Band Websites Suck.

Much like university websites, band websites suck. It is just too hard to archive all news items and to compile a complete list of concerts and releases. There have been some promising sites but one by one they got sacked. A lack of updates would have been bad. Still, every band homepage I’ve ever cherished has been cut down during the past 13 years. There might be a couple of artists I’m not really a fan of who still have a proper web presense. And there are, of course, some fan sites that provide all the info. (That’s what I attempt to do on anglagard.net.) Most offical band pages, however, have simply been replaced by shallow marketing schemes. New album out soon! Winter tour dates. And only then did they stop the updates. It used to make me angry. Now it only makes me sad, because I still don’t see why the old stuff has to go as soon as a new album is coming out. Our rather, a new social media campaign manager is on board.

Partei gesucht

Gibt es eigentlich auch eine Partei, die sich dafür einsetzt, dass Blind Guardian ab sofort wieder gute Musik schreiben und endlich mal eine informative Homepage mit übersichtlichem Layout bekommen?

Practical tips for statisticians (part 6)

The homepage colorbrewer2.org is a valuable tool for choosing colours for maps. The colour sets can be made colorblind-safe and photocopy-able. So you don’t get the usual (often distracting) MS Excel default rainbow, but highly usable colour palettes which can easily be used for other data plots, as well.

(via today’s Statalist digest)