Site Suggestions ?

Many thanks for all your help Graeme, Tony & Paul and Gang !

You really have to search out CO dont cha ? You've made it so easy. So thanks - I've got about 16 + sessions now and enjoying hearing the differant versions etc.

Struck me today how the info for this band is all over the place - even their own website, their myspace, blogs, blogger, twitter, wiki for band history/discography etc.

It would be great if this was the hub for purely selfish reasons for us all. I'm going to make a list of my "sessions" so I can keep track of what I've got/haven't got and was gonna post this to see if anyone could see anything missing - something I thought that would benefit me and any other newbie. Maybe, with the links in one place as a sticky thread ? I'm more than happy to contribute, help out, if I can ? I'll defo post any tick-tack I get hold of.

Things that would be great on this site ? If you don't mind Greame ? Just some thoughts (and like I said, happy to help out ) either as stickys or as sections

1. Discography
2. Band History
3. Historical Live Dates
4. Setlists
5. Bootlegs
6. In Session Links
7. Latest News
8. Photographs - Band/Fans
9. Blogs
10. Press/Media

Of course this is a fulltime job now ha ha !!

Don't know what your plans are Graeme, but just to let you know I appreciate what you've done here. I can see this place getting much much busier as the tour progresses.

Many Thanks.


Pete

I did (that is, am doing on a continuing basis) something similar for KarlWallinger.net
Of course, for that site, we've got official support from Karl and his long-time manager, so it's easy to say "We're the one-stop official hub!"

But... if we want to implement all Pete's suggestions for Camera Obscura, I've got a webserver with unlimited space and bandwidth (Seriously I mean unlimited, I think at this very moment, we've got 15 GB of live shows available to download just on KW.net.), it costs $10/year to buy a URL (which I'd very willingly donate), we'd need to design something, install the WordPress software as a front-end like the C/O official website is already doing, add in PhpBB (which is the forum software this one is based on, albeit, this version seems STRIPPED) and tada! All free, all very easy..

This is what I do. :P

i`ll go with anythin like...i tried with limited success to link this to myspace,which i do now and again...for passers by if they wanna spout...........the old camera obscura official forum moved even slower than this,it was run by gavin and got invadedin the end and died...there were about 4 or 5 members who would contribute every couple of weeks?so after 3 -4 shows this year i decided to knock this up quick...just somewhere to type any camera obscura thingys that may be of any use...to people goin the shows,set lists,hairstyles etc....if you look at the site where i live www.shacknet.co.uk that has been overhauled in the last two weeks...and splendid it looks too....if anyone can do this kinda thing,great.......it has been going for over 10 years now,and is the finest place on the net,no jokin......financed by us,although i believe the software used at the moment is free..........pete,paul tony et all...any suggestions,links,facelifts apprieciated,providin we can find it all like.....you`d think that there would have bin a wave of guests after the american shows....but anyways,i`ve bin banned from borin people to tears on shacknet...thats why i invented this.but its very much a diy job ...ta........

Yeh ! Where are all the fans ?

Once I get myself sorted and up to date with whats out there, I'll try and tidy my info up and see if it's of any interest.

Strangely today, I tried to get tickets for The Barrowlands, none of the major ticket agencies are selling the tickets. I'm also going to do Berlin & Hamburg - tickets appear to be available for that, but I've noticed a few gigs have been cancelled or just changed to a differant city on earlier dates in the year so I am concerned about booking the german trip.

I failed to mention that CO had been on my radar at some stage. It only dawned on me when I heard some of their older stuff. I had dismissed them out of hand. But this is a differant band now. The current setlists have been strongly bolstered by some excellant tunes from the last 2 albums and the vocals and musicanship are in a differant league altother now.

impressed with Shacknet btw. I haven't played HMS Fable for a while, so if I can get this bloody addictive CO off the stereo, I'll have to give them a spin.

Pete

i have the same problem with the god help the girl album........i`ve booked me flight for paris....fingers crossed..........

Okeeeee
So I'll throw some things together for a full fledged C/O fan website and put it on a temporary URL. It'll probably be next week at the earliest... and then we can figure out where (if anywhere) to go from there.
Some suggestions for domain names (URL's) would be nice to have. Short and simple are the best... Once we have one, I can even give you all email addresses from that domain, if desired. yourname@cameraexposa.com, for instance. cameraexposa.com is the only one I've thought of, which sounds slightly like a porn site besides being an incredibly weak pun, and why I'm asking for suggestions. :)

can we not have camera obscura in the title?

