Ignored By Dinosaurs 🦕

Well, friends, I asked for it. Yesterday I put up a post about Facebook's new SMS fan feature. This lets RRE fans (or whomever) text “fan RailroadEarth” to FBOOK and they're automatically added to our fan roster on Facebook. This sounds like an extremely convenient way to sign up new fans at a show or whenever the feeling hits them, yet there are a few hurtles from an effective marketing perspective that I wanted some feedback on. For instance, the best way to get the word out would probably be to make an announcement from the stage during the show, but RRE isn't going to be doing that. Whatever the vibe is that we're trying to project from stage, it ain't the one where we stop in the middle of a set and put in a plug for our Facebook page.

Other alternatives are placing info at the merch booth, the ubiquitous (and potentially ineffective) email blast, but obviously a coordinated effort on all fronts would be the most effective means of getting those numbers up. A coordinated effort is what Allan came up with. I'd love to hog this as proprietary information given to us, and only us, by a seasoned marketing vet for the purpose of blowing Railroad Earth up just a little bit more. However, that would be against the stated mission of ignoredByDinosaurs. What I present here is either something that he'd been working on for months and waiting for the right opportunity to fire off or a 30 minute rough draft of a brainstorm. You never know with that guy. Either way, he's an impassioned student of the biz and this is good stuff. If you promote bands you should read this.

The funny part is, I was just kidding when I asked him to make me a diagram.

I really like Fred Wilson's blog. He's a tech VC (venture capitalist) based in New York. He's steady, and often I fall behind since he puts out some good stuff on a daily basis. Following the tack of this post, Facebook just added an SMS friend feature to their business pages. All you do if you're not already a fan is text “fan RailroadEarth” to whatever the number is. The question I could use your assistance with is how best to get the word out about this. Seems to me like getting folks at the show would be the best way to capitalize on this, but obviously we're not going to announce it from the stage. Any ideas?

Don't Ignore The Least Common Denominator

Edit: We have a winner, folks! Allan Ronquillo has sent a complete battle plan – a work that deserves intensive study. If he doesn't mind I'll put it up here...

Phase Two – Love

The day that I knew I'd found the one was July 12, 2008. The 3G and the OS 2.0 software update had come out the day before. I'd updated as soon as I could, playing my part in the server issues that Apple had that day. I was fascinated by the prospect of adding apps, though I didn't really know what I would want to add to the thing that wasn't already there.

Had a nice loooong road trip down I-81 to contemplate such matters. I spent most of the ride and all of the battery perusing the app store. By the time I got to wherever we were going, my life was changed forever. “My God, this is going to change everything! RRE needs an app! Everybody needs an app!, if for no other reason that to format the information that's already on our website for the mobile screen. Everybody in the future is going to be carrying these things around, so if you're not with it, you're a friggin Dinosaur! I wonder how you write these things? It must not be that hard – the experience is so smooth, it must be really easy! I need to do some research.”

So I'll spare the details of what I found about programming iPhone apps, since that's basically the theme of this entire blog, but let's just say it's a bit more involved than I thought.

My involvement with Facebook only really began after the installation of their iPhone app. Same with Twitter. Or Wordpress. Or jogging. Or blogging. And on and on. So in a way, you could say that everything I've gotten interested in, or re-interested in, over the last year and a half – programming, design, marketing, my band – has been because of that little doo-hicky. Thanks Steve! On the other hand, the recent dearth of LiveDownloads is also partially attributable to that thing, also, since engineering and production have kinda lost a bit of their luster as a serious career path for me. Sorry, guys. Net positive, though, to be sure.

Phase Three – Seperation and reunion

I lost my original iPhone. I won't go into where, or when, or how, but it was a major bummer. I'd already bought a Mac by that point, since iPhone and Mac development doesn't happen on a Windows machine. Oh well, twist my arm. Besides, in the year that I'd been an iPhoner, my life had slowly but surely realigned itself around being in touch and on top of things, so even if I hadn't decided on development as a future career path I was certainly not going back to the “old way”.

Luckily, at the Rockaway Mall Apple store, they gave me the AT&T subsidy, so that my 3G didn't cost me a million bucks. Only half a million. The 3G, of course, has GPS, which I didn't think was really going to be that big a deal. I was already a good navigator and always had a map in my pocket. I was wrong.

