Here's a clip from a local TV news outlet in Florida,
highlighting our basic philosophy at The Digital Deli Online,
as related by the 'better half' of 'The Deli', Dee Neyhart:
For Our Internet Explorer users:
If you can't see the frame below this line, Please click HERE
to see our Video in Windows Media Player
Right Click Above to Play [or change] loop and play controls.
Summer has arrived . . . . . at last!!
Here's the latest updates for the site for July 2008:
- Well it's been an interesting Spring and Summer already--in so many ways. Some for the good, some for the bad, all positive learning experiences. First the good stuff--new features and articles:
- Dramatically expanded Golden Age of Radio Electrical Transcription History page. Click HERE.
- Golden Age Radio History Reference Cards--24 of them for starters, printed back and front with printer's marks. Click HERE.
- Golden Age Radio History Cover Art in both Windows Media Player and iTunes compatible format. Click HERE
- Golden Age Radio Premium Promotional Membership Cards from the 1930s to 1960s. Click HERE
- 230 Sight impaired enhancements to our 5,600 web pages of content. (Yes, still a ways to go, I admit, but highly satisfying--and a tip of our hat to the Blind Community for gently encouraging us to do so.)
- Repaired 72 broken links, adding 68 new Retrospective, Nostalgia, and Genre links in the process to replace them.
- 75 New Serial Film reviews and companying graphics from our Serial Film Collection of over 800 individual Chapters. Click HERE
- We've Added over 68,000 newly encoded or upgraded Radio Episodes to our Holdings for a total of 192,000 worldwide.
- We've added over 1,800 Golden Age Movies to our Golden Age Movie Holdings for a total of over 3,000.
- We've added over 4,200 Golden Age Television Episodes to our Golden Age Television Holdings.
- We've added another 520 Films to our Golden Age Ephemeral Film Holdings
- We've Upgraded our Primary Server to a quad-processor, 8-Terabyte SATA II Storage configuration.
- We now have over 7,400 Golden Age Radio Series Titles in our Collection. Click HERE
- We've acquired double our previous bandwidth from our Hosting Service.
- We've added 5,600 more Electrical Transcription Discs and Reel-to-Reel Tapes to our Transcription Holdings
- We've released over 470 previously uncirculated Golden Age Radio Transcriptions from our own 1st Generation Sources.
- We've acquired more software tools to develop the website and tag and encode our Transcription upgrades.
- We've embarked on an effort to dramatically re-organize The Digital Deli Online, consolidating its features.
- We've added some wonderful Special Collections Folders to our FTP Site:
- We've added the AFRS Collection, currently comprised of 149 distinct AFRS origination series from the World War II and pre-Korean Conflict era. Click HERE
- We've added the AFRTS Collection, currently comprised of 63 distinct AFRTS origination series from the pre-Korean Conflict area through the Cold War years. Click HERE
- We've added the Children's Collection, comprised of over 200 distinct series from the Golden Age Radio era programmed specifically for a juvenile audience and painstakingly transcribed from E.T.s, LPs and tapes.
- We've added the Christmas High-Quality Collection, categorized both chronologically and by series, from 1931 through 1978. Click HERE
- We've added the Golden Age of Radio History Collection, comprised of over 6,000 Radio History and Trivia episodes. The absolute minimum point of departure for any serious Golden Age Radio Collector and an invaluable resource for both new and experienced Golden Age of Radio Historians. ClickHERE
- We've added the Golden Age Radio Scripts Collection, currently comprised of over 2,100 full scripts and provenances in either Adobe Portable Document Format [PDF] or TIF and JPEG images, ready for OCR scanning.
- We've added the Hollywood Collection, currently comprised of 95 distinct 'Hollywood themed' radio series from The Golden Age of Radio. Click HERE
- We've added our new Star Showcase Collection, currently representing the entire circulating radio work of 19 of The Golden Age of Radio's most successful stars. Click HERE
- Moving on, our 'About Collecting' features showcase Golden Age Radio Collecting issues, best practices, resources, equipment, research techniques, philosophy, and tips and tricks in virtually every facet of Golden Age Radio Collecting. We'll be expanding this section for The Holiday Season, adding some ideas to help you with this fascinating hobby through the cold months of the winter. Check the section for some gift ideas for your favorite Golden Age Radio fans.
- Unlimited bandwidth has allowed us to provide several new high-bandwidth features.. Hopefully you've noted how fast the pages of The Deli come up on your screens by now. Please accept our thanks for your continuing loyalty.
- Web Traffic: We've maintained Google Positions 2 through 5 yet again! (That's positions 2 through 5 out of over 23 Million Golden Age Radio site references on the World-wide Web). Yahoo and MSN have placed us #1 for months now. Thank you!!
