August 2023 Update

Hey There. Long time no see!

It's been a long time since I've posted to this blog, almost 7 whole months! A lot has happened since then, in both the Gizz world and my personal world, but I haven't had as much time to work on this website as I'd like to. I just wanted to write a quick post to share a bit about what's been going on, where things currently are with this website, and what my plans are going forward.

If you've been on the website since June, you've probably noticed that there's a lot of missing information. All the latest shows, starting with the US Residency Tour, are missing. Also, as of today, there are 3 new entries to the Bootlegger program, which are currently missing as well. My goal with The Confused Cyborg has always been to provide a valuable resource to fans, with information about performance statistics, releases, etc. Obviously, missing shows and being slow to add releases makes that very difficult, and I have some ideas to make things easier going forward.

What's Up?

First, a little bit about how I put together this website, since there are a few different approaches that you can take to a project like this.

Some people might approach a music website like this by going through every show that the artist has played, manually writing out the setlist, location, date, etc. This is extremely tedious, as you have to source the information yourself, and carefully write out everything that you input, but it also gives you the most control over the content of your website. By creating all the data yourself, you're in complete control of the data structure, naming conventions, etc. It's definitely a strategy with some major benefits, and I use a similar strategy for inputting data on things like releases.

Another approach someone might take to a site like this is using APIs from existing websites. This would allow you to automatically pull information from a server, getting data that you don't have to actually create yourself. This gives you less control over the formatting, naming convention, etc, but also reduces the amount of work that you have to do, and can be automatically updated if the source updates, keeping your site up-to-date without having to do any extra work.

Instead of manually creating all the data for the website, or pulling all the data from an API, I've been using a bit of a hybrid strategy. As I've already mentioned, for releases, I manually create data files that store information about the release, songs, etc. This gives great control over what's being presented, coupled with the flexibility to modify how the data is structured as I built out the UI of the website. For show data, I created a script that would pull data from an API, and create something that is formatted to fit into the structure of the website as I built it. I could then go in and modify this information to make sure it fit the convention of the website, and add my own data to it that I couldn't pull from APIs (such as posters, links to recordings, associated live albums, etc).

The problem with the system I built is that it's one-way. Once I pulled the information for a particular show, any further changes to the original source data would be ignored. This largely means that for shows, I wait a few days after the show is over to make sure the editing has slowed down enough to ensure a degree of accuracy (and to see if recordings are posted anywhere).

And for releases like the Bootlegger releases today, that fully-manual process is a decent amount of work to find time for. Especially when there are 80 new tracks released in a single day.

So, I will work on getting some updated content for the site, but I am also oging to work on building a better workflow so that I can get more content updated more quickly than I could by my current/old process. Ideally, much of this content will be more automated, but I'm also going to make the input method for manual information much more user-friendly, so I can focus on efficiency. A litte more time improving my processes now will result in much faster updates from now on.

On the personal side, since I built this site originally, I've lost my job! Being unemployed is not fun, and so much of the time that I would spend on updating information for shows and releases is time that I now need to spend working on my resume and applying for jobs.

I hope to get some more updates here shortly. But I can't promise anything, as free time is a bit of a commodity at this point.

Until next time,

• Alex