Category Archives: Site Maintenence

Things going on here at the DIT Kalamazoo site

DIT – Changing For The Better In The Near Future!

Leave a reply

After over five years of a wonderful time on the WordPress format, DIT is taking a leap to a new platform. After much talk and consideration, it seems that wordpress is no longer the most functional site for the most-used purposes of DIT.

Expect soon, a site which will function entirely on mobile, as well as on a computer. The site will consist of the calendar list format (ie the sidebar and shows page here) as well as a month-to-month calendar view for those not that into scrolling.

The page will also have a form to submit an event, so that anyone in town booking/playing/promoting has a simple way to share information about their DIY event. No need to email or create an account, just fill out the form and it will get to the site admins, who can add it to the site.

For those who are still interested in write-ups for events, every event on the list calendar will be clickable with a link to the facbook page, as well as a spot for more information. It would be ideal if people would write up descriptions for the site, so that people who don’t know certain bands can get a general idea! It’s always been a fun part of the site, but interest has dwindled in the last two years, so we are no longer promoting write-ups as the focus of the site.

We hope to keep this wordpress account going for archival purposes. Five+ years of show write-ups, along with useful articles is nothing to throw away. Any resource this site has now, we’d like to keep available.

Thank you all for your continued support of DITkalamazoo! Without people playing/making/doing/experiencing, this is all meaningless. Hopefully the new site means an easier way for folks to get involved. Any questions can always be directed to ditkalamazoo@gmail.com.

It’s Happening Again! (Meetings, That Is)

Leave a reply

In the history of DIT Kalamazoo, it can be said that much of 2014 was sadly the year of internet communication. But since this is a loose collective of people trying to do something a little bit better, a little bit more exciting and human than sitting around on facebook – we’re looking to break up that monotony once again. DIT Kalamazoo will be hosting weekly meetings, every Sunday at 4PM, at Satellite Records (808 s Westnedge).

If you’ve never been, the meetings are primarily to keep organized what shows/events are happening in the upcoming weeks, share information about how to book/promote/run shows, and to find people to help with projects (I.E. “I have a show but I need help with making a flyer” or “I have this band from California looking for a show, but my roommates aren’t having it, is anyone interested in helping me find a place”).

Meetings are also just a good time to meet up with who is doing what and where. Every band/house/project/artist has a different thing going, and we’re all trying to support each other’s endeavors.

Well Dang, DIT – This Year In Review! (Statistics Style)

2 Replies

As I’ve been taking a more active role in the webpage faction of DIT, doing much of the sidebar updates and the like, I have found myself browsing about the other behind-the-scenes features of the site. This includes neat stuff like tracking how many visits we get a day, and what people search in order to end up on this site. Maybe not thrilling to you, but I thought I’d share a few tidbits about this year I like.

DITprogress

 

 

 

This here is a graph of our site views by month. I put up 2011 and 2012 to compare, as it shows that we really kicked it into high gear for 2012! While we were on a steady decline up to December 2011, we’ve been more or less trending up, meaning that more people may be using us as a resource. To simplify, we had 17,310 views in 2011, and 34,513 in 2012.

But doesn’t that mean that people could be finding this site arbitrarily? Perhaps we had something tagged with pizza or cats or something else the entire internet can agree is fantastic, and that’s where our traffic is from.

Last year, this may have been true. I believe last year our top searched item was “nerf” and still “nerf” is our all time searched item to get to DIT, topping searching “DITkalamazoo” 2 to 1. But we’re getting more relevant searches this year, or at least are heading in the right direction. If I crunch numbers of all things “DIT” “Nerf” and “DIY” related, this is what we get:

DIT-related = 1,315
Nerf-related = 206
DIY-related = 65

And finally, the top 5 houses searched for this year were:

Milhouse = 140
No Fun House = 102
Fat Guy House = 65
the Anthill = 65
Victory House = 48

Thanks everyone for looking us up and checking our site for the going-ons in town!

New Sherriff in Town

Leave a reply

Greetings Kalamazooians,

We here at ditK are not merely a place to find out what shows are going on, we are building a culture.  Our model of open collaboration is already catching on in other cities and we are constantly looking to evolve.  Culture needs a past, present and future and having been in town for a while and collected a wide assortment of audio recordings, I’m going to do my best to tell the story of Kalamazoo’s recent past.  I’m going to post up a live set at least once a month of mostly local artists, or artists from afar who slayed our fine city.

