I didn't know about the 24 hour thing. It's nothing to worry about - I get over a thousand hits per day, and I've never had that happen to me.

You seriously could have two or three mp3 blogs going off one mac account - at any given time, I've got at least 20 songs on my server, in addition to photos and other things that the owner of the account has put there.

As has been discussed over in the comments on my blog... I REALLY like this idea.

And I like even more the idea of setting up a syndication website for all of the diverse and many MP3 Blogs. After all, now that Blogger does RSS, it should be fairly simple for someone (more technically proficient than I) to just pluck the most recent entries from every MP3 blog and toss them onto one clearinghouse page. We could even have some fun and do a rotating "featured Blog" spot in some way or try to get some ad support going...

I would be interested in taking part in something like this and would happily put money in the kitty.
My father is a rare record dealer and has clued me into a ton of afro-pop, jazz, blues and vintage rnb... all of which I really don't see as having a home on the web anywhere.
I've been wanting to contribute, but my lack of web-savvy is a hindrance. Drop me a line in the "talk to me" section of my blog if you'd be willing to let me tag along.

I agree that Sean and Keith and others should definetly get their situations sorted so we can continue to download their track! The TV on the Radio tracks were great and I was definetly in the "heard of them / haven't heard them" camp before. Also, while I'm sure I would have heard the new DivCo and Modest Mouse elsewhere eventually, I was greatly pleased to hear it here first! So yes, by all means, get .mac accounts or another bandwidth solution and I'd be willing to pitch in too. I would imagine other listeners/readers/whatever would as well! The RSS syndication sounds awesome as well, if possible. If a non-Blogger option is necessary, I'd be glad to help set up Movable Type or some such. My only concern is: does this seem like too much of a valid business model to succeed? =P

ps. What happens if you overload a 1&1 account?

you get an email saying "Your account has been locked" and at the first of the next month it opens up again.

And y'know, the more I talk about this - and especially after you put it all so succinctly, the more it really does sound like a business model.

Hey Eric, flt, thanks for the comments.

It looks like some very generous soul may be donating a dot-mac account to mine and Keith's causes: we should have further details soon. In the mean time, please do pursue RSS nonsense. I know next to nothing about it, but I think it'd be a great idea. If anyone is technically minded...

re "going commercial," I'm not really comfortable making any money from posting other peoples' creative (copyrighted) work.

Oh, and about 1and1 accounts, Keith's not totally right. If you haven't given them a credit card number, they suspend your account permanently, until you do. If they have your credit card number, they just charge you $ for all of your excess bandwidth.

Which is why I never gave them a number.

And agreed about not going commercial for reasons of copyright - and doing this for the love.

But I really wouldn't mind breaking even one of these days if I do end up spending some money on bandwidth.

As to syndicating... I know enough to know that it is technically possible, but not much more. So. Yeah, an open call to someone who knows what he's doing... maybe I'll make a post over at MFA.

I can't believe someone has responded sooner.

Movable Type already has several templates for syndication filetypes available. I believe RDF, RSS, and XML are supported.

If you're not able to find the support pages for these on your own, gimme a holler. I know how to set it all up. Just let me know what you need.

and it seems blogger only does RSS on premium, which complicates things slightly possibly. Though it may well be that thats a few dollard well spent. Unless this Atom thing they tout so highly is worth jack shit. hmmm. well, I posted a help wanted over at MFA as well, so mayhaps we'll get some other interesting ideas from that sector.

Forksclovetofu, I'm really excited about you getting set up with an mp3 blog, because what you want to post sounds great. You'll get a big audience very quickly with that stuff, I think. Good luck!

Yeah, I didn't at all mean that turning a profit should be a goal here or anthing. I guess I was just amused at how much sense an arrangement like this makes, compared to some of the ridiculous DRM being attempted by iTunes, Napster, et al.

BTW, I think to make this RSS thing work, there are a couple of ways to go about it. None of them is at all a perfect solution. One, if everyone who wants to be involved can configure their site to output rss (via Atom or Premium or whatever). Then a "master" site could theoretically grab all of these feeds and update itself periodically (every 10 minutes or something) grabbing post text and direct file/download links. Or, depending on how individual bloggers wanted things to work, it could be configured so that visitors had to go to the actual blog before downloading any files. Either way the MP3s would all be hosted remotely, so there wouldn't be too much chance of the master site getting overloaded. If bloggers can't get RSS working, there's still the possibility the master site idea could work (could still just periodically check to see if the other sites had updated, but we couldn't get any of the content without doing some manual HTML scraping [kind of a pain]). Alternately, there could be one master site that everyone had post permission for, but everyone would be required to link MP3s posted here off of their own sites. I guess this would kind of defeat the idea of people having their own blogs tho. RSS really does seem like the best way, even if it's only like: "FluxBlog was modified at 11:30... Gramophone was modified at 11:45..." or whatever. Continuing to look into it.

Posted a test page that check for updates here and a few other places. Check it out at:

http://universal.antinomian.com/

And see what you think. Right now it checks every 5 minutes and it can't tell the difference between new posts and comments, but I think I could work on this...

It hasn't updated since 5:20 today. Was it turned off? or is it just not working?

Hmm... it seems to work after all. We all just suck and don't update in the afternoons EST.

Looks promising, Eric! Thanks for all the hard work! The only change I'd make is that rather than hammering our servers (well, hammering is a strong word), maybe it could just check blogs once an hour? Thoughts?

Ha ha... Yeah, every 5 minutes may be a bit too much, I guess. I'll fix that. The other thing I really want to add is RSS support on my end, so that people with RSS readers or whatever could get automatic updates whenever there's a change.

If anyone can give me any info on the Gramophone or on the Vinyl Record i would really like it. I have been looking on the internet for over 3 days now and i can not find any information. please if u have any info please contact me at ashl3730@edhs.scdsb.on.ca

thank u

ashley