Corware Blog

It's been a few years since the company's website makeover with ASP.NET 2.0, and since it was an intensive effort to combine website, blog, and user forums using a unified security scheme, I haven't been so keen on revisiting a new makeover.

However, times change, the company's focus has moved on, and the site could do more to serve the mission.  That said, defining the company's mission is more difficult than ever, so the technical direction is vital.

PalmPVT, the premier Corware software product is something we have always given away for free to researchers in the life sciences -- pretty much the only audience interested in a highly configurable portable reaction time test whose data can be uploaded from handheld device to PC for high-level analysis.

This group never used the forums, so that's going away. Likewise, there are much easier ways to host a blog and use syndication to display blog blurbs in a list on the main site, as I did with the http://jordanmartin.com website. So the cross-site integration requirement is eliminated, greatly simplifying the overall effort.

What remains is not trivial -- there is still plenty of legacy technical functionality to port.  Adding to the complexity of the effort is the problem of presentation, of coming up with a coherent concept that reflects what Corware is.  The company is a tag for who I am and what I do in the creative aspects of my life.  Historically, the company website has always served two purposes.

The first is to provide me a production environment playground to learn and apply the latest technologies so that my skills remain current and marketable.  The second purpose extends from being the sole source for the PalmPVT software, which has become an international standard in Pyschomotor Vigilance Tasks.  As author of the software we hold the copyright to its design, and although the Palm platform is just about dead, the software has been successfully ported to the Microsoft .NET platform, and sales of a potential derivative product are a distinct possiblityl.

We're committed to maintaining the availablility of the PalmPVT to maintain continuity for potential sales to a potential lucrative market in the future.  And we've become a bona fide music publishing company affiliated with BMI, with myself as the company's sole "signed" artist.

A few things are clear. Corware has morphed from a software consultancy to a publishing company.  The existing techology is aging and needs to be replaced.  The existing website theme doesn't reflect what I want out of it.  Yet I am still unsure of what I want it to do.

MVC and Entity Framework to the rescue.  Segementing functionality into controllers will allow work to commence on specific legacy functionality without committing to an overall conceptual organization.  I would like to incorporate WCF into the mix as well because I'm working with it now but am concerned about hosting. This is supposed to serve as an excerise in using new techologies so this will need to be build in such a way as to be deployable without WCF but be able to use it in the development environment.  An interesting challenge...I like it.

No doubt this will be a long effort before we see the new website since my plate is already pretty full!  Target...year's end...and maybe we'll get lucky!

Corware Web Site

Corware is proud to announce the deployment of a new artist website, jordanmartin.com, designed from the ground-up with the latest technologies.  This site serves singer-songwriter, Jordan Martin™, as a central portal for all artist content.  Linked extensively with social networking sites Facebook and Twitter, the site also heavily leaverages embedded code from ReverbNation to serve up various artist assets.  Music, video, show schedule, blog, guestbook features are all incorporated into a unified whole using a combination of VS2010 / MVC / Entity Framework / SQL Server.  AJAX & JQuery are used extensively to make the entire site asynchronous.

The new website does quite a number of notable things from a technical standpoint that not only help to deliver a seamless experience for site visitors but also serve the artist's goals:

• The music player (and other 'widgets') are located on the site's Master Page so that they are only loaded once upon site arrival.  The fact that all browsable content is rendered asynchronously means that the user can listen to the music uninterrupted while surfing the site. 
  • So many artist sites refresh the entire page, making listening while browsing to check out the artist incompatible.  It's one or the other, and from personal experience, users don't stick around long when that choice is forced upon them.
  • Using the music player widget (and other widgets) allows the artist to post content to social networking site where credits for song & video plays, fan signups, etc. are accrued.
• Blog content is served up from the artist's WordPress blog almost instantly and in compact form using .NET Syndication and background threading. Loading the blog in the background only once upon application startup and the asynchronous nature of the site mean that persistence between postbacks isn't an issue.  The blog data remains in memory at all times during user's visit so that navigating away from the blog page and then back to it do not cause the code to retrieve the blog data again.
  • The visitor can check out blog content summaries while remaining on the site. 
  • The artist can maintain an easy-to-use off-the-shelf blog without further programming efforts.
  • The programmer was able to deliver just the right functionality with minimal effort.
• The Guestbook feature, on the other hand, was written from scratch to allow for extensibility.
  • The artist can collect feedback and visitor email addresses that might not want to sign up as fans.
  • A future version will allow for site sign-in and authentication to allow the artist to:
    • Approve comments before they appear publicly.
    • Respond automatically or manually via email to a comment's submitter.
    • Possibly automate the submission into an actual fan signup.
• The menu buttons stay highlighted when the corresponding content is rendered.  A professional touch many other sites don't have and reflects the artist's approach to all public content.

While there is room for futher advance of the site, we think it represents a powerful advantage for its client.

General

We are pleased to announce Corware Publishing's affiliation with BMI, Inc. as a music publisher. 

Corware's move into music publishing not only complements its established history as an internet file distributor, it also sets the stage for exciting new opportunities.

That the music industry has undergone and is undergoing drastic change is not news.  While the traditional model is dissolving, certain facets of the consumption of music have already been transformed to deliver music to the people, and for artists and publishers to get paid.  The new model calls for self-publishing, not as an exercise in vanity, but as the new music business reality.

A quick primer:

BMI collects revenues, which are split 50-50 between the artist and the artist's publisher.  By self-publishing, one gets both halves of the money.  What money?  The money from when the music gets used on television or a motion picture or myriad other ways that BMI tracks and distributes money back to publishers and artists.

The confluence of advanced recording capabilites to the masses and the internet have opened up many possibilities in how music can be submitted for consideration to established music publishers with real industry connections.  These publishers have the kind of clients who need a piece of original music for their productions legally cleared on short notice.

That's where Corware Publishing comes into this story.  Affliating with BMI greases the legal skids towards getting the music of yours truly into production.  The big publisher gets a cut of the proceeds, Corware Publishing gets half of the remainder, and me, the songwriter/composer/recording artist, gets the other half.

There is a Catch 22 to becoming a registered music publisher with a PRO (Publishing Rights Organization), such as BMI and ASCAP. You have to have the expectation that your music product could be used in a real production.  Although I didn't make the cut this time, my music was under such consideration recently, and I was given notice to get registered just in case.

So this is a new music industry model that is up and operating on the internet and we're positioned now to roll the dice in the big casino. Those are the chances.  But to be quite serious, I make music that I believe needs to be shared and saved for posterity.  Getting myself registered as a songwriter/composer was an easy step.  Affiliating with BMI as a publisher, a much bigger hurdle, but now that it's done and we've had our day, it is time for the hard work of living up to the word "artist".

Wish us a broken leg please!

General