Fantastic Friday people of Slipmat!
This week we’ve been hard at work squashing bugs and UI issues reported mostly by you and found during the live events. We’ve also strenghtened and cleaned up the external / afk request event UIs to make the experience of taking song requests in club setting as smooth and easy as possible.
New Features
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Checklists are a very useful tool for all artists, and we now have them built-in for Slipmat events
This is a feature still behind Experimental Featuressetting in your user profile; enable that and you’ll see a new Checklists section in your artist profile page. After enabling them, you’ll see a --still very much work-in-progress-- Checklists page on your artist dashboard. (This way you can just opt not to see them at all if you don’t find the feature useful. checklists are not enabled by default).You can create multiple different checklists (one for streaming events, one for club gigs, and one for mobile gigs, for example) and each item can be directed to either before, during or after the event. This helps us show you the needed checks at every step of the event. Checklists are purely an
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Spotify Connect: you can now connect your own Spotify account at Spotify page you find from your account page. This has no real user-facing features yet, but it enables some really cool future integrations and APIs. Test it out if you are interested!
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External event page now has the initial simple implementation of Gig booking enquiries. If you set “Available for bookings” on from your artist settings you now see a “Booking Enquiries” navigation item in the artist navigation. This is the very first, simplest possible implementation with just basic contact details and a form, visible only during the events for the audience so you won’t get spam.
We are currently building behind the scenes a full-blown, proper, booking application that will do everything and more than any existing software available at the moment. This is the tiny first tip of that iceberg but allows your mobile gig or club audience send you booking requests via the requests-page that can be reached easily via a QR-code for example. If you are using something external at the moment (be it a third-party software, your own Web site form, excell sheets or just plain emails or Facebook DMs), I’d be interested in hearing about any feature requests and current pain points that a well-built booking system would alleviate for you! The current design goals are based on the experiences of a handful of Finnish club/mobile DJs who mostly have been using literally nothing to manage their bookings. So I think we have some idea of the actual pain points and things that could be better, but I also know that all artists are different and work differently – we want to build something that works well for everyone!
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We now have a public QR code generator tool that allows you to generate a static QR code that points to any URL, easily and for free.
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There is now a public support page if you feel like donating to a good cause outside of live events.
Enhancements
- Requests default now to using the artists whole track collection instead of forcing you to choose a specific playlist. But if you want, you can still select one or more playlists instead.
- AFK / request events can now be edited, cancelled and deleted like any other event.
- The external request event public page UI has been totally revamped. It’s now much better with mobile screens and it displays prominently artist details and booking form as well.
- The Slipmat application post-update reloader has been improved. If you happen to be online when the site is updated, the page is forcefully refreshed so that we can guarantee you are using the correct version at all times. There’s still lots of room for improvement here but now you get a clear notification before the refresh happens. We are deploying on average multiple times a day but also try to avoid doing any work whenever a scheduled show is about to go into warmup or is live.
Bugfixes
- Uploaded chat images no longer break when the caption gets link/mention enrichment. Thank You @telakeppi for the bug report!
- Abandoned live events are now properly cleaned up via an automated task. Thank You @Rimski for surfacing this issue.
- Friend requests no longer break on deleted accounts; orphaned friendships purged.
- A small bug in homepage feed creation has been fixed.
- Tidal search has been fixed.
- An issue with shoutout audio recording has been fixed.
- Track Collection merge can no longer be submitted twice.
- Sentry config and server-side logging has been tightened; we’re getting even less unnecessary noise in the automatic reports.
Under The Hood
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We’re now collecting device profile data (browser, OS, screen size, language, timezone, colour scheme) from all users. No IPs or any PII is stored, the data is auto-deleted after retention period. This is mainly for bug reports but also to strenghten security around logins and abuse.
Our data collection generally is extremely small and always ethical but we’re still planning for allow opting out from basically everything – just because it’s fairly easy to do and to offer the option. (We do not for example set any cookies for anonymous visitors or collect any data for any kind of marketing or tracking purposes whatsoever. We use ethical cookie-free Plausible for analytics (instead of free and unethical products like Google Analytics) and we disclose our data use explicitly.)
That’s it for this week – enjoy the music! ![]()