Composer Reference

[giles.enders]

After the postings have been there for a month or so, could we have 'composer reference' in alphabetical order.  It might be useful if the initial 'blogger' were then invited to edit their original posting to incorporate all the additional information.  This would then become an excellent work of reference for search engines to pick up.

[Dundonnell]

Putting the composer catalogues into alphabetical order would make sense.......although it would be a big job for the Administrators I suspect.

There are a number of national Indexes (which I update on a regular basis). That should enable anyone looking for a catalogue to see if one exists. A search by name of composer then very quickly brings up the desired catalogue.

With regard to incorporating additional information, I have also tried to do that as far as orchestral music is concerned with the catalogues I have posted. There are a number of catalogues relating to specific composers where another member has added a large amount of information on that composer's other music. Merging such information with the original post would be a big task.

My impression is that search engines are indeed picking up these catalogues. If-for example-I type "Finn Hoffding" + "Catalogue" into Google the first hit is the online catalogue here.

[Mark Thomas]

Sorry, my fault Giles, I thought that I'd addressed this issue.

It isn't possible to arrange threads in boards in any order other that the date of the last post within them I'm afraid. The software can't be configured that way although there are plenty of requests on the support forum for the ability to rearrange them in multifarious ways. It is possible to do so temporarily by making threads sticky but this would be disrupted as soon as a new post was added to a thread. This is one of the frustrations of using bulletin board software to host a reference resource.

I have been looking, in what little spare time I have had recently, at expanding UC so that the existing forum runs within a Content Management System shell (such as Joomla). Without getting too technical, that would enable us to have relatively conventional web pages, editable online by authorised members, to which we could transfer from time to time the reference resource elements of UC (such as Composer Reference and Downloads) as they get updated with new posts and display them in a structured and more usable way, whilst at the same time retaining all UC's current functionality.

From the end of next month I will have more time to see if that's a goer.

[giles.enders]

Thank you for your explanation.  I think the Unsung Composers site has grown from a smallish information/chat exchange to something that perhaps could not have been predicted.  It is a credit to you and Alan that this has happened.  My concern is that the more information that is posted the more scattered the 'hard facts' are likely to be on the site.  It would be interesting to know how you see the future of the site because there is so much hidden expertise among the members. Most of the info. gets picked up by Google, is it the intention that USC will be the place to go for info. about classical, romantic and post romantic music?

As an aside I have had a question on my piano concerto site for 7 years and today someone emailed me with the answer.