World’s Greatest Guitarist

We just cleaned up the voting results. Apparently there was quite a bit of multi-voting going on for the last couple of days.

Just because it seems to be possible to vote more than 1 time/day (using various “tricks”) does NOT mean it won’t get noticed or tracked. So you better believe us that voting multiple times is a waste of your own time and doesn’t do your favorite guitarist any good at all.

“Trick” votes simply don’t stay in the results when we do our final verification before publishing the official end result.

Therefore no big deal, right?

Not quite…

There’s one thing bugging us.

The displayed voting results are not representative and might even foster a climate of mistrust due to the (sometimes extreme) percentage fluctuations.

Regular visitors only see those percentage changes without having access to the traffic patterns or the information of how many votes were non legit the last few hours/days.

Fortunately, the new voting booth module that we are currently testing out should eliminate,or at least greatly reduce, the multi-voting issue by pro-actively blocking additional votes from even entering the database.

Obviously a much more elegant and preferable method than having to filter out the junk afterwards.

For the meantime we came up with the following solution:

Every time we do a mini audit of the voting database we’ll update a time stamp on the results page. This way you’ll at least get a better feel for the “real” standings and how representative the displayed results truly are.

Thanks for your continued participation in our little election. We really appreciate it.

To all multi-voters: practice guitar instead! 

It’s official now…

The winner of the April Fool’s Day edition:

Paris Hilton

in front of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse.
(Disney must be real proud of this strong teamwork)

Thanks to everyone who participated.

The “real” voting for April will start again on Monday. We’ll also announce the March winner on Monday evening.

• No newsletter
• Late publication of voting results
• No new content in the form of lessons and playback files

Here’s our WGG confession:

A couple of months ago we already had realized that our initial plan of how to present all our content was structured too rigidly and simply didn’t work for us.

We thought, “No problem, with our next system upgrade we’ll simply implement our changes. No big deal.”

Famous last words…

Right in the middle of this transition with things progressing more or less as planned all hell broke loose.

Actually in a good way…

We got approached to do music production work for television and had to fit gruesome deadlines into our already busy private teaching schedules. Additionally, there were gigs piling up on top of each other, way more than expected.

Great for freelance musicians to have many different projects going on at the same time.

However, it doesn’t help if you are trying to establish structures for some databases and try to program delicate changes into a CMS system.

The good news:

• We are getting a handle on how to handle our TV production deadlines
• In this hiatus we had a chance to re-think some of our ideas and found some new approaches
• There were new developments on the technical side and some of the problems we had faced simply vanished - POOF!

Besides the customary bloglike posts about whatever happens behind the WGG scenes we want to document the final transitional phase to our upgraded, re-designed version of our website. In future blogposts we’ll sketch out some of the new features and functionality that we are really excited about - and we hope you all will be, too.

For now, please accept our apologies for the “hibernation” - spring and (website) bloom are just around the corner.