Joshua van Aalst’s blog

This article applies to both www.joshandfriends.com.au and www.gayscene.com.au

1) Update your profile regularly! The site gives preference to DJs that update their profiles regularly by featuring them on the home page.

2) ALWAYS PUT INFORMATION IN YOUR PROFILE. If you upload a profile with just a picture and a title that will be no use to anyone. Who’s going to get excited about a DJ they know nothing about? Make sure you list your top tunes. What influences your style and makes your performances individual.

3) Ensure that events you are performing at are listed on the site. If the promoter hasn’t listed the event on the site then both you and they are missing out on the exposure! The site will automatically build a gig guide of past and upcoming gigs for you and notify your fans that their favourite DJ is playing at an event. We can’t do this if the events aren’t listed. Phone or email the promoter/event organiser and tell them to get the event up!

4) Ensure that you are linked to all events you are performing at. We can not construct your upcoming event guide and notify fans of your performance if you are not linked to the events! If you see an event that you are performing at but are not linked to then notify the creator of the event listing via a private message or email. You can do this by clicking on their name under the heading “Created by” on the event’s page. The more links to your DJ profile the more people browsing the site will see it.

5) Email your fans!! Some DJs have massive fan clubs on the site. We have a wonderful feature called “Email fan club” which will send a bulk email to all your fans. It even builds an upcoming gig guide for you!! You can find the button to launch this feature just above your fan club. Give it a try!

6) Put up a mix download and link it to your profile. Adding a mix will give you even greater visibility on the site. You can add one here: http://www.joshandfriends.com.au/dancemusic/Download/Create

7) List your tracks by text in the description box of your’ downloads. Why? Because search engines can only scan text not images. For example if someone searches for “Downloads with Alphazone Flashback” we want your mix to come up.

… Lastly if something is not working tell us! We can’t fix it if you don’t notify us. Please email me here josh@joshandfriends.com.au .

Hi everyone,

You might find this interesting if you are promoting on www.joshandfriends.com.au or www.gayscene.com.au

Top 10 tips for promoters and event organisers

1) Create a news article about your event and you will be listed on the top of the home page. This is the most unused section on the site and it is also the most viewed! Also now that only 2 weeks worth of events can be seen in the “What’s on” list (in the left nav), it is even more important to promote your event if it is far away.

a. Click the “Create News” link from the “News” menu.

b. Click the “News” menu and then click the “Create” button in the middle of the ‘News” screen.

c. Click on any event on the site and click the “Create Another News” button at the top of the screen.

2) NEVER put information straight on the forums! Only a percentage of our readers go to the forums. Make sure you maximize your readers by creating a News, Interview, Competition, Review or Event item.

a. A forum thread will automatically be generated for you.

b. Your item will be listed on the home page.

c. A notification email will be sent to users who are interested in what you have listed.

3) Create a competition or giveaway for your event. We now have a new menu and forum just for competitions and giveaways. This has been one of the most requested features from the users – To add a competition do 1 of the following:

a. Click the “Create Competition” link from the “Competitions” menu.

b. Click the “Competitions” menu and then click the “Create” button in the middle of the ‘Competitions” screen.

c. Click on any event on the site and click the “Create Another Competition” button at the top of the screen.

4) Always put text in the description of your events and other items. Our site is highly optimized for searching and when search engines index it they can only read text! There is nothing better than typing in Google “What’s happening this weekend for Trance in Sydney” and your event appearing first. There is also no point uploading an event with just a title and a date. People can’t get excited about it if they know nothing about it!

5) Link your events to all your DJs! If your DJs don’t have profiles on the site then email them and tell them to get their profiles up! Linking is important as it makes your item appear more important in the eyes of search engines and more likely to appear at the top of their results. It is also important as it makes your event more visible throughout the site. When people visit DJ Arbor’s profile they’ll see him listed as performing at your event. Also when you link to DJs their fan clubs will be notified via email that their favourite DJs are playing at your event. We can’t do this if you don’t link to all your DJs!!!

6) Get your event listed early. People plan their weekends and often groups of site members will arrange to go out together. If your event is not up it’s not an option! – To add an event do 1 of the following:

a. Click the “Create Event” link from the “Events” menu.

b. Click the “Events” menu and then click the “Create” button in the middle of the ‘Events” screen.

c. Click on any event on the site and click the “Create Another Event” button at the top of the screen.