Some of the recordings will be rough, have mistakes, people hollering or simply no longer representative of the artists.  However, live recordings also capture the environment, the mood and a passion that is simply not reproducible in a sound booth.  I often wonder how I didn’t end up a deadhead.  I digress.

The first set will be up soon.  If you have any recordings you would like to share with me I would love to hear them and potentially help clean them up and post them.  Or if you have questions/ concerns you can send e-mails to me at j5ruggles (@) wmich.edu

Mobile users, have we got a deal for you!

Leave a reply

So the mobile version of this site doesn’t show the sidebar, and we know that’s what most people check when they hit this site up up (heck, that’s what we check every time we hit this site up). We have a solution.

A ways back, we implemented a page called ‘shows’ which was a carbon-copy of the sidebar until everyone forgot to update it. Well no longer! The ‘shows’ page will be updated minimum once a week, and at present there’s so much stuff booked out on it, there shouldn’t be any trouble in missing shows that way.

To access this page on your mobile browser, just go to https://ditkalamazoo.com/shows/ , or you can touch the dropdown menu on the ditkalamazoo.com main page (aptly titled ‘menu’), and touch the ‘shows’ option from there.

Hope this is helpful!

-DIT(K)

DIT IN FULL EFFECT

Leave a reply

The new year has been good to us here at DIT(K)!

Meeting attendance has been way up and we’ve got new posts coming steady. We’d like to take this opportunity to extend some some invites and share a few updates:

First off, DIT meetings are being held at 210 Allen Blvd every Sunday at 5pm. This means we’ll all be there in about 3 hours. If you’d like to get involved, feel free to stop by! Everyone is welcome and we’ll do our best to be hospitable.
We’re looking for people who want to write for DIT; make fliers; put fliers up around town; book local shows; help a touring band; keep the dream alive.

We’ve just added an ‘Editorials’ category to the blog. You may have noticed a few posts recently such as ‘DIY Community Ethics‘ that went beyond the usual show preview/album review format. We’ve been talking about bringing in more of this type of content and hope to have a great deal more of it in the coming months. Look out for that and if you want to read what’s been posted so far, simply go to the categories tab on the lower right hand side of this page and click ‘Editorials’.
FLEX YR HEAD

It’s been a minute since we’ve updated the Flickr feed. Sorry bout that! We’ll have some more pics very soon. In the meantime, send us yr stuff! Got some sweet shots from a recent show? We’d love to get them up and continue to show the world how awesome Kalamazoo really is. Local bands; touring bands; just as long as the show was in held in our fair city.

BACK IN THE SADDLE

Leave a reply

Hello everyone!

DIT(K) is right now the slowest it’s ever been. We’re truly sorry and will be remedying  that ASAP.

There will be a meeting 6pm tonight at No Fun House to discuss upcoming shows, booking and content for the blog. If yr interested in getting involved and helping improve the Kalamazoo music community, by all means come join us!

STAY EXCITED

Ditkalamazoo.com: a real live website.

Leave a reply

Thanks to our good friend Carman Floorbustinginglyoverthrewthegovernmentoctopus Goodrich, we are now a real live legitimate dot com website with a domain name and everything! That’s right, ditkalamazoo.com will take you everywhere you want to be. Or, at least to our humble little ol’ web log here.

Tell your kids, tell your wife.

Like DIT? Let yer peeps know!

Leave a reply

Ever read a post on the DIT site that you feel like all your friends should read too? Well now, you can share them with the world!

If you find a post here on the blog particularly engaging, you can let everybody know on Reddit, Dig, Stumbleupon, Facebook, or you can tweet it to the masses!

Simply click on the title of the post you like, scroll to the bottom of the page, and pick your poison! Now none of your friends can make the excuse that they ‘didn’t know something was happening’ here int he Jolly Old ‘Zoo!

More Photo Credz

Leave a reply

Another big thanks to Tyler Emrick for sending in some more great shots of Kalamazoo Music in action, this time for The Reptilian, Empire! Empire!, Pan, and the Binary Marketing Show, who pout on an excellent show a few weeks ago at The Strutt.

Once again, if anyone has photos from local shows and wants ’em thrown up here on DIT, you can send ’em our way at ditkalamazoo@gmail.com.