Well we have officially made it over a year here at TMS and we seriously can’t thank you guys enough.  Through your efforts, donations, word of mouth, and general support we have managed to hit some major milestones with the site.   I figured I’d share a few tidbits with everyone just to show how a group of fans can come together and make something really monumental happen.  Since 6/24/2009 we have had:

• 28,843 Visits
• 231,823 Pages served
• 8.04 Pages per visit per user
• 15:03 Avg. Time on Site
• 41.28% New Visits

We have been viewed in 55 countries all over the world, the most active being:

1. United States
2. Canada
3. Australia
4. United Kingdom
5. Mexico
6. Netherlands
7. Argentina
8. Germany
9. Portugal
10. Brazil

Thanks for keeping us going strong in 2009 and 2010!

The Congress Theater is running an internet special for the Chicago Omar Rodriguez-Lopez Group show.  $30.00 USD for a two-ticket package (plus 3 dollar handling fee for the whole package).

• Ages: All Ages
• Event date: September 18, 2010
• Doors open at: 8 p.m.
• Location: Congress Theater
• Description: Composer, Guitarist and Producer for the Progresive Rock Group THE MARS VOLTA, and the former bassist and guitarist for the Dub-Regaee band DE FACTO and the post-hardcore outfit AT THE DRIVE IN respectively. He has also embarked upon a prolific and genre-defying solo career, frequently described as experimental, avant-garde and/or progressive and has collaborated with numerous artists spanning from John Frusciante to El P.

Click here for special internet ticket rates >>

Having trouble getting to the Pwna lately?   It appears the free message board host – IPBFree.com – is gone for good.  They have deleted their twitter, their facebook, and according to some of these Yahoo answer posts, they kind of up and vanished like a fart in the wind.   According to an anonymous source, they were shut down because they had too many DMCA Violations.  Apparently, they refused to remove illegal content on some of the forums that they hosted and, eventually, were shut down.  What does this mean for the Pwna?   What exactly is the Pwna?

The Pwna started for one simple reason – a place to post download links for the leak of The Bedlam in Goliath.  The album release had been delayed, there was a new drummer, and the hype was building.   The weird thing is, after the leak, most everyone stuck around.  It ended up becoming a full fledged TMV forum after the first demise of the Coma (which spawned yet another offshoot, The Umbi).  The Pwna wasn’t as active as the Coma, but it had it’s own tight knit community of regular posters for 3 years.

Well, it’s toast now.  So you better go fire up your Coma account because she ain’t comin’ back, kids.

EDIT: I spoke too soon – http://www.thepwnatorium.com – go sign up.

Yet more music from The Sentimental Engine Slayer has been identified.  Mataxia noticed (and I confirmed) that the music playing during the title card sequence of TSES is the same intro music that The Mars Volta used to open their electric set on New Years Eve of 2007 in San Francisco – showing once again that Omar apparently has a secret arsenal of clips  that he keeps on file for special occasions.

It just so happens that we have that live show available for download here (you must be logged in to download audio).  This show is extremely notable as the first appearance of Since We’ve Been Wrong, the first live acoustic set (the other being the Yahoo series), the longest show, and the largest setlist ever performed by the band.

Unfortunately for any fans who haven’t seen TSES yet, you’ll have to wait for the DVD to see the title card sequence – which is the work of Sonny Kay.   As of now, there is no release date for the DVD because it is still playing in the film festival circuit.

Oh, get ready!  Have you been waiting all day to come home and check The Marble Shrine to see if anything different has happened?  Ok, well are you at least mildly interested?  Ok, well how about I tell you anway.

I am in the process of throwing WordPress on the front page of The Marble Shrine.  This will allow our authors and contributors to all update the main page with articles, reviews, news – whatever.   I have had it installed in a sub-directory of the site since we first launched over a year ago, but my unfamiliarity with WordPress and need to get other parts of the site going put the front page on hold.

There are a few issues to note.  On the front page – and only on the front page – it will not show you logged into the site (even though your session is still active and you ARE logged in).   If you go to any other page (like show or album pages, for example), it will show you logged in again.  This is due to a session conflict between WordPress and the custom TMS usersystem that we created a year ago.  This should be fixed in the next few days.

I will also be connecting these posts to our facebook (which posts to our twitter) so all TMS admins and authors will be using the site to post content, which will then spread out to the other social networks.

Another cool feature we have in place is a megaupload link checker.  Phil (buddh45ack on the pwna/coma) figured out that Megaupload returns post data when a link is broken, so using PHP we can systematically go through all Megaupload links in the database and build a giant wget string that goes out and checks the URLs all at once.  Once a night, the script will run and flag any broken links in the database which keeps the site nice and clean.