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This week has been a great start to what promises to be a great year with LiveSoc. We opened proceedings with the Bunfight which was a great success. We had a laugh, good banter with the new freshers and over 300 sign-ups! That night we headed down to the Bar Monte for our first gig of the year. LiveSoc and AIM hosted the event and the atmosphere was great. The music was great and the bar was full of students loving the music creating an atmosphere that was simply immense! On Friday we headed down to The Hobbit Pub to see an old favourite band of LiveSoc, Yellowgroove. They delivered with a great show, playing some of their own new tunes as well as song supprisingly good alternative covers too. Finally though, the LiveSoc Jamming Session. The expected crowd showed and the Jam started up and we had an hour of great improvised Jams; rock, funk, metal and blues! The jam was unfortunately cut short, but we took the Jam out onto the concourse. Acoustic jamming, a good sing-song, drinks, but one get one free pizzas and great banter. Thanks to everyone who made the opening week a memorable one.

LiveSoc, Aim and SUSU put on a great gig last night at the Bar Monte and thanks to all of those came and made it such a good atmosphere. If the rest of LiveSoc's events are this good then we will be a freekin' awesome society this year. We opened proceedings with Jack Winter who played good, relaxed set. The Dave Gillani Experience then stepped up and were great! It's all about the Cobras, Cobras, Cobras! (sorry, inside gag). Then the infamous Dance Barry Dance headlined and got the crowd nice and pumped up with the fun madness! Great music, great people, great atmosphere, great night! Hopw you can all come down to our next event.

Welcome all of you wonderful freshers! LiveSoc has already got the ball rolling with our first gig which was a great success. If you missed it, dont worry, we have a stack of event lined up over the coming weeks and we're sure you're gonna love them!

Our next event is a gig by a good southampton band called Yellowgroove. We will be heading to the Hobbit Pub for 8pm (directions to the hobbit) and will see where the night takes us from there! Then on Sunday 2nd we have the infamous LiveSoc jamming session at the Cube (in the student union). Bring your guitars, basses, and any other instruments you like and we'll provide the drums and amps for you.

Next week we have three gigs lined up for you! LiveSoc and AIM will rock up to Glen Eyre Halls Bar on Monday 3rd for another collaborative gig; Tuesday 4th we have our first open mic night, but with a twist! It's at the Bent Brief pub this time and we will run this event every fortnight (and will usually be at the Bridge Bar on campus). On Wednesday 5th we have event with the Ethical Society (details to be confirmed).

More and more events will be announced so make sure you keep an eye on the facebook page, twitter feed and emails. We are determined to make this the best society of the year for you all!

Alex just pointed out to me that the times of upcoming events on the front page were out by an hour. Sorry about that! It's fixed now, so hopefully noone will turn up an hour early any more!

it's getting there...

there have been a lot of changes, many under the hood and many visible.

examples of visible stuff: nice submenus, there's an Atom feed as well as RSS, the venues map is much better (and you can rate the venues – not sure how useful that is but i thought i'd give it a go), there's a buddy list so the musicians you know or want to start bands with appear on the members submenu and you can send emails to other members by clicking the button from their profile page. (email addresses aren't shown except in emails you send, and you can opt out of being contactable on the settings page.) oh, and there are nice URLs throughout the site now, rather than dot-php and question marks and ampersands all over the place. your profile, for instance, is now at livesoc.co.uk/members/yourusername.

i want your feedback! suggestions, bug reports, broken links, error messages... the only thing i don't want to hear about is how crap the site looks in Internet Explorer at the moment (especially IE6) – that's very near the top of my to do list and i'll get to it soon. my email address is over on the contact page.

my to do list for Livesoc is a bit like this (in rough order of priority):

• finish testing everything which used to work but now might not
• wrestle with IE until things look about right and work properly (mostly)
• finish the forum (which is going to be extremely awesome – i'm coding it from scratchums). when this goes live everyone'll also be able to comment on news articles.
• search feature on the members' list
• link our Facebook page up to the news on the website so we don't have to post everything twice
• maybe the same for the newsletter
• teachers database
• Livesoc shop

got more ideas? let me know.

maps on profiles haven't been working for a while since geocoding full UK postcodes through Google apparently wasn't supposed to work and they noticed and fixed it. so now on your musician's profile update page you click on a map to say where you live. go do that. postcodes are no longer necessary and have been deleted from the database.

more useful (and that's "some which actually are useful" rather than "further, which, like this one, are useful") features coming soon.

i cocked up a bit last week – made a pretty big change and didn't test everything properly. unbeknownst to me, i screwed up registration. thanks to a tipoff, i've now found the problem and fixed it.

so if you've tried to register in the last few days and received only horrible error messages, try again now – everything should be tickedy-boo.

hey folks

the members list is now active. clicking a member's username gets you their musician's profile if they've made one. and if they've given a location that Google understands you'll get a nice map!

there's now an extra page in the members' area which allows you to upload a photo. this will go beside your profile. hopefully it'll help people remember who's who and remind you who you've met at events.

i should mention that you need to be logged in (and therefore a Livesoc member) to view the members list.

features i've yet to code are a search function and some mechanism for contacting the user. (since you can't do that yet it's a good reason to get to Livesoc events.) and i still need to fix the edit musician's profile page (it currently shows your instrument skills wrongly, but stores them correctly). [2007-10-24 edit: this has now been fixed.]

then as soon as Sam uploads some photos i'll get the galleries working. then i'm going to code a simple forum from scratch. perhaps let you comment on news articles too. and teachers' profiles are on the to do list.

mail me with any comments or suggestions at bjn104 at ecs dot soton.ac.uk.

Hey folks.

Some exciting new stuff is done: most importantly, you can now post your musician's profile in the members' area. Do so. You can't see other people's just yet, but that feature should be available very soon. Let us know if you play an instrument that isn't on the list and we can add it – the same goes for genres (but we don't want to go too specific there).

And be sure to gape at how awesome the venues page is. The rest of the committee will hopefully be adding more info and more venues to that over the next few days.

Update: I've now noticed a problem in my code which means when you go to edit your musician's profile the instrument skill levels won't be right. They are, however, being stored correctly. I don't have time to fix this just now, but will do as soon as I can.

Hey everybody.

Welcome to the new Livesoc website. It's not fully featured quite yet and it's so new that the committee haven't even signed up again, but go ahead and join! All the greyed out links will be active within a few days, and the ability to post your musician's profile will appear soon too. Becoming a member sticks you on our mailing list, and you'll get an email when I complete any major features.

Please email me at bjn104 at ecs dot soton.ac.uk if you have suggestions or problems.

This site hasn't been, and won't be, tested in IE. If you're using that, there should be a section telling you why right now, and how to do something about it.