A lot of people hate weeds. In all of my nature loving research, I've personally come to the conclusion that many weeds are simply free food or medicine that we are too ignorant to eat or use. Did you know dandelions are wonderfully medicinal, rich in vitamins, and you can eat every part of it? That however is a different thought train. Today, I'm going with the mainstream sentiment of weeds... GO AWAY.
About a week ago, I came upon a site called flattr.com, a concept which seemed pretty good. You paste some code into your online profiles and allow people to tip you a few cents here and there if they feel so inclined. I thought "I've got nothing to lose" and so I followed a few steps, added the code to our site, and also added each of our soundcloud tracks to our flattr account. That took about 20 minutes.
After doing this, each of our soundcloud tracks had a "flattr" button below them, and I didn't notice anything particularly wrong, so I left it. What I didn't notice until today was that it had completely REPLACED our "buy on Amazon" or "buy on iTunes" buttons. Buttons which were there after I had manually pasted in the specific link for each song into the metadata of each track. Something I'd probably spent about 30 minutes on at the time.
It doesn't take a genius to realize that the last thing a musician wants is for someone to mess up the links to where people can actually purchase their music. So I started going into the metadata for each of our Soundcloud tracks and replacing it with the specific code for each of our tracks. My computer is being very sluggish right now, so this was actually taking quite a bit of time waiting for the page to load each time.
After going through each track, I refreshed our soundcloud page and was alarmed to see that the Flattr button was still there instead of the buy on Amazon link. So I opened up the edit window again, and saw that the Flattr metadata had refused to die.
I went to our account page on Flattr where I had manually added each of our soundcloud tracks, and one by one deleted them each.
On soundcloud, I had to go back and repaste the individual purchase links for each track AGAIN. This time I was checking them and double checking them as I went along. Edit, paste, save, refresh, click edit, check the code. Sometimes it was saved to the Amazon link, sometimes it went back to flattr. It still wouldn't die. This could clearly be a soundcloud issue at this point.
I went back to Flattr and completely deleted our account. And this was what it said.
After this, I refreshed our soundcloud page and most of the tracks STILL showed the Flattr button under. So I went through them AGAIN and pasted the individual purchase links into the metadata of each track AGAIN and refreshed the pages AGAIN. This is what I got after doing each track 4 times.
Only about one out of every 3 or 4 tracks was changed. I clicked on one of the Flattr buttons and the link took me to the Amazon page. At this point, I decided to just wait it out.
"What have I got to lose?" Two solid hours of my Saturday afternoon and another slice of my sanity.
Although the removal bugs are likely the fault of soundcloud, the initial take over of the buy buttons was on Flattr. I'm not cool with that. Bye bye Flattr!!!!
P.S. If anyone has experience with Coin Widget let me know. I'm moving on to other things for now.
