my nuvo

i mentioned in march that nuvo has a new webmaster. nuvo is indianapolis's premier alterna-weekly, and i was pleased that their website was recovering from a severe wrong turn in november.

but that was just the beginning of what nuvo's webmaster had in store for us. this week, nuvo launched its brand-new website, redesigned from the ground up with lots of new features. the design is pretty decent, though it doesn't function as well as i'd like in firefox. they're still working out the kinks, so maybe they'll resolve the formatting quirks that currently bug me.

the most significant change is the addition of social networking features—nuvo's answer to myspace, facebook, and the like. i know what you're thinking—another social networking site? so what?—because i thought it, too. but the more i read, the more convinced i became that i at least needed to create a band account, because this sounds way more promising than myspace or that ghost town called friendster.

from the mynuvo signup page:

A myNUVO account is similar to a MySpace, Friendster, or Facebook profile. It allows you to create a unique profile online to tell other NUVO readers about yourself. Like MySpace, you can personalize your myNUVO page, send messages to your friends, post bulletins and view their profiles. But myNUVO is no mere MySpace clone: With a myNUVO account you can add any article, event, place, band or person on NUVO.net to your list of favorites. When you add a band their songs are automatically added to your music player and when you add a place it is added to your Google map. You can also decide what elements you want on your myNUVO page. You can add or remove the following elements from your account: Articles, Bands, Events, Google Map, The Week in Nuvo, and Places. You can also re-arrange all these elements by dragging them where you want on the page. The site will remember your settings next time you log in. Yes, this is all completely free!

as i learned last month, myspace code is a mess. imagine being able to actually remove sections of your myspace page... why, that'd be like squeezing a camel through the eye of a needle. the google map functionality sounds pretty sweet, too. and wayne "barfly" gertsch has been raving about the music player... though as a nuvo employee, he might be biased. (though i wish you could add more info to each mp3 than just the song title.)

so here it is: stAllio! on nuvo. in contrast to myspace, which restricts bands to a meager 4 songs each, mynuvo allows bands to upload up to a whopping 10 mp3s, so i've been diligently adding songs, including some that aren't available here on my site.

like i said, it's still a bit buggy (i haven't been able to upload a "band photo"), and it's buggier in firefox than in IE. but it has loads of potential.¶