7) Sponsorship. We are currently offering sponsorship for events (free banner, feature ads and inclusion in the mail out). If you would like your event sponsored then please email josh@joshandfriends.com.au .

Upload photos of your event. We have a wonderful photo gallery that is really easy to use and lets anyone upload photos. You can find how to use it here: http://www.joshandfriends.com.au/forums/photos-movies/4867-all-users-can-now-create-albums-upload-photos.html

9) If something is not working tell us! We can’t fix it if you don’t notify us. Please email me here josh@joshandfriends.com.au .

10) Create a company profile and email your fan clubs! We have a cool feature that allows you to email all your fan club members at once.

a. Click the “Create Company” link from the “Companies” menu.

b. Click the “Companies” menu and then click the “Create” button in the middle of the ‘Companies” screen.

c. Click on any company on the site and click the “Create Another Company” button at the top of the screen.

d. Once your company has been created and you have fans then scroll down your companies page and you’ll see an “Email Fan Club!” button just above your fan club.

Approximately 2 weeks ago I added Google adsense banners to the top of my sites www.joshandfriends.com.au and www.gayscene.com.au . The aim? To raise some money for the increasing cost of web hosting due to site growth.

Adsense = When you put Google banners and adds on your site for other sites
Adwords = When you pay Google to advertise on their search or their adsense network of sites.

We are currently doing an average of 20,000 unique visitors per month on Josh and Friends alone.

Over the 2 weeks that the advertisements have been up we have generated a total of US $3.67 . I could say that is a joke but I think the number speaks for itself.

To make matters worse lets look at how much I was paying Google when i was using their advertising program adwords to advertise on other similar sites to mine.

I was paying between 39 cents and 75 cents a click (Australian). Average of 57 cents. At current exchange rate (84 Australian cents to 1 US dollar) that is 48 cents per click I pay Google.

So how much does Google give back when i put their banners up? I’ve had 62 clicks in the 2 weeks which averages out to 6 cents.

So Google’s markup per click is 42 cents a whopping 88%!!!!!

You can see why their the worlds most successful company right now.

I am currently looking for another advertising agency. One which doesn’t take 88% of revenue. Send me an email josh@joshandfriends.com.au if you know any or reply to this entry.

If you thought Google was the dominant search engine then think again!

Here is an interesting result from www.joshandfriends.com.au .

So far for the first 18 days of June Google search and Google images was responsible for a whopping 97.7% of inbound links from a search engine. That is 5,056 inbound hits.

Compare that to Yahoo with 0.2% with 15 inbound hits and MSN Live with 0.1% and 9 sultry inbound hits.

That’s an insane result. I would have expected Google was maximum around 80% of inbound hits.

To compound this the site actually ranks higher in Yahoo and MSN Live than it does in Google!

Hi all,

Winston Prakash has posted a great blog about the www.joshandfriends.com.au, www.gayscene.com.au and the new www.stratacentral.com.au series of sites on his block here:

http://blogs.sun.com/winston/entry/realworld_webapp_using_vwp

I’d like answer two posts in regards to the site:

______________________________________

A. Varela - Can you please elaborate a bit on how Josh is using converters on his website?

A. Varela - Can you please elaborate a bit on how Josh is using converters on his website?

Their are a couple of issues here. The main one is that I want the URLS to be SEO friendly. Something like http://www.joshandfriends.com.au/Events/Create

The issue with using a standard VWP faces component is it won’t generate SEO URLs. I use converters to examine an object and create a SEO URL from it. On the inbound side the Servlet Filter interprets these URLs and forwards them to the correct VWP jsps.

For example if i were to pass an object instance of Class “au.com.jaf.News” to a converter called converter.LinkConverter.

The output would be something like /News/VWP_5_5_1 _released_2345

… where 2345 is the id of the instance.

This also occurs with my Images which are surrounded by a href.. tags

I also find Converters very useful for fine grained control of the output. All my images have alt and title attributes. All the links have title attributes.

I didn’t use custom tags as I don’t really like configuring a tld each time i change something.

You can also use converters for generating HTML tags that aren’t realised in the VWP or MyFaces component libraries. UL and OL tags are an issue here.