GPS went hand in hand with a cool app that I'd gotten just after that called iMapMyRun, which tracks your runs, your training progress, and just happens to run on that little doo-hicky that you already had in your hand since you like to listen to tunes while you jog, which, by the way, neither did you jog nor did you listen to tunes a year prior to that. Goodness. So you could definitely say that loosing my original phone turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

#random #iphone

For me, it began in December of 2007. Anyone who reads this blog or has stumbled across it (as a surprising number have, unless there's a bot out there relentlessly searching for my post on the Best App Ever) knows that I'm a fan. I started off as a casual appreciator of the iPhone, and have since proceeded to jettison a lifetime of loyal MS-DOS/Windows computing in favor of being a blogging, Mac toting dork. I'm not ashamed. My personal productivity has skyrocketed over the last 18 months, due almost exclusively to the tectonic shift in mindset brought about by my consumer relationship with the House of Jobs. And now, for your enjoyment (I hope), I present the emotional cycle of iPhone ownership.

Prehistory

It started off for me simply enough. I'd been a Cingular customer-cum AT&T customer since the dawn of cell phone use (for me). I'd been through a few phones over the years, most notably the old bricky Nokia that worked great and only did that one thing. I was perfectly happy for a number of years, but eventually I was seduced. I wanted something with a bit more style, more pizazz. I'd been reading the Motorola Razr PR for a while, and thought that perhaps it'd make me happier, what with it's flippy coolness and it's camera. It even held the promise of being a music player, though a cursory glance could've shown a lack of a headphone jack or any real internal storage. I didn't care!! I was leaving the droll stability of the good thing I'd had with Nokia.

You can tell where this is headed. The camera sucked. The phone dropped calls all the time. The flip thing bothered me as much as I always knew it would. It wouldn't even let you set your own ringtones from your own music that you already freaking owned. It was extremely uncomfortable against your ear. It would connect to the crap ringtone store spontaneously and download the new NeYo tune for me. Repeatedly. Finally after less than 6 months, the thing just died altogether. Actually, I snapped it in half one night, so I guess you could say I terminated it, with extreme prejudice. This was about two weeks before Noah was due, so obviously I needed a new phone pronto.

I'd already seen Jimmy hanging out with it. He sent me an email with the signature at the bottom reading Sent from my iPhone. What a dork. I was intrigued...

Phase One – Infatuation

It was a rainy December day. I had a notion that since I'd just re-upped my Cingular contract months before, the new contract discount wouldn't be applying to me on this day. The suspicion was confirmed by the (very cool and helpful) dude at the store. A new Razr would cost me $379.

Or I could just get an iPhone for $20 more.

The first week was a revelation. The mere act of checking my email and being done with it in less time than it took my POSVRPC (Piece of $h!t, Vista-running PC) to even reach the first splash screen on booting up was like a dream come true. I immediately regretted my purchase of the POSVRPC only two weeks earlier, as the iPhone could easily get me through the relatively gig-light winter. I wrote a blog on the iPhone within days on MySpace – old-school – praising Apple as the “Barry Bonds of product design – every swing, out of the park”. This was before the steroid allegations really came to light, but the comparison is probably still apropos.

I'd never bought an iPod, so having music to listen to was another big one. I'm sorry if I've written about all this before, but the real winner was when Noah was born and I had pictures emailed to the family within minutes.

The contacts and the calendar? I'd actually bought a Palm Pilot in college, deep in my freelance gigger days, but couldn't make myself carry it around all the time, which seriously negated it's effectiveness. In short, I started to see that if I couldn't get my life together with an iPhone, I was hopeless.

#iphone

It feels like ages since my last post, even though I've tried to keep it up with some links to some good dorkery. Today is spent in the bus, driving the 735 miles from Denver to Columbia, MO. We left at 9 this morning and have made a small dent in Kansas, but we'll most likely be rolling in around midnight or so tonight. So here goes...

Yesterday was spent at the Mile High Music Festival in Denver, one of our hometowns. It was kind of a strange lineup – us, Ani, Ben Harper, Tool, Panic, Black Keys, India Arie. Sort of like a festival we do all the time, but not exactly. I can't explain it without sounding like I'm getting down on the festival, but it was sorta like Rothbury without all the vibe. Now, Rothbury, there's a festival. My friend Laura has a great blog about her involvement with the copious vibe-ification that took place. Check it out here. It's not kosher for me to be proclaiming any festival the “best”, but if it were...

Festival season aside, I've pretty much just been at work on Railroad Earth's next website. After months of research, I've pretty well settled on WordPress as the platform and have been building for the last few weeks, talking to numerous developers and designers that can help with the look – the backend and build-out has pretty much become my baby. I'm very excited about it. I'd tell you where it's stashed, but not only do I want it to be a surprise to as many people as possible, the metrics tell me that perhaps a few of you have already found it.

Pardon my lack of anything interesting to say, but my creative fire seems to go in cycles. I've had to venture into the woods for more firewood lately, and will hopefully have more to say one of these days.

