Summer music, tech and other minor problems, et cetera

 Hello readers!

Hope you guys have been enjoying my latest album, The Time Jump, which is now available on Spotify, Pandora, YouTube, and several other places on the web.  Anyways, here are some things I feel like talking about.

Feel free to listen to my album, The Time Jump, as it was composed and is the brainchild of me, Alan Lu.  I had spent a lot of time over the years crafting this album, and I wanted this to be considerably different from the first two, and so this one has much more of a hard rock vibe, as where the other albums feel to be more of the dance and electronic variety.

To me, I have enjoyed creating and listening to my newest album, The Time Jump, as it is something you can rock out to and also have on the background.  When I work out to my own music though, the album I enjoy working out to the most has been my 3rd album, Call For A Celebration, which was inspired by the 2019 St. Louis Blues' title run, even if I feel it creatively may pale compared to my other albums.

My newest Spotify album's URL link, The Offseason Hobbyist's The Time Jump: https://open.spotify.com/album/48Cvvs98gWhVwFhpnVSTJX

Non-Music Related Stuff:

So I received an email about if I should have my basketball site on Google News and the steps to implement it there.  🤷♂ I tried, but I'm not a tech guy, but I also am not fully interested in paying someone to do that for me, so for now I feel like it doesn't need it.  I understand that it could get me more readers and bring some extra credibility, but I feel like that I would then have to jump through too many hoops, and I'm okay with where the site is right now.

I've re-looked into re-implementing Ezoic, but I don't think I have any plans to do so until maybe after the 2020 election.  When I first re-implemented back in late July, it worked, and for the first time in weeks, it actually didn't cause website functionality problems like it did before in mid-July, but a whole set of problems started to resurface.  I've tried to prevent political ads from flooding into the site, but after several times I see ads on my site, they always pop back up again.  Specifically, I don't want Trump ads on my site, and it annoys me whenever I see an ad on my site that I tried to prevent from getting there that makes its way on there.  So for now, it's been deactivated.  

One More Thing:

Lastly, I want to give a shout out to my friend Victor Hightaian from Illafent, he's an incredibly talented musician that I had the chance to meet in an orchestra class in high school, and the songs he makes are really good.  I was listening to my release radar that had me on it (it was my first song from my new album), David Bowie, Del The Funky Homosapien, Weezer, Run the Jewels and Travis Barker, and his song, The Story Goes showed 6th on my playlist.  It's a a very catchy, melodic song that is sung very well, and has some very good guitar riffs.  Definitely a radio station quality song in my opinion, and I feel like if you have the time, especially if you dig bands such as 311, Incubus, and Blink-182, you should give it a listen, as it might be the song for you.  

Illafent's New Single, "The Story Goes" was a surprisingly catchy and a delightful listen, and deserves a listen if you haven't heard this song yet.

Illafent's The Story Goes' Spotify URL Link:  https://open.spotify.com/album/3yRtBEog9U0eiN8c2AfmBk 

Website Incompatibility Issues

Awhile back on September 18th, my basketball website was able to install Ezoic onto its platform, after months of tedious hard labor and website renovation.  We had moved away from a solid web hosting service, Wix to accompany the needs of Ezoic, to Siteground, which is also solid, but we've had more issues with our website crashing due to auto-updates and incompatibility issues. 

In the summer of 2019, we've had to back up our website and move numerous full-length articles to the new web hosting service, and multiple attempts to integrate Ezoic had briefly crashed our website offline, but finally in September 2019, we finally were able to figure out how to pair Ezoic and Siteground together to integrate those element to our new website and into our new website design.

Today, we've had another issue once again.  Website incompatibility issues are undesirable, and ideally, the website would never crash or go offline, ever.  The latest incompatibility issue may be a setback and also a blessing in disguise.  Earlier this afternoon, the basketball website was down, as it was a blank white screen filled with no content, which was strange, because usually there was a lot of content and a handful of ads to accompany it.  After talking with Siteground's technical support, we had worked our way through the problems, and after testing each plug-in one by one, we figured out that the Ezoic integration was the thing that had messed up the website's functionality.

Therefore, we disabled the Ezoic integration, after multiple attempts to minimize ads or to figure out how to keep the integration aspect, we had to shelve and disable the Ezoic integration function once and for all.  We figured it's better to serve information without ads, then to try to attempt to keep the ads but have no website for people to read.

So that's where we are at right now.  I'm not really a tech guy, I'm a person who brings his knowledge to the table, and I just try to do my part.  I'm kind of bummed, but maybe the whole Ezoic integration aspect just ran its course.  My basketball website had ads from September 18th, 2019 until the early afternoon of July 16th, 2020.  It was a good run, I guess.

On the other hand....ads did slow things down considerably.  The mobile site speed grew considerably worse, and the worst part of it was having absolutely no control or knowledge in deciding what ads go on the website.  Again, I'm not a tech guy.  Some of the ads I surely would've absolutely disapproved of and not had on the site if I knew how to manage the ads.  But with limited funds and knowledge of that area, the ads were basically auto-run through Ezoic and through their ad system.

So for now, the website is back up and running, but this time without ads.  Since I haven't figured out how to integrate that back once again, the Ezoic aspect may be permanently shelved.  Time will tell if we run ads on the website in the future, but what's first and foremost of utmost importance to us, is being able to have a website that allows us to dispense our information and knowledge to you, the reader.

Thank you for your time.