New Music Videos Section

Well its taken me long enough but I've finally (with a little help) completed the new Michael Jackson videos section! I never seen anything like this before, so I'm the first site to offer so much information combined with Youtube videos of each of his actial videos.

I've basically created a page for every music video Michael has ever produced as well as information on each one and the accompanying video via YouTube.

What a great collection, starting from his very first, the disc video for Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough , through to Billie Jean the first video played on MTV featuring a black artist! Yes, Michael changed that as well!

Then there's Thriller, the one that changed how the music industry viewed music videos forever. Michael was the first to spot and fully utilize the potential of the music video to sell records.

When a new Michael video was due to be released it would be a huge event, especially if it was the first one from an album. I remember the excitement before and when Bad, Black or White
videos were released.

Michael really had to do something special for the first release from the HIStory album, and with Scream it was expensive at $7 million! But Wow, what a video!

One of my personal favourites is the You Rock My World video . It was that song, combined very much with the video that inspired me to create this very site.

I think this will be hugely interesting section to any new fan. They can see, hear and learn a bit about every video all from within my site.

One problem is going to be the fact that some of the videos will be removed from YouTube quite frequently, so I will have to keep an eye on this and hopefully fans will contact me if a video isn't working.

Updates

I've mainly been cleaning up the site the last few days, for example the Thriller album page was just one block of text so I've paragraphed it and added tracklistings. I don't think it needs much more information than that. I did the same for the other album pages.

Also, late last night I went through the Michael Jackson 30th Anniversary Celebrations and added a one line caption for each picture.

I did this for 2 reasons, firstly to see if the extra words used made any difference to the Google AdWords displayed, for which I have to wait 48 hours to find out. At the moment every page of that section displays the same ads, as you would expect given every page is very similar to a search engine like Google, as they don't see the image.

Secondly I think the captions will be useful and interesting to anyone visting the gallery. Whether I'll do them for other galleries I don't know yet. Have to see.

Behind the scenes I've been working on a new galleries. However, rather than do a bit of one gallery and then upload it and add pictures to it another day I prefer to go all out and find as many pictures as possible for a specific category and then upload the gallery and then leave it at that.

I'm going to upload all the main key galleries in one hit and I'm sure it will make a big difference to the site as fans love to browse picture galleries.

Back to Adsense, I placed a block of Ads quite high up on the page underneath the latest pics.
I think they fit in very well and hopefully don't take anything away from the content of the site.

Actually one of the sites in the block of Ads went to a site that on its front page had my Michael Jackson biograpghy, word for word!!!!

Hmm, just thinking what to do about.

Hotlinking My Images

Its obvious Ive been really busy as 12 days later I'm just picking up from where I last left off!

Hotlinking
My site bandwidth usage has been huge the last few weeks. Only now have I got round to fully investigating why. Obviously the site gets alot of daily visitors and many of those visitors have there own webspace for example via MYSPACE, and it turns out many of these people like some of the Michael Jackson images hosted on my site!

Not only that, but they like the moving gif images, which are actually huge files and use alot of bandwidth from my site alone, let alone being on other peoples.

Not being to tech minded, or when I do find a technical solution its either doesn't work or wasn't designing for my sever, typical! I'm having to go through my new site stats and workout website offenders and the worse image offenders.

Hotlink is actually a form of bandwidth theft. Not that the people doing it probably actually realise this. In a way its flattering that they like the images from my site.

The moving gif images were a great way to bring some life to certain pages, for example I used them on my Michael Jackson dance page to show the moonwalk in motion. Anyway, I think some of these pages could be improved by replacing the gifs with relevant YouTube videos or similar and they don't use any of my bandwidth! :)

Help with the site

I need more time or help
Finding time to improve the site is proving difficult. I'm sure in the old days I used to be able to get much more done in a day but these days I just end up with lists of ideas and jobs to do that seem to take forever to get through. For every job I do I add 2 more to the list.

I left a message in a forum this week asking for help with the site. I've been fortunate enough to have had some interest, so hopefully that will be a big step forward in building and improving the site further. It's not easy trying to cover over 30 years of the greatest ever living entertainer in just a few hours a week.

Traffic and bandwidth issues
This week the guy who hosts my site was ringing me letting me know the site was using alot of bandwidth. He thought it was the recent YouTube streaming videos I added. This seemed strange to me and I researched and posted on some message boards and everyone said that the embedded YouTubes would not use my bandwidth.

I did a little checking and found that some other sites had copied whole pages of my site and were hotlinking the images. God knows how many other images have been hotlinked over the years. Some of them were big gif image files that I used to highlight Michael in movement, for example doing a specific dance move. I can now replace these with actual YouTube videos. Although even that can present problems because some YouTube videos get removed for copyright reasons.

Michaels Latest Comeback News
Well the Michael Jackson comeback seems to be definetly in the planning stages if a recent news article I recieved today is anything to go by, this motivates me even more to get the site the best in can be in time for any future Michael projects.

I just hope he doesn't get a long term gig in Las Vegas and end up a reclusive in some hotel. Look what it did for Elvis. Albeit Las vegas is a great place, I've had the fortune to visit there myself and I loved it on the Strip.