______________________________________

JJ - Does the site load in the Visual Designer or does it have to entirely be updated in the jsp view? If it doesn’t load in the designer I don’t see the point.

You raise an excellent point. The answer depends on the following:

1) If you are using a static skin (via CSS) then the sites layout will show correctly.

1b) If you are NOT using a static skin i.e. the user can choose skins for the site (like in the case of my site). Then it will never display correctly in VWP designer view. — That being said you can still use the designer! Use the Outline Window to reach you components and the properties window to edit the components.

2) Dynamic images will never load so the Designer view will look kind of weird even if it does display.

So the question is why use the designer at all when it only correctly renders primarily static sites with dynamic text?

For many reasons:

1) The designer is very useful for prototyping up the page before you add dynamic content. I do use it for prototyping up pages which use relative positing i.e. a Dream Weaver generated html templates.

2) I often use the designer to configure properties/values of components rather than the docos. It is very easy to use (and see what’s available) via the VWP properties window and the Outline VWP window.

3) The designer does a great job of some useful code generation. A prime example is the actions for paging on outputTables. Without the designer I’d have to have done it myself.

4) For quicklky testing action event combinations. I often use simple designer pages to test combinations of auto-submit on changes and complex components. You can knock up a test on your code base asap.

Hope the responses were useful.

Thanks,
Josh

p.s. I’ll ask my web designer to post up some locations to download predefined stock HTML templates.

Yep thats right. Off in about 6 hours.

I will be reachable as always at josh@joshandfriends.com.au

If you need urgent help and i’m not around ….

For all www.joshandfriends.com.au inquiries please contact Megan userid “The Schmoo” on the forums. She has the power to do anything

For all www.gayscene.com.au inquiries please contact “Ghost” on the forums.

Alright… I’ve been asked about this twice yesterday so it’s obviously a little hard to see. Until we can improve the placement of the Create a banner and Manage banner buttons here is an image of where they are

Please note this is the same for adding a Feature image in the right nav (the image under the text that says “Feature”).

CLICK HERE TO SEE IMAGE

Probably the most powerful feature on the new www.joshandfriends.com.au and www.gayscene.com.au websites and also the most underused!

At the time of writing only 13 out of 1850 members were using it.

What are classifications?

Classifications are a way of seeing only the content in the menus, left nav, right nav and home page that interests you!

This done by stating a general description of what a piece of content (a DJ, an event, a download) is. For example:

A Night Of Trance is a Trance Music Event in Sydney

Weaver is a Hardcore DJ in Sydney

By using the Preferences & Classifications link at the top of your favourite site you can choose from:

Locations:

Sydney n NSW
Brisbane n Queensland
Melbourne n Victoria
National (Australia)
International

Music Styles:

Trance / Hard Dance
Electro / House / Breaks
Hardcore / Hardstyle / Gabba
Rock / Alternate
RnB / Hip Hop / DnB

So to sum up. If your in Melbourne and like Electro. You can choose to see just Electro content from Melbourne. That means you won’t see ANYTHING from Sydney or other states!

Try it out today:

Preferences & Classifications

After writing twice to Google to ask why our site www.joshandfriends.com.au was banned from adwords and unlisted in all searches I received this automated reply back:

Hello Joshua,

Thank you for your email. I understand that your are unable to see your ads. Below, I have addressed this in detail.

Your ads were disapproved per our ‘Unacceptable Content’ policy. When reviewing your ads, AdWords Specialists found that your ad directs users to a website that either contains (or claims to contain) copyrighted TV shows, movies, or music that cannot be distributed freely online, or your website promotes the availability of such material without the consent of the copyright holder.

At this time, your website does not meet our policies. Please do not submit ads or websites in violation of this policy in the future.

What the???

Come on Google. Name 1 thing that is unacceptable on our site. What is copyrighted?

a) All the music on our site are either produced by local producers like S Dee or promo mixes of the likes of Oliver Leighs where Olly is a Massif DJ and has approval for their tracks.
b) Megaupload has tones of illegal content and they don’t ban them.

We have a free community website designed to support the underground dance music scene. A scene that is often trodden on by the main stream styles and is yet to have a big web 2.0 site to push it.

Seriously….

It’s just laughable. The company that owns YouTube the number 1 site for copyright infringement is picking on a small free community site!

Guess i’ll go spend my money with Yahoo.

