interested in doing, and we'll consider you.

Thanks! :)

I was going to make this thread, but you did a better job than I would've! =O

TCK's going to be leaving too in about a month, so we could really use the help.

Unconfirmed as of yet, but it's quite possible that this time next month I won't be a part of SotW staff.

I'd love to help out. I'd be more than willing (and have plenty of time) to do the following:

The only thing I would need some pointers on is using MP3Gain (and I'm not sure what APE tags are). Everything else I'm capable of doing already.

MP3Gain is easy as hell, it's just a case of downloading MP3Gain, and running all the tracks through it. Takes less than five seconds.

APE tags are another kind of tag like ID3, used by some programs instead of ID3 tags. For tags I've been told to use Tagscanner, and while it works I'm sure there's better out there.

I could help out with preparing tracks for voting (MP3Gaining and tagging), research on track information, thread creation and nomination management if need be. I'm not all that confident with more intensive website managament and vote tallying, though maybe with some practice and a sample excel sheet I could pick up the latter eventually. Hopefully, my workload from July onwards won't be as heavy as my research project from a couple of months back.

The method we have on the wiki for vote tallying is actually pretty easy once you get the hang of it. If you look at the table, you'll see the first set of lines of code naming the columns, then in between separators you'll see

or something like that. In that particular case, the fourth track got 3 points, the sixth track got 2, and the seventh got 1. There's also some info about who made the post there that I left out, but that's the basic jist of it. Then it's a matter of staring at the table and adding the columns together. >_>

There's only one thing staff need to do to the main site (apart from uploading the tracks via ftp), and that's update the results for the various results. That's easy enough, thanks to http://songoftheweek.info/update.php (the password is CHzsmells btw).

Vote tallying is all done via SotWiki. Because the results are set out in tables it can be really annoying adding votes in to it. The wikicode works, but unless you really know wikicode it looks like utter gibberish. If someone could create some sort of frontend where one could convert votes into wikicode that'd be great, but until then CHz should be able to cope on his own. Lord knows he has coped on his own for quite some time :D

EDIT: Mo0 got a post in before me. It's easy enough when you know how it works, but even then it can be really tiresome and repetative to add in voters.

Yeah, the table is kind of confusing, but compared to what we had before, which was a LOT more typing and a lot more confusing, I'd say we have the best option right now.

So you guys don't even use a spreadsheet anymore? Let's hope Mo0 didn't do any more miscounts :tpg:

Nah, the wiki table makes miscounts almost impossible. >_>

I'd be interested in helping out, Kaleb. As credentials I have the music site of my own that I started (link in my sig). Right now one of the weaknesses of my site is that there's really no proper tagging. I'd be interested in helping you guys out with that (especially as it would be a way to educate myself for my own site).

I also have some slightly-higher-than-n00b-though-only-slightly PHP skills that could benefit the site, I could add new functionality. As of tonight I'm switching my site to Ruby on Rails, so I could also use the outlet for continuing work with PHP. I'd enjoy helping to add new functionality to the site.

Anyway, I f-ing love the game music community, I'm a big fan of SOTW and I've found a lot of wonderful music from there, and I'd love to help with another project doing something I greatly respect.

This sounded like a cover letter!

Hmm, what exactly does that have to be? I could take a stab at it, but I'm not sure what is supposed to be made. :z A little icon? A banner? etc.

I'd be more than willing to lend a hand. I've done my share of wiki-ing at the grand Wikipedia, and I've created at least one voting thread when I got impatient :)

I'd be unable to do anything that requires a PC though, since I only have a Mac.

An icon that is either 24x24 or 32x32. If you put a lot of detail into it, 64x64 might be doable. For reference, here is the current Song of the Week Battle award. (It's nothing fancy, but I'd be willing to toss it if someone made a better version.) In any event, the Song of the Year award should look nicer than this.

By the way, thanks for everyone who offered help with SotW so far, I'll comment more on this later. :)

ORION FOR THREAD MANAGER!

HI, I'M MO0, AND I APPROVED THIS MESSAGE.

