All,
First, this isn't a plea for funds. We're still a few years away from needing that again. ;-) But there is something you may be able to help with.
The 20th anniversary of the very first Harmony In My Head is coming up in a few months and I'd like to hear from listeners old and new in the lead up, which I will highlight in an anniversary post when the time comes.
A few weeks ago I received a very kind message through our contact form from Alex, who wrote,
Just wanted to say thank you for this website. I'm a sucker for Iggy's shows and can now listen to them all the way back together with my girlfriend. Now checking out some of the other stuff you have here. You made yourself a nice little corner on the internet, keep it up and thanks for putting it together!
Thank you very much Alex, but I feel it important to note that I am merely the current custodian of this archive.
From my best understanding the work I am currently doing is only possible because of the efforts of my three predecessors (and if I missed anyone, please correct me in the comments. everyone deserves the recognition):
-
- Tara - who managed the first version of this site on Blogger.com
- Angela - who appears to be the one who migrated to a modern content management system
- Gareth - who managed the site for many years, and finally
- John - me, your current archivist
In addition, there have been a number of regulars over the years who have helped by contributing tracklists, show recordings, and the funds necessary to keep us going.
Everything kicked off almost 20 years ago with show #01: May 17, 2004 on Indie 103 FM (vice.com article here, wikipedia entry here, and, amazingly, their actual website from 2007) in Los Angeles.
In those early days of 2004-2005, before our current domain, the Rollins archive was a Blogger hosted site. Rollins-archive.com first shows up on the Internet Archive in 2006, with deep links to the Blogger site.
archive.org screenshot of rollins-archive.org from early 2006
archive.org screenshot of rollins-archive.org show details from early 2006
In those early days the recordings were captured in pieces and each show posting had links to between 2 and 6 files. For reasons lost to me, each segment was placed in its own ZIP file.
The world was more desktop-centric back then and the idea of a mobile device that could stream the recordings was in its mere infancy.
Today, as an archive and not a streaming media site, we continue the practice of placing each show in a ZIP file, even though the programs are now captured as single mp3s. A few years ago I used some tools to merge the older multi-part mp3s into single files without losing the baseline quality of the originals and updated the links on all old posts.
From time to time I check in on other spaces on the web where Rollins and Iggy fans congregate ( reddit & facebook mostly) to see if we get mentioned. We do, but often enough someone comments about how we have broken and missing links to various shows, especially those early episodes.
This pains me, as I try very hard to validate the accuracy of our posts and run missing link detection from time to time. Nevertheless, I do find that sometimes our older files will timeout when attempting to download them. Oddly, after that first attempt, a retry is always immediately successful. I can only assume some underlying latency and file retrieval issue on the part of our web host.
Rest assured every file we link to does exist on the server and I have local copies of everything if ever that fails.
In the next few months I'd love to hear from anyone with thoughts they'd like to have archived as we approach 20 years together.
Feel free to comment on this post or use the aforementioned contact form to submit a note privately.
I'd especially like to hear from Tara, Angela, Gareth, and any long time followers so that I can post a lengthier piece come May.
Until then, "Stay fanatic," and please let me know if you ever find an episode link that's broken.
