Explanation of technology in the new Moonalice.com
We started this project 18 months ago with the goal of making all of our content available to fans. Pretty early in the project, we realized that the traditional design of websites - with separate pages for music, video, blog updates, etc. - was not going to work for us. We settled on the idea of a "control panel" model, where the fan would spend most of his or her time on one page and we would serve the content they desire. The traditional tools of web development made this possible on a PC or Mac, but not on smartphones, whose share of internet devices now exceeds PCs.
About a year ago, we realized that everything we were doing would be more useful if it worked really well on smartphones. That caused us to begin working with a new programming language called HTML 5 so that we could put our content on smartphones without requiring an app. About five months ago, we started broadcasting our concerts live via satellite, using both Flash and HTML 5. Fans loved it.
It turns out that while HTML 5 is going to be amazing, it is still very crude today. The language has huge holes in it - you cannot process financial transactions, for example - so we used HTML 4 and other mature tools to implement our HTML 5-model design. What you see today is the most primitive form this site will ever take. We plan to upgrade functionality continuously.
It has been straightforward to load posters, legends, and audio. Video, on the other hand, is a bear to load over the web. Our vendor re-negged on a commitment to upload the shows for us, so it will take us longer to upload older show videos than we would like. We don't think that's a big deal, as we play about 100 shows a year and are always getting better, both musically and video-wise.
We recommend that you save MoonaliceTV.com and the audio player on your iPhone, iPad or Android home screen. That way you are only one click away from our music!!!
Thank you for your support!
Moonalice