Welcome to the Song Notes beta!

• Overview
• Known Issues
• Recent Fixes

Week of Sept 12

• Updated the homepage, so logged in users see the 50% discount code, forum links, etc (and none of the “Join” stuff). Thanks Rich for the suggestion here!
• Lots of work on the HELP section – which I’m almost done with! Just need to add a few missing answers. This is one last “big” missing piece, especially if I need to deep-link to instruction pages for how to do XYZ with your account 9etc).
• Setup @songnotes.net email stuff… which doesn’t really have user-facing implications, but I needed to get done just the same. After I flip the switch from playsongnotes.com ==> songnotes.net, I want to have my email addresses matching accordingly.
• Added some visual polish to the Community page! Feeling good about getting that done.
• Enabled plans for $5/mo and $50/year. Did a lot of backend work with plan management — e.g. making sure certain interface items do, or don’t, appear based on whatever plan you’re enabled in.
• Worked on getting lesson #453 shipped.

Sept 7-9

• Worked on wrapping up Girl from the North Country, as well as prepping my lesson for next week. No work on SongNotes.net stuff aside from brainstorming & prioritizing stuff for next week.

Sept 6-7

• Finished coding up v1 of my Join page — which I’ll eventually need before launching. Glad it’s up!
• Minor tweaks to the styling of the Help & FAQ page.

Monday, Sep 4

• Labor day break! Smoked some delicious ribs, watched a lot of US Open tennis, hung out with neighbors, and watched Game of Thrones.
• Lots of practice on “Girl from the North Country” by Dylan & Cash… excited for the forthcoming lesson.

Sat, Sep 3

• A few Q&A tweaks to the mobile navigation, to ensure spacing is correct & things don’t wrap to the next line on small phones
• Changed the website’s font – small item on the list, but has been on my list as the font I had (Gantari) had bizarre & horrible rendering of it’s “Y” character which has a noticeable impact on readability in certain cases.

Fri, Sep 2

• Redesigned the mobile web (phones, small tablets) navigation so it shows your login link (or, “Account” link if already logged in) without requiring you to click on “menu”. This is important just to provide immediate, high-level confirmation of a user’s login status. Example use case: someone sees a premium PDF they want to download, but it’s asking them to login – they might think they already are logged in. Then they’d have to open the menu just to validate this hunch. With this change, this is no longer an issue.
• Created a new email template for notifying SongNotes.net members about new lessons – and used this template for sending out news about lesson #451. Feeling very excited to see this come together!

Thu, Sep 1

• Improves clarity of the wording within the “50% discount code” module (shown on each song page) and also the “Instructional PDF” module (shown on each non-song page). Includes the addition of a “log in” link for non-signed-in users.
• Added “Discuss this lesson” module on each lesson page (for now, on lessons #444 thru #451) which links directly to the comment thread in the Community forum.
• Fixed broken extended videos on #450

Weds, Aug 31

• Worked on editing & publishing lesson #451… no updates to beta website stuff.

Tuesday, Aug 30

• Re-uploaded the many dozen PDFs that were giving an error upon downloading! Had to rename the files to remove special characters. All fixed now. Thanks Pete for reporting this!
• For lesson #450, made it so the extended videos are members-only
• For lesson #448, made it so the the instructional PDF is available for download (and doesn’t link out to Patreon anymore)
• Invited the initial group of folks to test this website!

Monday, Aug 29

• Added the overview video under the “Overview” tab, giving folks a walkthrough of the new site!
• Added this “Recent Fixes” tab, similar in spirit to a “changelog” in software/web terms. The idea is I’ll keep track of all updates & improvements I make, so occasional visitors (in the test) can get an idea of what’s been updated since their last visit.
• Added a tab for “Known Issues”, so I can be transparent about items I plan on fixing & improving over the coming weeks.
• Scheduled a help desk call with Memberspace for this Wednesday… to tackle the SSO issues I’m having with Circle.

July and August

• Worked hard getting the new site designed & built! I’m using Memberspace for account & login stuff, which allows me to require membership to access premium content. I’m also using a tool called Circle for the community forum. These tools offer SSO (single sign on), allowing folks to “log in once” and have their authentication follow them as they move between this main part of the website & the Circle forum (which I’ve added under the “Community” tab).