December news 2017

Dear wikiloops community,
I'm issuing todays site news to make sure you are not missing some good news,
and to keep you up to date with the recent engine room efforts.

[b]The 5th wikiloops member meeting is scheduled[/b]
We are once more having a long weekend of jamming in Steinfeld, Germany coming up on the last weekend of August 2018.
AFTER reading the rest of my news, you may check out the details here:
https://www.wikiloops.com/forum/viewthread.php?thread_id=1653


[b]wikiloops version update 10.1 went live today[/b]
OK, I'll admit it right away, giving a new "official" version number is more or less a gut-feeling based decision, since hardly a day passes without making some minor changes. What has caused me to honor todays update with a new version number comes down to two things:
The whole page has been re-worked a little to work smoother when accessed by mobile devices or screen readers (thanks again to zac for reporting in!), a few annoying bugs like erratically closing messengers were finally fixed
and the wikiloops forum is offering a simple, yet quite cool new feature:
I have been asked quite a lot of times if it would be possible to "embed" a wikiloops player on some other homepage or blog,
and in the past, I usually declined such requests to prevent overloading our server infrastructure with requests from third party sites.
Ever since we moved the music files "up to the cloud", there is no longer a need to worry about that too much, so I have slowly moved to developing a player that may eventually be offered for embedding on third party websites of forums.
While working on that, it dawned on me that the best way to test-drive that would be to offer these embedded players in our own forum, first,
and from today on you may embed tracks in wikiloops forum posts.

To do that, watch out for the newly added wikiloops icon that is displayed next to the youtube video embed link.
It may seem a little strange at first to add a track on wikiloops to a forum post on wikiloops, but given you would like to ask a specific question about your mix or would like to present your use of some lyrics which were shared via the forum, it may come in very handy.
Here is what such an embedded player looks like:
[wl]121060[/wl]
For now, I'm looking foreward to the creative uses you will come up with & hope you will enjoy the feature.

[b]To those going on christmas shopping tour...[/b]
Please try to remember to use the [url=https://www.wikiloops.com/shopping.php]wikiloops shopping gateway to amazon[/url] when planning to shop there. Amazon will return a small percentage of your shoppings value to wikiloops if you enter thru our gateway, so you can help us fund the fun on wikiloops while buying gifts for your folks.
Oh, and please share that link with your family, too, one doesn't have to be a wikiloops member to use the wikiloops shopping gateway.

Last, for those who may have missed it
[b]The wikiloops support rally address 2018[/b]


Yes, that call is still on, and there is some additional info for anyone interested to get to know a little more background on why I have felt the need to call out for user support, which you can find here:
[url=https://www.wikiloops.com/forum/viewthread.php?thread_id=1645]Put in perspective - the calls for support 2017 background[/url].

This is what our funding progress bar for 2018 looks like so far - thank you for listening, and for making it happen!



Last, as always, the stats of the day:
97,490 tracks online
51,527 members registered