Jeeez - I feel like I've opened up a can of worms here

This is all very bold

Camera Obscura translates in Latin as Dark Room - I wonder why they chose this name ??

I'm thinking early CO to the new CO = Dark Room to Light (alumina) ?

www.cameraobscuralumina.com

www.camera-alumina.com

aluminati = enlightened ones ?

maybe an poigant lyric ??

I don't feel qualified - there a band that's hard to put in a box - maybe some of the early diehard fans would have an idea ?

I agree with Greame tho that it may to have CO in the title ???

Pete

graeme wrote:

can we not have camera obscura in the title?

There's no reason we can't.

Pete wrote:

maybe an poigant lyric ??

my vote would go for something like that. the problem is finding a one-liner short enough to not make typing the URL a chore.
i browsed through my Let's Get Out... dust jacket (it's sitting on my desk) and came up with these:
boredwithme.com,
falsecontenders.com ,
allthefriendswecanget.com
... ?
i've always been incredibly bad at coming up with witty/clever names.

allthefriendswecanget.com








sweet xx. love it !!!!

....its a global mission

paul-h wrote:

allthefriendswecanget.com

haha - Love it! i been watchin this thread and im likin where its goin'! i searched for a CO site/forum many a moons ago and only ever found sites that focused on specific times in their career or on lyrics or whatever...never an all-inlcusive. this one has been an absolute gem for me. i tend to get obsessive (to say the least) when i like a band and hafta collect all the known recordings that i can but as i told paul-h on another thread, i dont usually get overly high quality stuff...just simple mp3s to listen to at werk/in car. to take this site to the next level would be sweet and im all for it and will try to compile a list of the shows that i've gathered. i will also try to put together a list of links that i've used to track stuff down previously. there are a few really awesome bootleggers out there but none so far will respond to me emails ...anyhow, nice ambitious idea this is!
tony

i'll admit the name has grown on me in the last 24-ish hours.
it's payday tomorrow, so if there's no objections, i'll purchase allthefriendswecanget.com in about another 24 hours from this post. if we don't end up using it, i can always do something else with the domain. i end up using a lot of url's for anonymous ftp and the like.

i haven't drawn anything yet, but i came up with a good idea for the overall graphic design of the site that basically just copies the gothic-victorian style of the Let's Get Out Of This Country album jacket. i like all those fancy squiggle borders...
do we have any graphic designers here? i'd love to see some other [and therefore better] ideas.


yesterday when i was looking to see if the "allthefriendswecanget" domain was available, i stumbled across one of C. Schultz's old Peanuts books named "I Need All The Friends I Can Get"
Now, I've always thought the song was a sort of social network (i.e. MySpace, Facebook, etc.) anti-theme song, but in flipping through the available pages on Amazon, I'm wondering if that's where the song originated? It wouldn't be impossible that the like names are a coincidence, it's a somewhat common phrase, but the themes are uncannily similar.

http://www.amazon.com/Need-All-Friends-Can-Peanuts/dp/1933662395

I'm going to throw this in with my next order to Amazon. It's only six dollars american.

i like the name allthefriends....although like the alwaysontherun site....the name has no cameraobscura in it?although i`m sure you can link it to the name..the basic idea of having a definitive forum for the band may be harder for passers by to find(especially if they`ve only ever heard maudlin or french navy etc.......its a clever take on a lyric(allthefriends) and as a direct link(the way i put this one on myspace)it would work...but what about people scannin to find it with yahoo or google and their ilk.....forum visionaries pete and paul know more that me i reckon...and this thing may have a shelf life...good luck with any further "tartin"up of the site....................i must say,i like bein a part of it..............nice one...........

i agree, having both would be a good idea for newbs
it looks like obscuracamera.org is available (& .net, and all of them except .com if we stick a dash in). almost nothing with the name in the right order is... but you can do searches yourself on namecheap to see whats around. (note that everything other than the "big four" extensions, .com, .org, .net, .info, cost $29/year or more, not $9 -- it can get expensive)

someone offered up a while back www.cameraobscurafanclub. which although may sound cheesy(for people our"aghem"age)....i think there is a quaint 1970`s twang to it......and also theres the francis macdonald connotations...................

