Planet Polybonk

Polybonk Blog is a window into the world, work and lives of Polybonk

A Brief History of EXO

First entry in my "blog" hehe. I really don't know what to put here but I suppose that will come with time.
I usually limit myself to expression via abstract means, so direct communication is kind of alien to me.
Nevertheless, I will attempt to provide some "meaningful" chit chat, amongst other stuff. So Bear with me.

I present, A Brief History of EXO ..(Click the post or "Read More" to expand the full story)

Checkout troubles

Apologies to everyone who attempted to checkout over the past couple of days. We had a major problem that went unnoticed until today.

The problem was our shopping cart wasn't able to communite properly with PayPal during the checkout phase.

We have fixed the problem, everything is back to normal.

Once again we are very sorry for any inconveniences we may have caused.

New media player

Today I made a mock up of our potential new media player used to listen to our previews. I felt from the very beginning of designing the way Polybonk plays you our previews for each track was a total overkill and literally kills browsers.. most frequent in one particular dreaded browser.. *cough* IE6/7 *cough* (If you are using Internet Explorer of any kind please stop now. use Firefox.)

Here is a Sneak Peak at what the player might look like.

Mock-up media player

Job's almost done Mr Polybonk

I'm about to release the revolutionary subscription to the public for the first time ever! This is extremely exciting for us since it's been such a long road to get where we are now today. Plus I have been working on a few extra features and updates to the site such as:
  • Featured album on the front page
  • Polybonk's theme has been given a big clean up
  • The front page is now a lot cleaner and includes some actual useful information
  • many minor bug fixes which you hopefully never noticed ;)
    • I hope to put these changes into effect later tonight.

Good Bad Ugly

Hey guys check out our newest uploaded album, Good Bad Ugly - very cool. In particular Good and Cactus flowers are really interesting, some pretty amazing sounds going on... cylan certainly puts the mental in experimental :)

So You Think You Can Dance!

This post wont be very relevant to you if you live outside of Australia but one of my friends Vanessa has made it in the show So you think you can dance! and she has made her way up to the top 8! I feel very slack since I keep missing the show but I at least I can watch the show on her So you think you can dance! profile. On the up side to this I guess I get to cut through all the TV ads and get straight to Vanessa!

Also If your into facebook she has a pretty good group supporting her here, I get lots of frequent updates on her through there. Anyway thats my part on Venessa, Good luck!

Polybonk has just moved into its new home

If I were to describe to you what this new home is like for Mr Polybonk, it would be like moving from a cardboard box, barely big enough for one person. If two people were to try enter Polybonk's house at one time the box would explode. Compare this to a newly built house with enough space to happily entertain thousands of our wonderful guests. It would be like moving from a house made of cardboard to a full furnished chateau, anyway you get the idea.

Now the technical side of it, we've moved our website to a dedicated server with a great hosting company RimuHosting These guys really get the job done. When you request support you're always talking to a professional who really knows their stuff. I don't think I've ever experienced support as great as theirs.

If your interested the specs on our machine are

Happy new year

I do apologise for the lack of news. Just to keep you all up to date with everything, I have discovered a few critical limitations with some of the core components of Polybonk. So I have been secretly working on fixing these issues, hence a lack of activity on Polybonk.com.

The issues have been solved and we are currently implementing a new ecommerce module, http://www.ubercart.org. I have totally revamped the adding and removing of audio on polybonk, which allows much more flexibility and facilitates the development and implementation of future improvements.

The average user won't really notice much change in Polybonk. The changes mainly affect the administrators. Hopefully we can add all the music to the new site as soon as possible. I will post an update as soon as this is done.

I want to FLAC you like an animal!

I found this interesting article on digg.com:

"After the astounding response from my article on Ogg Vorbis (What the hell is Ogg Vorbis, and why should I use it?), I thought it would be nice to do a follow up article on another open source audio format called FLAC" Read more

Update

My apologies for the lack of news lately, we have been working very hard on both the musical and web development side as usual but with less public activity.

So what have we been doing you may ask? Mainly we have been working hard at creating strategies to fix some of our more critical bugs on the website. The most noticeable one, the Preview Player.. I wish my coding skills were more up to scratch but I do believe we have found a solution. What I have found through my tests is somewhere along the line our audio module's database has become corrupt, and therefore it doesn't serve the files to you when you press play on our preview player. The only way I know how to fix this problem is to do a fresh install since my mysql skills are almost non-existent. This is a pain but it may provide us with some advantages in the long run.