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News
This is an opportunity that I regularly take to tell you about what we've done with Four on Four over the last year and what's coming up in the new year.
2020 In Review
2020 was a difficult year for everyone - being cooped up indoors due to the pandemic changed the way we live. Concepts like social distancing and stay at home orders although essential to keep us safe, were new to all of us. The pandemic gave us an opportunity to most of our time at home, in front of our computers and TVs but offered very little in musical inspiration. With all the music venues closed due to the pandemic, there were very few opportunities to see live music and get the creative juices flowing.
I spent much of the year working on the Four on Four site to continue improving it's usability, look and feel and set it up with good functional aspects that would support the improvements I have in store for this year. The Four on Four Music Portal underwent various enhancements this year, most notably:
- Completed work to make the site access control based on roles and permissions in version 4.12. This allowed us to lock down things as needed down to a functional level so we could restrict functions for guests while opening them up to more privileged users.
- Introduced revision history and page visits in version 4.13
- The CSS theming framework was implemented in version 4.14 which required us to decouple the site from some of the Bootstrap CSS styles, thereby implementing our own
- Sub-menus were implemented to compact the growing menu, both for music and for administrative options
- Posts, or news articles underwent a lift and shift with icons to provide context to clickable links for bands, albums, tracks and labels
- The categorization of news articles was rebuilt and several news categories can now be filtered on
- The post editor was refurbished with several more editor buttons and a preview panel
- Implemented functionality to keep track of 'listens' on music tracks. This is a foundational component that will be leveraged in 2021 to provide charts to the site.
Looking Ahead to 2021
I have ambition goals for 2021 and most excitedly, I'm proud to resurface an older but good line of sound called 'Logical Progression'. Logical Progression (LP) will differentiate itself from Four on Four dedicating itself to progressive house and progressive trance sounds which are very different from the future house and EDM sounds of Four and Four. The thought is start introducing new content and mixes under this channel this year and possibly even bring some remakes and remasters of old mixes that I recorded under that name many years ago. I'll have to spend some time coming up with the logo and you'll be able to filter on those LP mixes here on the site.
Aside from LP, I'm looking to release many more Radio shows and mixes this year - at least one a month - so that we can promote much more in terms of sound.
A big functional aspect I want to bring onto the Four on Four Music Portal this year is the concept of charts. I implemented functionality recently to capture track listens and I plan to extend that through out the site to be able to feed this into most listened labels, bands, albums and tracks. The other aspect that I'm interested in trying to implement is a 'mix bot' which will generate and recommend track listings for future mixes directly from our music inventory. Of course these are recommendations that provide just a strawman tracklist and get refined before they ever can become a mix.
More regular content and monthly updates. You will start seeing posts that are tagged with the month for which they are published - this is with the intent to avoid stale content and forcing me to refresh the site with new essentials, new mixes and new collections every month.
There are also some items which are planned to occur behind the scenes - for example, I'm currently architecting the framework to support test suites and test cases. This is in the spirit of making regression testing of the site more structured and consistent. The hope is that this would provide much better testing after enhancements are introduced and which at times have caused things in the site to break. This is intended to avoid the number of fixes that every release generates. I am also actively working on code versioning using Git with the thought that I can revert to working code should something go amiss after an update.Last but not least I wanted to let you know that we are releasing a new logo (which you can already see here on the news cover) to bring in the new year and give Four on Four a fresh look - so stay tuned for that!
In Conclusion
As always, a big thank you from me, DJ Alexander and Four on Four. Remember to stay safe, wear your mask and keep social distancing.
DJ Alexander