Help managing listings...

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johncolumbo
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Help managing listings...

Post by johncolumbo » Wed Jul 20, 2016 6:36 am

Hey everyone... long time, no post. I'm here working though and looking forward to seeing many of you in November!

I have a request, mostly to Michael and the Taxi team.
Is it possible to add the DUE DATE and LISTING # to the TOP of each of the listings on either the Taxi "submit music" page or the main opportunities page?

Something like this:

No later than 11:59PM (PDT), on Wednesday, July 20th, 2016. TAXI #S160720PC
CONTEMPORARY POP INSTRUMENTAL CUES are needed for ...


The reason I am requesting this is because I use, and I'm guessing I'm not the only person, TODOIST.com, EVERNOTE.com, and other tools to schedule my time.
The ability to copy a section of text from a website is pretty standard in these apps, however not being able to capture the due date and listing number in one short section makes this a more difficult process than it really needs to be.

I hope that makes sense to someone and doesn't sound like I'm complaining because I'm certainly not.
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Re: Help managing listings...

Post by Paulie » Wed Jul 20, 2016 10:42 am

Lots of folks have offered listing clean-up selections. :) I work around it by manually copy/pasting the listings I am interested in into a rich text doc I keep on my desktop. I also have a whiteboard where I list due dates and genres so I can see my weekly and monthly picture. Sort of old fashioned, but it works for me.
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Re: Help managing listings...

Post by johncolumbo » Wed Jul 20, 2016 11:23 am

Hey Paulie... what do you mean exactly by "Lots of folks have offered listing clean-up selections."? Do you mean that there are other forum posts with suggestions to manage this easier?

I was posting them into Evernote by copying and pasting and then cleaning the content up, but that's a lot of non-value added time spent just organizing stuff and then having to set reminders and such.

Now I'm using todoist's ability to snag highlighted text using their safari plugin... it works great, until a longer listing and then it cuts off the content which stinks. It's doable because I'm setting the dates manually myself, but it's not ideal.

I could go on and on with other reasons why it would help, but that's not the point.
I was just reminded by Michael's recent example of how an industry person told him he wanted to see success stories on Twitter and Michael had no idea they used Twitter that way. This could be a quick easy change internally that would help a lot of us more active members as we schedule and manage the listings.

Thanks,
Last edited by johncolumbo on Wed Jul 20, 2016 11:25 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Help managing listings...

Post by hummingbird » Wed Jul 20, 2016 11:24 am

When I copy and paste the listings I'm interested in to my gdoc or notepad, I always write the date due at the top, and then I organize them in date order, so I can totally understand what you're looking for. I guess we all do this manually.

DUE THU AUG 11TH - ACTION INSTRUMENTAL CUES
New Listing ACTION INSTRUMENTAL CUES are needed by a Music Library with a super impressive list of great placements in Film and TV. They're open to Orchestral, Electronic, Rock, or hybrids of the aforementioned styles. Give them epic, Up-Tempo Instrumental Cues that would work great for an awesome car chase or any other high-energy action related scene...... blah blah
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Re: Help managing listings...

Post by johncolumbo » Wed Jul 20, 2016 11:29 am

hummingbird wrote:When I copy and paste the listings I'm interested in to my gdoc or notepad, I always write the date due at the top, and then I organize them in date order, so I can totally understand what you're looking for. I guess we all do this manually.

DUE THU AUG 11TH - ACTION INSTRUMENTAL CUES
New Listing ACTION INSTRUMENTAL CUES are needed by a Music Library with a super impressive list of great placements in Film and TV. They're open to Orchestral, Electronic, Rock, or hybrids of the aforementioned styles. Give them epic, Up-Tempo Instrumental Cues that would work great for an awesome car chase or any other high-energy action related scene...... blah blah
+1 Glad to know I'm not the only one Vikki. :)
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Re: Help managing listings...

Post by johncolumbo » Wed Jul 20, 2016 11:50 am

And speaking of Google Docs, did you guys know that there's a really cool function in SHEETS that allows you to automatically pull in the details of an RSS feed?

You would just put the feed URL, something like http://blog.taxi.com/forward/feed/ in field A1, then put the following functions into other fields like B1 and B2. Try it out.
=IMPORTFEED(A1,"items title")
=IMPORTFEED(A1,"items url")

I tried this with the Taxi forward feed, as shown above, with my intent being able to get to the content and then do some more detailed reporting on forwards, but unfortunately the Taxi feed does not have tags around certain content or does not have a related XML template it is using so I couldn't figure out a way to easily or accurately parse out the information I wanted.

If the Taxi listing page had a feed and was tagged accurately we could all easily use this method to automatically pull the listings into a Google Sheet and then report on it with awesome colored charts... WOW, wouldn't that be glorious, eh?

But I digress...
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Re: Help managing listings...

Post by VanderBoegh » Wed Jul 20, 2016 2:39 pm

I don't copy and paste anything. Or write any listings down... which could explain why I'm constantly missing deadlines or forgetting about listings entirely, lol.

Seriously though, when I was writing for Taxi listings regularly (like, trying to write & submit to 10 or so per month), I used the whiteboard method. Worked pretty well for me, and I was able to stay on track fairly easily.

I've never heard of the online calendars thingamajigs you mentioned, John, but they sound interesting.

~~Matt

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Re: Help managing listings...

Post by johncolumbo » Thu Jul 21, 2016 5:35 am

VanderBoegh wrote: Seriously though, when I was writing for Taxi listings regularly (like, trying to write & submit to 10 or so per month), I used the whiteboard method. Worked pretty well for me, and I was able to stay on track fairly easily.

I've never heard of the online calendars thingamajigs you mentioned, John, but they sound interesting.

~~Matt
Hey Matt,

I'd use the whiteboard too if I weren't always in different places all the time. Having everything synced up between the laptop, phone, and tablet is a whole lot more practical for me.

Check out http://todoist.com. I'm a premium member... it works great for keeping me on track and breaking jobs down into smaller tasks that I can do even away from the studio. The safari plugin I mentioned is here https://todoist.com/safari.
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Re: Help managing listings...

Post by artturner » Thu Jul 21, 2016 8:30 am

+1 to these suggestions!

I tried (unsuccessfully) making things work with todoist, but now I copy/paste listings of interest onto my Google calendar.

I also tend to rebel against my tech (Todoist--stop telling me what to do!) (GPS--stop telling me where to go!).

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Re: Help managing listings...

Post by hummingbird » Thu Jul 21, 2016 8:43 am

artturner wrote:
I also tend to rebel against my tech (Todoist--stop telling me what to do!) (GPS--stop telling me where to go!).
That sounds like a great idea for a song! (c) Art Turner! lol
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