We Begin To Say Goodbye

IndieHeart will cease to broadcast in the Fall of 2011. To all of you, listeners and musicians alike, Sam and I thank you from the bottom of our hearts for all of your support through the years.

Why is the site closing? Simply put, I have struggled for a long time with finding the time and energy to keep the site going. There is also a money component, but I had made that much more manageable earlier in the year, so it is not as big a factor as it once was.

While I have loved doing the shows and finding such phenomenal music, doing it right just became too time consuming. This is why there have been so few shows in the past few years. For each band or solo artist who appears in the show, I listen to another twenty or so who didn't make the cut.

And then there's the radio station playlists, actual production of the shows, and site administration (you have no idea how much I hate web design, especially given how bad it all looks when I am done!)

I don't regret the time or money I have spent on IndieHeart. Not one jot. I always thought that my original energy level would return, but it is clear after a full year of neglecting the shows, it will not. That is the part that I regret! But we all reach stages in our lives when we have to rebalance ourselves and be realistic about what we can manage, and I now know that it is time to begin what I hope will be a graceful shutdown of the site.

From today, the rock station will stop broadcasting and the ability to sign up on the site as an artist or member will end. Members can still sign in to the site to administer playlists, etc.

The acoustic station and member playlists will remain available until September or so. Sam and I will also be finishing up with the final three Transatlantic Acoustic Shows in that time frame. I anticipate leaving the TA Shows available on the feed until around December, but I may keep an archive of those shows available for quite a long time. Perhaps Sam and I will back when I am retired and he and his wife have finished breeding!

Truthfully, there have been many times over the past couple of years when I decided it was time to pull the plug. And then I would get such lovely e-mails from a listener or two and change my mind again. We have had such a wonderful group of people joining us in our silliness and that kept me going for a long time! Thank you to all of you!

That's pretty much what I wanted to say about it. I will be sending notifications when changes occur that affect Artist and Member accounts.

I recently joined Facebook, and if any of you would like to be a friend (because you certainly are!), you can find me here. I think you'll find I pretty much just post music and videos by Indie artists. Because I can't really seem to help myself! Just let me know that you are a listener if you send a request, so that I don't have to think back to grade school to try to figure out how I know you :-)

Jill Nojack

Radio Station Upgrade!

It took two full days of work to get the stations on to a new server, and a number of frustrations as well. Because the stations are integrated into the site, it takes a site recode as well as setting up new playlists, etc. for the new server.

However, there are some nice improvements that have come out of me banging my head on my desk in frustration!

1. The Eclectic Acoustic Station now has port 80 streaming. This means that it will not be blocked by strict firewalls of the type often encountered in the workplace and various other locations. Nice!

2. The playlists will now be more varied throughout the day than ever, with very little work on my part to keep them that way. That's more than fine with me!

3. The lists on the radio pages of the "Last 10 Songs Played" now display correctly on the page, instead of all crammed together. I had given up on ever getting that right, but I gave it another go, and this time I got it! They should be much easier to look at now, for those of you who use them.

If you use a bookmark in your player, you can create a new one from the radio pages. However, if you want to create a bookmark that will follow the stations wherever they may go, you can edit your bookmarks with the following addresses.

For the rock station, replace the url with:

http://indieheart.com/rockplaylist.m3u

For the acoustic station, replace the url with:

http://indieheart.com/acousticplaylist.m3u

I don't know if that work in all players, but it works great in WinAmp.

As always, thanks for tuning in!

Jill

Radio Stations Down 1/25/2010

Both stations have been down due to problems at the hosting company since at least early this morning (Tuesday 1/25/2011). I notified them about 12 hours ago, but still no movement on their side.

If you visit the station pages, you will note that the recently played list will look pretty funky and links will not work. All related to the server problem (what with the server not being online and all).

Sorry about the inconvenience, but I have no control over this one.

Fans of the our rock station will probably enjoy WSPR (SongPlanet Radio) as an alternative until we are back online. Heck, you may like it so much you never return :-)

Thanks!

Jill