cameraobscurafanclub.com AVAILABLE
MORE CHOICES
cameraobscurafanclub.me AVAILABLE
cameraobscurafanclub.net AVAILABLE
cameraobscurafanclub.org AVAILABLE
cameraobscurafanclub.mobi AVAILABLE
cameraobscurafanclub.us AVAILABLE
cameraobscurafanclub.biz AVAILABLE
cameraobscurafanclub.info
Limited Time Offer! $2.98 for the first year. AVAILABLE
cameraobscurafanclub.tv AVAILABLE
cameraobscurafanclub.co.uk AVAILABLE
cameraobscurafanclub.org.uk AVAILABLE

sounds good to me.
the .com tld seem to be the most common and what most everybody expects to type at the end of their url, but i always seem to remember .info ones better. thoughts?
and cameraobscurafanclub.info is only $3, which is less than my lunch today cost. can't argue with that price. :)

leave it to you,gang...later......

Ehi, you stolen my idea!
So Graeme, it's exactly what i was talking about some week ago (there's a topic about, remember?)...well, anyway, you can count on me...i'm a webmaster (hope you like the site www.belleandsebastian.it) and first of all i'm in love with all about Tracy...

great stuff luca(pity i cant understand it like).......but thats the kind of thing,yeah......i do not have the technology.......put ya heads together and sort it...at your leisure,nice one...........

Luca, I recently have gotten into B&S and love the site! Nice work!!
I'll set you up with admin access on allthefriends... and send you the ftp pass.
Graeme, Luca, and Pete of course, can you PM me an email address I can contact you at? Thanks


So... I'm going to snag cameraobscurafanclub.info and mirror it with allthefriends soon if nobody disagrees. I could do .com or .org or whatever else no problem, but at this point I'm leaning toward .info since nobody has said either way. Let me know!!!

This all seems a rather exciting ! I don't know anything about setting websites up, just to clarify. My input would really be in compiling info for inclusion, if thats okay ? I suppose if the skeletol sp? Structure of the site was there, then I would task myself with doing the research to help out.

So whats the plan re site name = I'm a bit confused with your post above Paul, is the url cameraobscurafanclub but the site still called/subheaded allthefriendswecanget ??

Pete

Hi Luca !

Pete wrote:

So whats the plan re site name = I'm a bit confused with your post above G, is the url cameraobscurafanclub but the site still called/subheaded allthefriendswecanget ??

Here's basically how it works (or will work):
Some technical info, first. Website hosting is, for all intents and purposes, independent of the actual domain name the general public sees. Every webserver, where the mail, files, databases, etc. of a website are stored, has a numeric address assigned by the ISP that directs visitors directly to that computer (or cluster of computers, in most cases). But so that the general public doesn't have to memorize a bunch of 9-12 digit numbers, nameservers were set up that basically just redirect all the traffic from a domain name/URL to the actual numeric address of the computer where the website is stored.

With this being the case, you can actually have as many domains as you want pointing to the same webserver. In our case, we'll have two, one for the clever people (allthefriendswecanget.com), and one for the uber-newbs who are googling for c/o information, (cameraobscurafanclub.???), where the latter title would make more obvious sense to people who don't know the C/O catalouge yet. I'm going to set up all the mail and things to direct to the former however, as that will be the "primary" domain name for the website.

The title of the wordpress-installation I threw together real quick-like is "All The Friends We Can Get - The Camera Obscura Fan Club". It may change in the future depending on what everybody wants, but that sounded like a good allincompasing placeholder.

Clear as mud?




On another topic, anybody know or have this photo in a physical media? Like, is it printed on an EP or poster somewhere? I want to get a 200dpi (or higher) scan, if anybody has the means to do that.

http://www.alwaysontherun.net/cameraobscura.htm

just checked this site - what about the pic of Traceyanne here


I'm falling in love again ! Dont tell the wife !!

....are these eyes the coldest blue ?

absolutely clear Paul !!

in the meantime, if we were compiling info, as in "text" what format should this be in ? For example, if I started to work on say a band history, discography or site introduction.

also, can all this info be cut n paste from all over the net - I would assume unless people were credited, there would be copyright issues ? so most of this stuff would have to put in our words - so to speak ?


pete