I don't know why it took me so long to bop on over to the app store and search Wordpress, but of course there's an iPhone app! I'll use it now to distract myself while Sheaffer drives us to the airport.

We're headed to the Mile High music festival in Denver tonight. We're playing tomorrow afternoon at the exact same time as Ani DiFranco, which is a real bummer because she was the best set of music I saw all weekend at Rothbury. I'd never seen her play before, and all I can say is Holy Crap. She played the Sherwood stage, which faces that forest you might have heard about. She played her song Napolean, which I'd never heard before. Sitting there on the side of the stage with her voice echoing off the forest was the best way to hear a tune like that for the first time. I'm kind of in love with her now. Anyway...

#wordpress #iphone

History of the C family of languages.

“Our guys on the Safari team even had special toilet paper made up with a Chrome logo on every sheet.”

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Let's all take a deep breath and get some perspective.

It's about time somebody told me about this site.

bluegrassintelligencer.com.

Bollocks!! Do not buy a domain from Yahoo.

I just want to make sure that shows up in the description of search results, if there are any. Now a parable...

Many years ago it occured to me that if I didn't go and buy JohnnyGrubb.com, then I was stupid. I had no idea how to make websites and no need for one whatsoever, but I did know enough to know that if I didn't buy my own friggin name then someday I might regret it. So, in March 2006, I bought my own name for 5 years. Doesn't that sound weird? Yahoo gave me a great deal, or so I thought then.

I soon started getting lots of emails exhorting me to host a website with them. Come on, it's only $15 a month and we'll help you make the website. It seemed like a good deal (it wasn't), so I did it- for about 6 months or so. At some point I got a new Wachovia check card and didn't update my info with Yahoo and they shut me off. Apparently when they shut me off, they also shut off access to my domain. I didn't find this out until yesterday. I'd kept an eye on it over the years to make sure that some Chinese company hadn't stolen it from me, and according to the records, I still owned it. Registered with Yahoo. Cool.

So, yesterday, as I was switching this website over to the new host (didn't even notice, did ya?), I got it into my head to try and point JohnnyGrubb.com over this way also. I'm thinking that perhaps JG will be the more personal website – the one that deals more with music – and that this (ibD) will be the business (that's presuming there's business, I know).

This is when I discover that even though I own JG, Yahoo won't let me in so I can transfer it, or even point it where I want it to go. So now it's time for a lesson that I learned the hard way over the last few days...

We'll skip the possibly fraudulent fiasco that is Yahoo Domains for now, and talk about what happens when you buy and host a domain/website. If you're a musician and you only buy a domain so that nobody else can buy it out from underneath you, it stays parked wherever you bought it. You can then go forward and decide to host a website with the company where it's registered, or you can wait and maybe host a website somewhere else. If you decide to host somewhere else, then you have to do some configuring. That domain that you bought is parked on a computer somewhere, and what you have to do is tell that computer to resolve any incoming requests made for johnnyGrubb.com, for example, into the proper numerical IP address for the website. That computer is called a “nameserver”, since its job on this earth is to take the english web address and translate it into a numerical IP address. If you want to host the website somewhere else you have to login to your Domain Control Panel, they all have 'em, and tell that domain to point to your webhosts' nameserver. This website, for example, is hosted at Media Temple, with a nameserver address of something like ns1.mediatemple.net. I had to login over at GoDaddy and tell them that, since that's where the domain name is registered. When you come here MediaTemple's nameserver gets the request and turns it into a number that the rest of their system can understand. It's kinda complicated at first. That's why it's good idea to buy the domain from the same place you're gonna host it, if you like things to be tidy.

I just found this all out. The hard way.

Since Yahoo wouldn't let me in to JohnnyGrubb.com's domain control panel, I couldn't point my name to my new web host. Bummer. So I had to shell out another $10 to re-register my domain with Yahoo just so I could get in there and point it in the right direction. Jerks. Like I said, my registration for that domain name wasn't supposed to expire until 2012, but I figured that $10 is probably better than me spending until 2012 trying to get someone at Yahoo on the line. They don't even have a customer service email. What kinda shit is that? I even dug up the email welcoming me to Yahoo domains and clicked on the link to my domain control panel, which promptly told me “oh you must have decided to let your overpriced, crappy webhosting service lapse because we can't let you in there. Sorry chump.”

Long story short. If you're a casual user buy your domain at GoDaddy. They're at least reputable enough and I had good experiences with their customer service during my period of hosting over there. DO NOT buy a domain from Yahoo.

Better yet, ask me. I'm getting the hang of this stuff.

#random