- We seem to be beholding to the people of China for elevating us to the top 25,000 most popular websites in that massive population. Thank you, China. We hope you're enjoying our pages as much as we enjoy seeing you return to them day after day. And somehow, we've become the Most Popular Old-Time Radio Site On the 'Net. (while we don't really care much for the 'Old Time Radio' or 'OTR' categories the folks that run the service Alexa uses to make their popularity determinations, have refused for 4 years now to establish Golden Age Radio as a category). There's no accounting for these anomalies, but we don't see any change in the DMOZ for the immediate future. And this, despite Alexa's four-year refusal to accurately describe The Digital Deli Online and it's blazing fast response times, we continue to place within the top five of their 'Old Time Radio' websites. Note that if you lookup digitaldeliftp.com on Alexa, they continue to quote an eight-second access time to reach any of our pages. Did it take you eight seconds to reach The Digital Deli? Of course not. Thirteen demands to Alexa to correct this discrepancy over the past three years have been ignored. Despite their continued, false information regarding our website, we continue to place in the top five on Alexa. We owe this to you, our subscribers' continuing loyalty.
- We're subscribed to, and visited by every country, territory, and international body with access to the Internet now--including thousands of hits each month from our dedicated troops prosecuting Iraqi Freedom.
- The site has grown from 5 pages to over 5,600 pages.
- We've grown from offering 40 show logs in February to over 142 show logs now.
- We're offering 180 CD/DVD Art labels now, as opposed to the 45 labels we were showing in February. You can preview 45 more on the CD-Label Art Page. The next installment of 90 more CD/DVD Art Labels should be rolling out by the end of June. We've received donations for 23 CD-Art compilations already, with glowing comments from all who've received and used them!
- And if you ever get lost on the site, the wonderful Google Site Search Tool is readily accessible on every page now.
It's been a devil of a year so far! But you're continuing interest and loyalty have made it all worth it.
Other Quick Notes
We've developed 28 Transcription Label Images that I'll probably be showcasing on the Transcriptions Page soon. This is a new feature in the Golden Age Radio Show Preservation effort.
We've added 380 mp3 and itune compatible cover art images for your Golden Age Radio Collection.
New spotlights on the remaining Spotlight Categories are in draft.
Route 66 will be the theme of our next major feature upgrade.
World-wide Interest in Golden Age Radio.
I continue to be amazed that the Internet could ever reach so far from such a humble beginning as the first 10 months of The Digital Deli. The country count of our subscribers tripled in one year. We now have subscribers from 147 countries, territories, and international bodies. (Click on any flag to see a map of that country)
See where the last 1000 of you are visiting from, 24/7 and real-time:
(Hover your mouse pointer over a dot for precise location--see if you can
find yourself as well. Click refresh if your location isn't shown at first)
Now honestly . . . how cool is that?
 . . . as well as in all 50 of the United States now. This has far more to do with Golden Age Radio's enduring fascination for people around the world, than with our efforts on this web site. You can't help but be amazed at such far reaching responses to this initial presence. We've marked the occasion with this world map showing our subscribers so we can all see the genuine universal interest in The Golden Age of Radio worldwide.
FTP Site Access and Updates
There are over 1 Gb of shows and other materials available for 'http' download--from the same FTP Site our supporting subscribers use. If you wish to know how fast our FTP download site really is, simply download any of the 100's of available mp3's on the site, and gauge the performance for yourself.
As Always, a Reminder About Media Players
Any of you that have bought a new computer in the last few years--PC or Mac--may have become aware of some incompatibilities between Media Players with this most recent generation of both platforms, the Apple Mac's and the Windows-based PC's. If you get a Mac you're looking at QuickTime defaults to play most of your audio media (including MP3's), and in the Windows camp, XP's Media Player wants to see MP3's played under its own Windows Media Player defaults.
The software we author and maintain the web site with is Adobe GoLive, which has its own predilection for QuickTime audio and video--unfortunately [or by design?] to the exclusion of a driver for generic MP3 recordings. One can only surmise that with Adobe's long association with Apple, and--Adobe's direct competition with Microsoft on many marketing fronts--Adobe was more inclined to promote QuickTime in its own defense.
I now use Media Player Classic and it's codecs (encoders/decoders) to post the MP3's here, in the hopes that the MP3 decoders in both the Microsoft and Apple QuickTime camps can decode the resulting ''platform-neutral' MP3 encodes I post here. Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe can keep duking it out in the marketplace, and we can still use Media Player Classic or other 3rd Party developed media players as a common denominator to play web-delivered MP3's.
A Final Note
'Why not just use RealAudio on the site like everyone else seems to be doing?' The short answer is that, contrary to all of the websites you visit that DO use RealAudio, I value your personal security and privacy far too much to be complicit in the questionable practice of tracking subscribers' personal information and internet surfing habits. We get enough of that from our own Telecomms and Government these days. I feel that RealAudio is just simply too intrusive--and disingenuous. . . . . as is Netscape. Both RealAudio and Netscape monitor and record--via your computer's unique ID and your personal Windows Registry--every site their users traverse and, more disturbingly, every single download you transact, with their non-standard hidden 'cookies' and 'phone home' routines that are hard-wired into their whole architecture now. (Follow this link to keep well informed: http://grc.com/downloaders.htm ). I feel that's a bit more of an invasion of privacy than I'm willing to expose my subscribers to--but apparently almost all of our competitors and imitators have no problem with this deplorable practice. With that in mind, I'll continue to use every technology at my disposal to provide you with the least intrusive media and the safest recommendations that I can make to you, with which to enjoy The Digital Deli's content. For The Deli's Privacy Policy follow this link: The Digital Deli's Privacy Policy.
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