So, you all remember that little music festival I’ve been doing for seven years? The one that was in May and took up an entire weekend for me? We had some people out from ReelFM.tv filming and they put together a pretty good video with a sort of recap.

Get a feel for what the festival is actually like (if you’ve never been). It really is a big job that I have loved for the last chunk of my life. But also one I have come to peace with leaving, if it ever came to that.

Anyway, check it out:

I promised it and now it’s here.

Yeah, it’s been two weeks since we hosted the 32nd AgapeFest music festival here in Greenville. The festival itself is entirely run by students from Greenville College and they do a fantastic job handling such a large event. We bring on average 5000 people to the Bond County Fairgrounds each May and host the biggest names in Christian music on our main stage, plus many local, indie and up-and-coming artists on our smaller Stage 2.

We are a mid-sized festival and definitely a different experience than the Cornerstones and Icthuses of this industry. But we serve a need to be a less expensive, local, but high quality event for churches and families to attend. Even with a tumultuous history of red ink, the last four or five years have been fairly solid in generating a profit. For our non-profit, that is important. If we hit a hard year and lose money, the festival is at risk to be shut down by the college board of trustees. We certainly know that we may have to pay–so to speak–for the losses of our predecessors.

But that serves as better motivation to do it right. That makes us tighten up the budgets and make smarter decisions with our marketing.

Part of my job at the school is to not only serve as a staff advisor to the festival student staff, but to oversee a bulk of the web marketing. This past year I made a push into social media for the festival and it seems to have paid off well enough. I rounded up a group of eight or so students on staff and gave them our Twitpic email for posting. From setup to tear down they were sending images to Twitpic that would post to the festival’s Twitter stream. We were *sort of* liveblogging the event in this capacity. It was really cool to be able to operate this way.

Another aspect of my normal work is as a backup photographer. So I had a Canon 20D on my back the entire time we were out there (mainly because Jessica wanted to hang onto our D80 and shoot with it). During the weekend I was uploading photos I took to our flickr group.

On top of those I had my Flip Mino camera out there and would hand it off to the staff to make videos, or I’d shoot some myself. These would get uploaded to the YouTube channel.

With these three (sort of four) avenues covered, I tweaked the AgapeFest.com design to be a little more micro-blog format friendly. I went to a two-column front page with a wider area for posts and then used the FeedWordPress plugin to import posts from our accounts. This meant that any visitors over the weekend could see what was going on at the festival without having to track down all of our social media outlets. It was a glorified lifestream for the main festival site, but it was wildly successful for a first run. I was averaging 8000 or so hits to the website in the days leading up to the festival and jumped our Twitter following by about 40 followers (Twitter isn’t as ubiquitous in this demographic).

At this point I’m looking forward to what we can do next year.

So, the festival. It was good. Looks like we made a little money this year despite the recession, rain leading up to and on Friday afternoon, and a few hiccups at the festival. We had some weird people come out. I’m starting to see more weirdness — we had a man and his two sons dressed in full Renaissance faire costumes carrying knives and hatchets try to come in — and I’m not sure if it’s just not being on student staff I see more, or if there really are more oddities happening.

In any case, the student staff did a great job, as usual, even if there were some hiccups and challenges along the way.

I’m worn out. Awesome weekend. Lots of people. Great music. Met some cool guys. Check out the photos.

See the rest in my Flickr Photostream »

Things’ll be a bit quiet around here this weekend.

At work, I am a staff advisor for a student-run music the school puts on each year, and this is that weekend. So I’m out making sure the students are thinking of everything, handling any emergencies, taking photos, filming stuff… pretty much everything.

One cool this is that I have some of the students twittering for us during the festival and then a bunch of that content is being pulled into the website, agapefest.com. It’s been fun. You should check it out.

So anyway, I’ll be occupied by that this weekend. Talk to you all on Sunday for sure.

Yeah, that last post. Forget it.

I totally forgot about WordPress’ XML-RPC features and that I could use a service (like PixelPipe) to update it. I looked into using this new service called Posterous – but it was too restrictive in having to verify emails to be able to post that I had to abandon it. Doesn’t work so well when I have 6+ people needing to use the service to update the blog and Twitter.

But PixelPipe offers a common email upload and will update everything including YouTube. So. Awesome. That’s the plan. I’ll have to do some testing (and I think LunarPages breaks the XML-RPC capabilities… I can’t get it to work on this or any blog on my server) to see what the formatting is like, but I think this will be a better solution.

Pretty close to being done. I think I’ll end up putting it live on Wednesday of next week, when we start going out to the fairgrounds to hammer fence posts and do preliminary festival setup.