Finally finished writing this. It’s pretty much what my life was for the past 3.5 years! So here it is:

Who are Josh and Friends?

Josh and Friends is a dance music event business which promotes and produces dance music events in Sydney.

The Josh and Friends group also operates a free community Web2.0 enabled website www.joshandfriends.com.au .

The History

* please note that attendance figures are based on door takes at the end of the night.

2003- The Dawn

Josh and Friends was originally born as a small party for Joshua van Aalst and his friends (James Deucker and Selina Combs), where they could DJ and produce their own event.

The initial party was called A Night At The Palace and was held on the 22nd of August 2003 at the Palace hotel (corner of Flinders and South Dowling St’s Surry Hills). The party was a wonderful success with over 100 people turning out to enjoy the music and dance. A friendly vibe with freebies handed out throughout the night, a mailing list also was collected.

Following the success of the first party a second event was held at the Palace Hotel in conjunction with Scott Richardson from Trance Tribe. The then owner of the Palace Hotel notified that the venue was to be sold to Pubboy management and no more events could be guaranteed.

Not wanting the journey to end and still heavily focused on DJ’ing, Joshua van Aalst contacted one of Sydney’s longest running (9 years) underground venues, The Icebox (now Saphire Suite at Keller St Kings Cross). The owner Charlie Sailor was quick to respond and invited the event to his club.

The event; A Night At The Icebox was the first Josh and Friends event to be widely promoted both in collaboration with Trance Tribe and also via a street poster run.

The first A Night At The Icebox on the 3rd of December 2003 was a massive success with almost 300 in attendance. The feedback on the underground internet sites (Tranceaddict, Trance Tribe and In The Mix) was nothing but praise.

This began the first of a series of monthly parties at the Icebox nightclub.

2004

In early 2004 it was already evident that Uplifting Trance was in a massive slum in Sydney with major events Transmission and Sydney’s 2nd biggest club Gas nightclub cutting it from the bill.

In March looking towards a future for the little event business and attempting to fill the void of Uplifting Trance, Joshua van Aalst changed the name of the event to A Night Of Trance. This name was to become one of the biggest (in attendance) names in Trance music in Sydney.

The March event featuring old skool DJs Diggs n Morro was the most successful event at the Icebox with over 400 people crammed into the venue.

Following the March event The Icebox had double booked for April! So Joshua van Aalst contacted the new and much bigger Suzie Q’s nightclub (now Havanna Club on Oxford St). Ben Cooper agreed to host the event at his club. The club had 2 dance floors and a capacity of 600+. Significantly larger than any previous venue that Josh and Friends had done before. This was the first Josh and Friends event to involve a marketing campaign of street press, pole posters and flyers.

The event was another huge success with over 450 in attendance. Although this does not seem a big jump on the previous Icebox events it must be noted that the Icebox received approximately 100 patrons walking in off the street per night. Suzie Q’s at that time received no walk in patrons.

Following this event Josh and Friends were unable to book in another date at Suzie Q’s nightclub.

Looking to up the anti yet again, Joshua van Aalst contacted personal favorite, Sydney venue ARQ Nightclub (16 Flinders St, Taylor Square). ARQ was a 900+ capacity super club with 2 massive dance floors and a moving lighting rig. ARQ was known as a gay and lesbian venue.

In what was to be a stroke of luck ARQ phoned back. They were having difficulty with their Friday night and invited Joshua van Aalst to trial a once off straight event.

Although the May 2004 A Night Of Trance was not a huge success mainly due to Rush (another uplifting Trance event) being held at Icebox on the same night and also the straight clubbers lack of knowledge of the ARQ venue, the ARQ office invited the Josh and Friends group back in July 2004 to put on another event.

This time with the clubbers new knowledge of the venue the event was a massive success drawing 700 clubbers.

Following the widespread success (attendance and word of mouth) of the July event Joshua van Aalst formerly registered the business name Josh and Friends and trademarked the logo, with the possibility of one day running the Josh and Friends business as a full time profession.

The next event to be held at ARQ nightclub was A Night Of Trance 1st birthday which saw 800 clubbers rammed into ARQ for a night of top quality uplifting music from the likes of DJs Scott Richardson, Cameron O’Shea, Joshua van Aalst and Marishka.