Elorin, you were helping out on staff for a little while once before, so I think you should be a shoe in. ;) Drakken and Klondike would be nice help as well. I'll talk to CHz about this.

Any progress with this?

No, but there should be some made soon. Perhaps we could set up a meeting in #sotw?

I'd suggest a design of a quarter-note with the traditional flag at top replaced with a pennant flag displaying either 'WEEK' or (a fancier one marked) 'YEAR'. I'd make a prototype of what I mean, but my computer art skills could not be worse if I used two hooks and an elbow to do it.

Okay, I've been a killer combination of lazy AND forgetful about this thread. :( HERE WE GO

Yeah, I remember you were part of the research crew a while back. If you want to continue reprise that role, that would be super.

Once all the research is done and copies of every track have been found, tagging and MP3Gaining doesn't take that much effort with TagScanner.

I actually copy-paste the table into a spreadsheet to do the totaling. >_>

You should nominate something once in a while. ;)

Since you're already familiar with wiki editing, and you've shown enthusiasm in getting the voting thread up (if only for your own benefit), I have to agree with Mo0 here; you'd make a fine thread manager for here, assuming you don't mind wiki'ing up votes and nominations.

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Here's what the duties are looking like to me thus far. Input graciously accepted.

* Thread creation and upkeep at one or more forums.
I'll continue doing STC, since that's really low maintenance. If/when TCK decides to leave, I can take over Chudah's Corner too, since that also doesn't get a lot of activity. orion_mk3 would be my choice for GFF manager, taking over for me.

* Nomination management: Culling all forums for nominations, updating the Nomination Queue, restricting nominations in co-ordinance with the thread manager(s), and taking care of week rollovers.
This has been falling on the thread managers, although I've been picking up CC for TCK for a few weeks now. >:(

As far as the rollovers, I can handle that.

* Vote tallying at all forums: Need to be able to use Excel, OpenOffice Calc, or another spreadsheet type.
Copy-pasting the voting table into a spreadsheet takes about ten seconds, since my web browser conveniently delimits cells with tabs.

* Information researcher: Making sure each track has all the correct information for artist, album, track title, catalog number, etc.
Getting Elorin back in the researching saddle will make this part much easier.

* Voting tracks preparation: Properly tagging all of the tracks with ID3v1/ID3v2/APE and MP3Gain.
Elorin, Drakken, me? This one's still up in the air.

* General wiki maintenance: Update the front page as needed, keep an eye on recent changes, ban spammers, clean up dusty old articles (the "Song of the Week" article still needs to be properly divided up into smaller articles).
I can handle this, except maybe the SotW article division, which no one's ever gotten around to doing. :(

* Programmer to clean up my n00b php code and/or add more functionality to the site.
Klondike has shown some interest here.

* Graphic designer to add more styles to the site and/or create a redesign if able.
No one here as of yet, although this isn't a huge priority for me because the site looks fine to me as is.

* Someone to create the Song of the Year award graphic (yes, this still has gone unaccomplished).
Both Kanji and SonicPanda have shown interest.

Research, tagging and MP3Gaining is fine with me. Might need help/advice with APE tagging and converting certain submitted file types into mp3 but major ones like .ogg shouldn't be a problem. Couple of questions: 1) when should we start cracking, and 2) are we going back to using the chocojournal for communicating info? Or #sotw (I'm afraid I need some orientation on how #sotw works :P)?

I can confirm that I will be leaving. Starting a new job at Sega next week, so I'm not going to have much free time.

I can probably stick around for a little while to bring in the newcomers if required, but I'd preferably want to be relieved of all duties by the end of Week 65 (two and a bit weeks).

I'm on it.

I can convert pretty much anything, so you don't really need to worry about that, assuming I remember to actually do it. :(

We don't get many nominations in non-MP3 formats anyway.

Maybe as soon as right now! Depends on if everyone else is ready to start as well.

We've been using the wiki for a while. If you need a crash course in how the system works and how to edit everything, just ask and TCK or I will oblige.

So, janitor then?