Pony.fm in 2017

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It's been a pretty good year for Pony.fm development. There's been lots of work done to expand Pony.fm to make it easier for you guys to upload and share your tracks. And lets not forget the Hearth's Warming Contest, you guys submitted some awesome songs there.

2017 is going to be amazing for Pony.fm. I've got a bunch of features planned that I can't wait to show off. I'm also looking for some new team members too! I'm gonna outline some of our goals for this year. Now, in no particular order!

• A complete redesign and rework of the layout. It's almost 4 years old now (can you believe it!) and is in need of modernising. With this redesign, I'll be focusing on: better mobile support, faster page loads and better error detection. Oh and it's also really pretty too
• Better (and hopefully less) errors. Don't you just hate it when you've finished uploading your track and then BAM "Unknown Error". It's pretty annoying, I'll be concentrating more on not only fixing these errors, but increasing error detection and improving explanation so you understand what went wrong. Mostly just to stop the "Halp Pony.fm is broken!" threads and emails
• A focus on promoting artists. While having a recent and popular feed is great, there is room for improvement. I'm planning a system that will recommended tracks based on what you've been listening to. Our goal here is to not just repeat the same popular tracks over and over again, but to also promote tracks that are good and otherwise would have gone undiscovered.
• Making mobile a priority. Let's face it, smartphones and tablets make up a huge portion of the traffic online. This year, I'll be improving our mobile site to make it less laggy and easier to navigate. I'm also investigating building an app for Android and iOS that will allow offline playback for tracks for those long road trips.
• Archived tracks. As you're probably aware, we have a bunch of tracks on the site (over 21,000!), some of these are from the MLP Music Archive which we added to the site a while ago. We've got another archive that will be being merged soon

I've also got some smaller things planned that I'll think you'll appreciate

• Replying to comments.This should land at roughly the same time as the new redesign. We hear your feedback, don't worry, this will be added!
• Push notifications. Currently working away on this, should drop 'soon'. Basically it will let you get notifications when your browser is closed or your phone is locked. Will only work on the newest versions of Chrome, Chrome for Android, Firefox and Opera.

In addition to this, I want to make a few announcements regarding the Pony.fm team. We've had a bit of a change of leadership. You you might have seen him posting on the Pony.fm threads and helping out with the Hearth's Warming Contest. I'm pleased to announce that Anima Fever has been promoted to Pony.fm second in command! He'll be helping me out with a lot of the community outreach we are planning this year. Hopefully you'll get a chance to speak with him this year. He's got a real passion for archiving the fandom and helping smaller artists out. He's got some awesome ideas on how to improve Pony.fm and our standing within the community.
 
We're looking for programmers!
 
Speaking of the Pony.fm team, we're looking for some new programmers to join the team on a voluntary basis. If you're a programmer with experience with PHP or Javascript, we really want you to join our team. Pony.fm is getting bigger everyday and we need more talented programmers to help us add new features, fix bugs and expand to new platforms. Pony.fm is an open source project however, by joining our team, you're joining the core contributors, can participate in internal discussions and propose and implement big changes to site. If you think you're up for it, send me a PM! If you're not accepted and still want to help out, the core of Pony.fm is fully open source on GitHub and we are accepting pull requests and new issues.