Each St Patrick’s Day, a select group of eager drinkers make a pre-dawn pilgrimage to McSorley’s Old Ale House in New York.  This year, we posted our their antics to McSorleys.tv with a decent amount of fanfare.

“It’s a genius Twitter/Brightkite/Flickr mashup that documents the debauchery in real time.”
- Eater.com

“I don’t totally get it, but it seems to be a hybrid of Twitter and Brightkite, in which you can read a stream of drunken Twitters and look at fuzzy pictures of pints.” (Close enough)
- Village Voice

“Should you decide to join them tonight, you may want to consider avoiding the more obvious destinations like McSorley’s (where the mob lined up to start drinking at dawn)”
- Gothamist

“It’s not actually video, just images and tweets from McSorley’s in the East Village. Still looks like more fun than I am currently having.”
- Amanda Dobbins via BuzzFeed

“mcsorleys.tv kicks the crap out of skittles.com . Way to do it with class”
- Christopher Lehault via twitter

“Interesting.”
- Lush Life via Twitter

Some people got it, some didn’t. We had fun and, though we Tweeted in years prior, it shows how Twitter is growing more main stream every day. Next year we’ll hopefully have more participation and stay tuned for similar experiments throughout the year.

In these trying economic times,  companies have to trim some fat. Why get fancy with graphs and charts when all we want to know is “Is The Dow Up?”

Our newest site, IsTheDowUp.com provides only the most vital of information so you can get back to business.

You can also check out NM3′s post about the Post to Twitter addition to Elbows video pages.

Faster Searches
We’ve implemented the full-text search engine, Sphinx to replace our previous MySQL full-text search. This has lead to much faster searches and also the ability to sort results by relevance rather than by date.

Complete History
Elbows started in late April of 2005, but due to performance issues, we were forced to archive a good chunk of posts. Thanks to some creative database changes and the addition of the new search engine, we were able to restore the complete archives back into the site.

Artist Feeds
This is something that people have been requesting for quite a while. The current artist pages are ‘/artist/artist-name/’. Simply append ‘feed’ to that in order to get artist feeds. Eg: http://elbo.ws/artist/radiohead/feed/ .

Video Searches
When you perform a search on the site, you’ll see an option in the middle bar to view video results for that search string. Eg: http://elbo.ws/videos/?q=radiohead

Larger Images
We were getting sort of tired of trying to make out those tiny 72×72 images that we’re been using for the posts, so we’ve switched to a smarter format that will show images in their original aspect with a height up to 125 pixels. Check it out and you’ll see what we’re saying.

Applications that augment or mimic existing features on Facebook – such as the wall (a space for writing messages) or a poke (a way for friends to say a quick hello) – are also more likely to take off. And those that stumble on even the smallest bug are likely to become roadkill. Matches, a flirting application, fell into a hole when a time-out bug, a Facebook glitch, stopped the app in its tracks. In the week it took to fix it, Matches lost about 100,000 users and ceded the category to a rival called Crushes. The lesson, Farmer says, is “users don’t care why it doesn’t work or whose fault it is. They will leave and probably not come back.”

Read the entire CNN Money article here. Add the Crushes Application here!

What’s Hot
The redesign includes an expanded Hot Artists section that includes a thumbnail from a random post as well as some teaser text to draw readers to the artist’s page or to the blog featured. The Hot Videos section allows visitors to view top videos embedded into the middle bar.

Searching
The search functions have been consolidated to allow visitors a single screen which includes search results from posts, artists, mp3s, and blogs.

The Future
The redesign has been taking up quite a bit of our time. Now that it’s finished, we can focus on adding new and interesting features throughout the site.

If you have any questions or requests, please email us at info@itmay.be.

Thanks to Appaholic for the data.