As SoundCloud recently hit 5 million users, blogger’s pleas for us to support the service grew too strong to ignore and we’ve added support for detecting embeds.

The info will show up as a track under the post in the same way as a music file.

There is a caveat: SoundCloud still doesn’t support artist meta info. What does this mean to you? If the SoundCloud account doesn’t belong to the artists, themselves, the “title” of the track should be Artist Name – Track Title. One space is required on either side of the dash. This is mainly for labels who upload many tracks by many different artists.

There still may be issues. Guessing the artist and title is a shitty way to do it, but that’s what SoundCloud gives us. I’m hoping they add an artist meta to the api at some point, but who knows.

(Hat tip to Hyperbolium for the conversation that lead to this)

We often get questions about how to let elbows know when you’ve updated rather than waiting for the bot to crawl. While the bot should check your feed a few times per hour (for regular posters), it’s always possible that we miss an update.

How to add http://elbo.ws/ping/ to your ‘Update Services’ area:

Movable Type – Log in to your account and go to the ‘Configuration’ section and click on ‘Preferences’. Scroll down to the area where you can find: ‘Publicity / Remote Interfaces / TrackBack’. Add http://elbo.ws/ping/ to other notification services.

WordPress – Log in to your account and go to the ‘Settings’ section. Click on the ‘Writing’ tab. Scroll down to ‘Update Services’ and add http://elbo.ws/ping/ to the box.

Blogger and others – Head over to http://elbo.ws/ping and throw in your url. You’ll have to do this manually, but it’s just one extra step when you want that post to go out ASAP.

Likewise, if you don’t blog for a long period of time (over a week), our bot will put you on the backburner. If you use ping within your blogging software, you’ll be all set. If not, you can head to http://elbo.ws/ping and jump start the process.

It’s important to note that Feedburner caches a copy of your feed so updates might not come through immediately.

It’s been a long time coming (probably too long), but we’ve finally added support for Vimeo videos today. Whenever you embed a Vimeo video going forward, it will show up with your post the same way Youtube videos have:

They will also count towards the Hot Video list. In fact, the Erykah Badu video in the example above is currently #3 on the Hot Video list.

I just wanted to post a quick note to say we’ve changed the way the bot will be crawling. If you’re using either the manual or automatic pings, this will not affect you – we will still crawl these as they come in.

Otherwise, here are a few things to take note of:

• Unapproved blogs get crawled at night. If you submit a new blog, you’re going to have to wait at least a day for it to be approved (but probably longer).
• Crawling has been optimized so that we get through all the blogs within 90 minutes during off-peak hours. We’ll monitor to see if this remains similar throughout the day.
• If you’re a very active blogger, you will be prioritized over bloggers who post less frequently. This is an attempt to decrease the number of failed scrapes. We don’t want to scrape an inactive blog more than an active blog.

Also, we will probably be implementing some sort of “holding pattern” for inactive blogs. This will probably mean that, if you haven’t posted anything for a week or longer, we will only crawl once per night.

Again, if you’re using the pinging services, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about – we will still crawl them as they come in. This is probably the best way to get us your posts as quickly as possible. Another thing to take note of is, if you are using feedburner, pinging MAY not always work as quickly. This is because feedburner caches your feed and your latest post does not always appear immediately in your feedburner feed. If you are concerned about this, send over a link to your raw feed and we’ll replace the feedburner link with it.

We are pleased to announce our first WordPress plugin. By installing this plugin and adding a bit of code to your single page template, you have the ability to give your readers access to additional related posts from the Elbows archive.

The latest version of the plugin will always be available here. Simply unzip it into your wp-content/plugins directory and activate via the admin panel.

Once installed, you can edit your settings here and add a bit of code to your wordpress theme (usually on your single post page):

<div id="related">
<h2>Related Posts from Elbows</h2>
<?php related_elbows_posts(); ?>
</div>


The related_elbows_posts() function will output an unordered list that can be styled accordingly.

If you have any suggested modifications or need help, feel free to email me at brandon (at) elbo.ws.

Welcome to the reincarnation of the Elbows Blog. This time, we’re going to attempt to focus on what’s happening in the music blog community with a little chatter about new features on Elbows mixed in.

Our posts here will be at our discretion. If you wish to follow every word of the Music Blogosphere, see the Elbows main page here or visit the Elbows Music Blogger Community for discussions.

We hope you enjoy and, as always, if you have tips or feedback, please message us at info@elbo.ws