DJ Tony Z's Netmix Global House Sessions Podcast #11 streaming on MixCloud.com.
Tag: netmix
Netmix Global House Sessions Podcast Episode 10
DJ Tony Z's Netmix Global House Sessions Podcast, Episode 10.
Netmix Global House Sessions Podcast – November 2011
When I’m not toiling away in OmniGraffle, creating site maps, wireframes, and associated product documentation, you can find me creating DJ mixes using the digital audio workstation, Ableton Live. Before I got involved in building and managing really cool web products, I was a DJ in the Boston area. And, that’s where, in 1995, I launched Netmix.com. It was the first DJ culture website in the world to broadcast globally renowned DJs in the mix.
I originally ran the site out of my apartment in Brookline, MA. I paid a local web development shop about $10,000 over two-years to build and host the site and Real Audio streams. In 1996, I split up with my girlfriend at the time and moved to New York City to pursue fame and fortune as one of the first online music start-ups. After 5 difficult years working p/t to pay the bills and spending nights and weekends on Netmix, I sold the company for $3.165 Million in cash and stock. While that looks like a phenomenal sum on paper, it turned gold honey pot turned to a dark bronze.
Our deal closed on June 1st, 2000. I bought a few bottles of Moët & Chandon, then popped the cork in the office we were sub-leasing from one of my former partner’s friends on University Place at 10th Street in the West Village. I remember shedding a few tears of relief, for it was a long arduous journey from growing up in subsidized housing in the Allston section of Boston, to being handed a check for $100,000 with the next payment around the corner. Unfortunately, that payment never came. The bubble had burst and our parent company couldn’t raise a nickel to keep us alive. In fact, despite our combined traffic numbers and the dedication of our content team, our sales team hadn’t sold a dollar of advertising that summer. While Netmix was on its way to generating our first $100,000 in sales that year, our parent company folded only 6 months later. The advertising market bottomed out and the writing was on the wall.
After 6-years of continuous growth, Netmix went dark. I still have all the mixes. One day I’ll put them all online again.
It’s been 11-years since those tumultuous days of what is now called “dotcom 1.0.” In 2003, I discovered WordPress, a blogging platform that allowed me to bring Netmix back online as a blog. Since that time, I have published over 400 articles and launched my podcast, the Netmix Global House Sessions. It doesn’t matter where I am or what I’m doing–Netmix will always be live. It may not be as timely or as relevant as it once was. The inconsistent publishing schedule is evident and my mixes are the only audio on the site. But, I don’t do it for the money. I do to keep alive what I first started over 16-years ago. And, who knows where it will go.
In the spirit of Netmix, here is my latest Global House Sessions podcast. You can either listen to the SoundCloud version below, or subscribe to the podcast and download it with iTunes to your desktop or iOS device.
via Soundcloud
Rebuilding
English clergyman, John Donne once said, “No man is an island…” He may have been right then, but today, this one man (yes, that little construction worker above) is an island unto himself, rebuilding all of my web properties under my Netmix Media umbrella brick by brick. This entails converting all of my WordPress enabled web sites in a single, WordPress multisite network consisting of all the domains I operate. And, it involves exporting databases for each site and importing them into the multisite instance, moving all themes and plug-ins from each site into the new system, and then making sure all the media assets that are pulled over in the database transfer are properly linked.
I noticed that with my Netmix.com web site, a lot of the text content came over, but multimedia assets outside of the WordPress wp-content/uploads folder need to be fixed, as the links to these assets are broken. I also noticed that for every site that I employ NextGen Gallery, I’ve had to download the “gallery” folder from “wp-content” for each blog, and then recreate galleries in the new network. Unfortunately, no available plug-in exists to export NexGen galleries from a single site instance to a multi-site network. It has to be done manually. This, my friends, is a lot of work!
Many of the plug-ins I use for social media, like Twitter Tools or Intense Debate, need to be connected up correctly to each system. While multisite allows for a plug-in to be used across all the blogs in your network, each one has to be enabled with its own API key or login, to work correctly for each site. Nothing like publishing something here on TonyZeoli.com, and then have it appear on DigitalStrategyWorks, my digital strategy consulting company’s site.
Given my day job as Lead Developer at UNC Chapel Hill, this work has to take place nights and weekends. While I could put all the sites in maintenance mode to hide their various states, where some haven’t been updated with new content and others have layout issues, they don’t garner enough attention to justify shutting them down while I bring each one back to life.
At this point, I’m extremely busy with ensuring that we wind down Reese News web operations for a skeleton publishing staff, who will be contributing to the site for the summer. It will afford me the opportunity to migrate our media assets to a CDN, which should increase site performance and speed.
If you’re looking at this blog and wondering what the heck happened to my TonyZeoli.com publishing schedule, well, as you can see not much. My goal right now is not to publish to the blog, as much as it is to fix everything and get them all ready for the future. As each blog/site is updated, I’ll talk about those updates here. We can measure the progress together.
With that in mind, I’m working on revamping Netmix.com into a blog focused on web and mobile application design and development in the music industry. Other categories included education and careers, video, and the business of music as seen through the eyes of the individuals doing the work. It wont’ be so much a music news site, as it will be a blog with contributions from various players in most aspects of the music industry.
Thanks for stopping by and for cutting me some slack. I certainly need it!
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