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Spring 2008 Has Sprung!! . . .
Here's the lastest updates for the site for April 2008:
- We apologize for the late updates for March and April 2008 and the latter half of 2007. A catastrophic fire reduced the editor's family home of 60 years to rubble March 3rd, 2007. It's taken far longer than we'd anticipated to recover all of the source material for The Digital Deli Online's website and features but we've managed to recover all of it and then some!
- In the process we've upgraded our server to twice it's speed, capacity and reliability, as well as adding almost three times the content as our original server contained. We now offer over 4,000 Golden Age Television episodes, hundreds of them from early kinescopes. We've got over 70 complete serial movies to offer, comprising over 1000 individual episodes. We've added over 68,ooo new and upgraded episodes to our worldwide Golden Age Radio holdings, which now totals over 135,000 episodes. We maintain over 3,000 ephemeral films and historical films in our collection. And we've added over 2,800 movies to our Golden Age Movie holdings. All told, we're running full tilt now with a 7-Terabyte Golden Age multimedia collection. And no, you don't have to worry about the 'copyright police' or the RIAA raiding your home when you access our collection. One of the most egregious 'OTR' sites on the internet boasts 'over 300,000 files for download'. An absurd claim on the face of it, since by all expert estimates there are less than 220,000 total unique American Golden Age Radio episodes currently in circulation. In point of fact their entire site holdings comprise less than 90,000 worldwide radio episodes. But what they don't mention is that over 60% of their entire holdings are pirated audio books and other contemporary copyright-protected works. Now granted, it stands to reason that anyone so dismissive of the rich history of Golden Age Radio to refer to it as simply 'OTR' likely has too few scruples to concern themselves with promoting or abetting the wholesale abuse of thousands of current copyright holders. What's most disturbing is the hypocritical 'copyright notice' that site--and hundreds of other sites like it--post for their subscribers, knowing full well that well over half of their entire collection blatantly violates their own posted copyright disclaimer. The Digital Deli Online has for 7 years now, posted a standing offer to remove from it's collection any and all copyright protected material from it's holdings whenever cited--and without question. In that entire 7 years we've experienced only three citations of potential copyright infringement--all three of which we respectfully responded to within 24 hours by removing all potentially infringing material from our holdings.
- Our newest addition to our FTP Holdings are our 'Special Collections' folders:
- The AFRS Collection, currently comprised of 149 distinct AFRS origination shows from the World War II and pre-Korean Conflict era.
- The AFRTS Collection, currently comprised of 63 distinct AFRTS origination shows from the pre-Korean Confict area through the Cold War years.
- The Chidren's Collection, comprised of over 200 distinct series from the Golden Age Radio era programmed spcifically for a juvenile audience and painstakingly transcribed from E.T.s, LPs and tapes.
- The Christmas High-Quality Collection, categorized both chronologically and by series, from 1931 through 1978.
- The Golden Age of Radio History Collection, comprised of over 5000 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.
- The Golden Age Radio Scripts Collection, currently comprised of over 2100 full scripts and provenances in either Adobe Portable Document Format [PDF] or TIF and JPEG images, ready for OCR scanning.
- The Hollywood Collection, currently comprised of 95 distinct 'Hollywood themed' radio shows from The Golden Age of Radio.
- Our new Star Showcase Collection, currently represented the entire collected radio work of 19 of The Golden Age of Radio's most successful stars.
- The 'About Collecting' feature showcases 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 and 3 yet again! (That's positions 2 and 3 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're still in the top 100,000 websites out of over 6.1 Billion (yes, that's B-I-L-L-I-O-N not Million) web site pages worldwide. Alexa has placed The Digital Deli Online as the 3rd Most Popular Old-Time Radio Site On the 'Net!! (while we deplore the term 'Old Time Radio' or 'OTR', the folks that run the service Alexa uses to make their popularity determinations, has refused for 4 years now to establish Golden Age Radio as a category). This is understandable since every single 'manager' for the decisions of that 'neutral' service are successful, commercial 'OTR' site operators and owners, with a vested interest in barring competition from the rapidly growing Golden Age Radio proponent community. And yet despite Alexa's three-year refusal to accurately describe The Digital Deli Online and it's unbelievably fast response times, we continue to place in the top ten 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 any of 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, deliberately falsified information regarding our website, we continue to place in the top three or top ten 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.
- 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
I've developed 28 Transcription Label Images that I'll probably be showcasing on the Transcriptons Page soon. This is a new feature in the Golden Age Radio Show Collecting arena.
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 subscribership so we can all see the genuine universal interest in The Golden Age of Radio worldwide.
FTP Site Access and Updates
There are over 1000Mb 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.
A Reminder About Media Players
Any of you that have bought a new computer in the last couple of 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 I author and maintain the web site with is Adobe GoLive, which has its own predilection for QuickTime audio and video--unfortunately, or by design methinks, 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 WinAmp 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. I feel that RealAudio is just simply too intrusive--and disengenuous. . . . . 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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