[sneak peak]

I tried to make it look more Twitter-y, I guess. That wasn’t really intentional, but it’s the direction it took. I’m using a plugin called Fresh From FriendFeed and Twitter which is a ridiculously long name. The author doesn’t give enough options in the backend, so I had to modify some of the PHP for this one project. It’s a little sad. I wish I could’ve just left it, but it was so convoluted.

Basically, the plugin monitors your twitter feed and imports your latest tweet and creates a post out of it. Cool right? Well, the instructions in the backend are a little hard to understand. I’m all for making language in your posts/docs sound cool, relaxed and comfortable (see how I write on agapefest.com), but not when you lose clarity of meaning. I’d like the settings to say things like: “Import each Tweet as a post. (We’ll refresh to keep you current.)” and “Import your tweets once a week/day/month” instead of the craziness he has in the backend.

One of the cool things about the plugin is that it automagically parses media from Twitpic and YouTube (and others) and creates the embed code while inserting it into your new post. Well, it would be cool if the images were given any classes whatsoever. Or if the layout had any classes whatsoever. Really. No classes. Metadata is there for the alt attributes… but not one class. So custom styling is a no-go without poking around in the plugin code and adding your own for each item. Annoying.

Also, every post title begins with “Fresh From {Service Name}” and you can’t change it in the graphical config. Once again, you have to poke around in the plugin code. Oh, and on top of that, by default it adds a filter to redirect all of your meta links (including permalink in headers) to the service URI. That means “leave a comment” takes you out to Twitter to leave a reply. And there’s not option to turn it off. It’s a cool idea, and definitely useful in some cases. But a on/off option would be killer.

So, I’ve had a few annoyances, but had no other recourse short of learning PHP to a degree where I could write my own plugin. Not conceivable for me at the moment, though it’s on my list. That, or the time will come when Twitter is ubiquitous and I won’t have to deal with so many visitors not having an account.

Apart from all the headaches, I’m pretty excited about this little experiment next week. Hopefully the plugin will refresh quick enough to keep things going (documentation doesn’t exist. No FAQ. Just a FriendFeed room that you, again, have to search through to find what you need — if it’s there at all). Otherwise I really may have to write my own plugin. Maybe I will for next year anyway.

Well, not entirely new. This week I’ll be working on converting AgapeFest.com into a quick micro-blog for festival week.

What does that mean? It means I’ve got all of my staff that have iPhones, picture messaging or Flip cameras set to take photos and post them to Twitter/Twitpic. Then AgapeFest.com will pull each of those in and create a post about them. If I had been thinking, I could’ve used this as an opportunity to learn how and then write my own WordPress plugin for it. Maybe later.

In any case, I think this is going to be super fun. By the way, does anyone know of a Twitpic-like service that does video instead? Like if I had my Flip out there, little 30 sec to 1-minute videos would be awesome. I’d better buy some batteries…

Wow, lack of updates. I guess I’m busy.

First things first, I quit ScriptFrenzy already. I just have too much to do right now. And for me, I found a lot more motivation in writing a novel than I do in writing a script. Every time I sit down to script I think “I have websites and jobs I should be working on” and so I do those instead.

And the fruits of that misplaces labour is that whatisawix.com is almost finished. And I’ve got a good bead on the GFMC site. AND I possibly have a new client from here at the school. That’s exciting. He’s a super cool guy and, from what I hear, an excellent musician.

Last Saturday I judged the AgapeFest Battle of the Bands. It was kind of a long afternoon, but I’ve judged the thing the last three years and ran it before that. So I knew what I was getting into. It was a pretty good show with some great bands and some good bands and some so-so bands. But that’s what you get at a battle.

So, in a month it’ll be festival time and that will take up my life for about two weeks. I’ve got video to coordinate and a staff to look after and probably something else that’ll come up. Sadly no friends in bands coming out this year, but that’s okay.

I’m also planning some cool micro-blogging on www.agapefest.com the week of set up. I think I found a WP plugin that’ll work out and we’ll be able to twitter from @agapefest and have WordPress pull in the photos we send to TwitPic via our iPhones and such. Probably should take my Flip camera out too. Man. This might actually be fun!

The new theme, which I have dubbed Rock Out Loud for the general WordPress community and “AgapeFest 2009″ for the festival, is really really close to being done. And actually, the WP version with widget ready sidebars and that is completely done… except I might give it a once-over and see what can be improved.

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I’m really happy with it. I’ll make a formal announcement when I release the template/theme into the wild and then you guys can play with what I’m talking about. But I’d love to hear your opinions or criticisms on the design. Leave them in the comments.