Some exciting things have been keeping me busy. Once this "upgrading" phase is over, I'll be back to focusing more on writing. But here's what's been up.
To make this community complete, I've been thinking of a system where you all can be more involved. I mean, what makes me any more worthy of being on the platform, compared to you guys? Meanwhile, Mike (of switchfootbootlegs.com) has had similar ideas, so we've been talking about how to bring all this together (bootlegs, blog, fanspace, forums). So I came up with a MySpace-like community section (which was Mike's idea), where you guys can blog and be heard too in the Switchfoot community, have your own profile page, and you can post your own videos and audio! (The only limitations being 25mb for video files, and 8mb for audio files. If you have something good that's bigger and you don't know how to compress it, we'll help.) This is not the official launch of this service (which is why you don't yet see a "log in / join" box on this page), but this is a sneak preview. I wanna see how well this thing actually works, and for that I need people - beta testers. So here's the link to it, folks. It's like a YouTube (but with audio and blogging) that's just for our community - you can tag, comment, rate, and there's also rankings like "most popular", "most viewed", etc. It will be further customized and improved (the text in the header graphic will be changed to "community" instead of "weblog", for one) - we'll also be working on finding a way to tightly integrate the community section, bootlegs, the forums, and this blog, so you can use the same login/password for both the vBulletin forums and for the community section. I hope this experiment proves a success so we can officially set up a login widget on this page.
Anyway, enough of the techie mumble jumble, there's even more exciting news. On the very date we hit our 3-month mark, Tim got in touch with me about having switchFeed republished (through RSS resyndication) on switchfoot.com and on the Footsoldiers site. Of course I gleefully agreed and got the code for the Footsoldiers site ready, and hopefully it will be up today. Meanwhile, "they're working with their webmaster on getting the feed on their main site as well." I didn't see this one coming - it's such an incredible honor, and I just wanna thank the guys once again for being like no other band. And I wanna thank you all for supporting this venture and for reading regularly - a special thank-you to those who comment and contribute - without all of you this wouldn't have been possible! Congratulations, I love you all.
As a token of our appreciation, the extremely talented John (who's the other admin at switchfams) and I are thinking of putting together a live DVD of the Vancouver show that Switchfoot played on the 19th - complete with menus, chapters, etc. To do this, we need your help, if you attended the show! If you have ANY footage of that show, whether good or bad, we would greatly appreciate it if you could send it to us (switchfeed AT gmail DOT com). Ofcourse, we'll credit you. The more video footage we get, the more camera angles we'll have. The DVD will be of decent quality (we already have some quality footage and the 6 bootlegged audio tracks, and not to mention, John has major skills). We plan to send it out to whoever's interested, for no profit - all we'd ask for is the cost of shipping. So please send us your videos! If you need help getting it across to us, send us an email anyway and we'll help you out.
Lastly, Vicky found me a cover of "Let That Be Enough", done in a bedroom on YouTube, and it's actually good.
dear phil, I have been a long time reader, and I want to say thank you for doing such a great job with the site. Congratulations on the 3 months, etc. God bless.
Ben
PS The DVD sounds like a great idea, I'm definetly interested.
Phil and the rest of the Switchfeed team, Long time reader, first time commenter here (if you can call less than 3 months a long time, I'm not exacly sure when I discovered your site..). And I just have to say that I am so stoked for you all! I'm so glad that you are getting the appreciation that you deserve. I also love that fact that you are taking the time to make all of the Switchfoot faMs a real community. Keep up the amazing work, I deffinately get *excited* every time there is something new. God Bless.
wow Phil! wow! that's all I can say about all that you're doing. I really like what you are trying to do to unite all switchfoot fans. And I'm glad to hear that the guys are so supportive of what you're doing. That's AWESOME! Keep up the great work man!
Oh and I had an idea about something...but I'll email ya about that.
i just joined, phil. amazing! take care.
p.s. - you're free and easy.