After the 1st Birthday came the 5am vs A Night of Trance event and the A Night Of Trance feat. Mark Dynamix event.

At the end of 2004 Joshua van Aalst got together with his friend Tennille Scicluna (ex Icebox nightclub) and opened the weekly Thursday night hard dance event WanteD at the Phoenix bar. WanteD and the Phoenix bar venue were instant successes and the event saw 200+ patrons entertained till 6am every Thursday night / Friday morning.

2005 – The Dark Age

2005 was a dark time in the history of Josh and Friends. In early 2005 a split occurred between the Josh and Friends event group, their clubbers and the Trance Tribe website and its loyal followers. This division was to have resounding effects on the A Night Of Trance events and also the image of Josh and Friends.

Following the above split Joshua van Aalst quickly launched the www.joshandfriends.com.au website to give the Josh and Friends clubbers an online community of their own.

March 2005 saw the massive A Night Of Trance @ Space nightclub featuring The Thrillseekers (UK). A personal favourite event of Joshua van Aalst’s the event featured a mammoth laser display with multiple bounce mirrors.

Mid 2005 saw the My Event Rules competition kick off with some amazing events including Dean’s Garage and Blacklisted. Ultra the first Josh and Friends all age’s event was also launched during this time.

During this period WanteD was also on the move, from Phoenix to Rogues (now The Gaff) and then to T2 nightclub on Taylor Square.

The end of 2005 was a busy time for the Josh and Friends group which now included Tennille Scicluna as a full time event organizer. A Night Of Trance moved back to the popular ARQ nightclub, a national CD was launched (A Night Of Trance – Karvan n Condivi), an updated www.joshandfriends.com.au website launched with cms (content management system) features, a spin off website launched www.gayscene.com.au and WanteD re-launch at the Pavilion Hotel.

2006 – The Golden Age

2006 was without a doubt the Golden Age for what was now known as the www.joshandfriends.com.au group (The display name was changed to the website to better promote the community). It was the year of multiple 1000+ events.

The mega Ultra 1st birthday kick started the year at the Metro on George St and was a massive success with 1,200 ravers enjoying the supurb DJ Warehouse sponsored lighting setup and the free arcade games that were placed throughout the Metro’s entrance.

The biggest event however for 2006 was in August when the Josh and Friends group took over running Saturday night at the 2nd biggest nightclub in Sydney: Gas Nightclub and the Bohem Lounge (licensed capacity 1,350 patrons).

With a fresh approach that focused on local and national talents and brands, Joshua van Aalst and Tennille Scicluna breathed new life into the venue and attendance grew from an average of 600 to a full house of 1000+ capacity by 1am! Major successful events during this time included Gas’s 7th birthday (feat. DJ Dean) and Cosmic Destination vs Groovinc.

During this period Gavin Cook (Gavin Dee) jumped on board as a full time Graphic Artist and Event Manager of WanteD.

The 2nd half of 2006 saw Gas close due to ownership issues but the Josh and Friends group remained strong with a string of very successful events at ARQ including Cosmic Destination vs Grooveinc the final lap in December and the launch of the 2nd national CD A Night Of Trance – The Anthems by Yoshi, which featured local Australian produced anthems from the likes of Nathan M, Jody 6 and E-Tek.

2007 – The present

2007 so far has been marked by two major events in the Josh and Friends calendar the first of which was the A Night Of Trance Summer Festival. To grow the Josh and Friends business festival size events would have to be produced. A Night Of Trance – The Summer Festival was therefore launched in Febuary. The event was at a massive 2,500 capacity venue the Roundhouse (UNSW). The event featured major Trance internationals Rank 1, Matt Darey and Steve Hill and every Trance local DJ. The event also featured sponsorship from Auslase which saw a mammoth laser install. The event itself was a massive success.

The 2nd important event of 2007 for www.joshandfriends.com.au was the launch of the new cutting edge Web 2.0 enabled website. The new website is a technical marvel and took over 7 months in development from top web developers from Sun Java, IBM and Switch Networks.

The Future

So what does the future hold?

At this point the future is without a doubt to grow the new website into a major dance music source for all, a source that the whole underground dance music scene can benefit from and one which was unavailable when Joshua van Aalst launched his first event in 2003.

There have also been some talks of an A Night Of Trance event later in 2007.