Announcements

That album cover issue mentioned in the previous news item should be corrected now.  I was able to delete any duplicate entries in the database.  However, not all of the albums have their correct album covers replaced.  That will happen over time.

It seems that there was a glitch in moving servers, in that some images were overwritten with other images.  Not sure what caused it, but we're working on cleaning them up.  So, if you see some wrong album covers, you now know why.

We've moved to a new server. I'd like to apologize if the site disappeared for you for a few days. The place where I registered my domain was broadcasting the wrong IP address for a while, but I think I've got it resolved now. Besides that, everything went smoothly. I've updated the look of the albums by year page and the bands by country page. I hope people like the new format; I find it vastly more useful than the previous incarnation.

The server crashed on Sunday with a corrupted filesystem. While I was able to get back on the server to repair things by 3:00 Utah time, I felt that I should back up the existing data before attempting repair. So, due to the large amount of data I needed to download, we remained offline until around 11:00 Utah time. I apologize for leaving the server down all day, and I'm happy to report the repair was successful. I'm working on extending the automated backup process to include offsite copies of backups so future occurrences (if any) will result in less downtime.

We have begun adding DVDs and VHS to the discographies. We'd held off for a long time, thinking there was some technical limitation, but when we realized they basically go in the same way as albums, we started adding them. Only a few so far, but that will grow over time.

Some other new features will be coming eventually, but no planned schedule at this point. Most of the work lately is on the administration side of things, to make it easier and faster to add new bands.

The search crawler apparently died a while ago, and I hadn't been checking up on it. So, the search index is about a month out of date. It's running again and should catch itself back up within a few days.

My apologies to those of you who use the search box. I'll write a monitoring script to restart the crawler if it dies.

If this page looks all jacked up, hit Reload. I hope y'all dig the new home page. I also moved a few links around to consolidate the navigation. Feedback is always appreciated.

The big news is that you now have an easy way to report errors or suggest a band to be added. We hope that provide an opportunity for those of you who want to help the site, but don't really want to apply to be a librarian.

More changes to come.

Librarius Metallicus is 4 years old, as of a couple weeks ago.

Oh, and I've created a Myspace page for us to keep in better contact with the metal community.

http://www.myspace.com/librariusmetallicus

If you're in a metal band and have a myspace site, go ahead and add us. We'll do our best to make sure all of the bands on our Friends list get entries on the site.

Okay, you'll probably notice the design changes. If you don't, hit the refresh button on your browser to clear the cached stylesheet. This is the first step in cleaning up the design of Librarius Metallicus. Please, tell me what you think of the changes (Contact Me). If they are generally liked, I will continue to make more improvements.

It took much longer than expected, but the new search box is up and running finally. So, without further ado, I present the new and improved Librarius Metallicus.

I hope you dig the new stuff, and expect further incremental improvements to come.

Oh, and say hello to your new overlord, Goreripper. He's running the site now (see below).

Goreripper is now the Head Librarian.

I wanted to publicly acknowledge that Goreripper will be taking over admin duties of this database. When I began the site, I had a lot more free time to work on it and a lot more motivation. Since then my life has changed drastically, and I just haven't been able to keep up with this site as much as it deserves. So, from now on, Goreripper will be handling the database administration, librarian recruiting, site promotion, and pretty much everything except the programming. That leaves me to focus on the technical end of things and continue to provide improvements to the site from that end. So, congratulations and thanks are in order for Goreripper.

Welcome to the new Librarius Metallicus. It isn't officially launched yet, as we want some time to add some data to the new sections and clean up old data using new features. Once it's official, I'll add another news item.

What's new? Well, from your perspective, it may not look like much has changed, but there have been a load of new navigation features added. You can now search bands by location, band status (Active, Disbanded, etc). Bands that have changed names will have a link to the new band entry (and the new band entry will link back to the old name). Albums can be listed under multiple bands, making split albums much easier to deal with. Guest appearances are separated from real lineups, so you can more easily tell if your favorite drummer was in the band or just playing on the album. Under the new Links section, you can view an alphabetical listing of all band, label, and musician homepages in the database. There are also various other categories of metal-related sites to check out. You can find out more info about the Librarians in the new Librarians section, or more easily contact any of them using the Contact Us link. Browsing by genre and year has improved, as well.

That pretty much covers it. We hope you dig the new features, and we hope to continue to add more in the future. If you'd like to be a librarian yourself, fill out an application using the link just above this section.

Oh, and about the Search box not working; I'll get to that before we launch.