Blog Ukulele Tabs

If you’re frequent visitor, you probably remember that 3 years ago we had a different homepage, including “Top 15 tabs” and “last 15 tabs” boxes, with direct links to the corresponding pages. They disappeared back in july 2010 when UT’s v2 went online, and even if many members were unhappy with this change, we never put the old presentation back online… until today! We weren’t really convinced by this move neither, but we totally forgot about this aspect while focusing on how to improve the website (what we did!).

Good news is: these tops and last tabs blocks are back on the homepage ! To do so we had to modify our homepage again, but we didn’t remove anything this time… hope you like it!

As you may have noticed, we also re-designed and deplaced our nav bar, it’s now close to the main content area, nicer (with cool effects), and of course it’s working like a charm (there were small issues with sublevels on the previous one).

Next step: V3…

Since we opened the forum back in august 2012, we received several email from members saying that our lost pass tool didn’t work. In fact, it worked fine in most cases, but sometimes, for some unknown reason, it failed to reset passwords. Only a few users were affected by this problem, so fixing it was a bit tricky. Hopefully, we think we found what could randomly block this “lost pass” process, and implemented a tracking system to monitor this tool. It should be working now

If you still have troubles logging in after requesting a new pass, just reply to the email sent to you so we can check what went wrong.

Thank you!

We just renewed our partnership with aNueNue for a year ! There will be 12 more great ukes to win on UT for the next 12 months ! Next contest in march !

This time, winners will be randomly selected among the members that submitted at least 10 tabs (during the month).

Enjoy!

Some members reported problems with special characters that resulted in errors blocking access to a few artists pages. It was due to encoding compatibility issues.
Everything’s fine now : http://www.ukulele-tabs.com/uke-songs/Die+%C3%84rzte-uke-tabs.html

To make tab submitting process easier, we reworked a bit the form to publish  tabs. Here is what’s new :

• AutoSuggest (to avoid duplicated entries): if you try add a new artist, you will now get a list of artists already available in database.
• New artist confirmation : if your want to add a new artist with a name too similar to an existing one, you will have to validate your choice (same reason as above)
• Tab Preview : see how your score will look like once online before publishing it on UT! Because some tabs don’t show up as expected once re-formatted on the fly by our script… “Preview result” link available below the texarea where you paste your tab. (refresh the preview as many times as you want, you won’t lose your tab, it’s AJAX powered)
• Chords finder : there’s no need to list the chords played in a song anymore, UT will find them for you !
• Difficulty (for 100% tabs) : new option to define the level of difficulty of a tab. As we can’t automatically define this parameter, you’ll have to set it manually.
• Tab saved if an error occurs : you won’t lose your tab if something goes wrong (required field missing, etc.),

Thanks for submitting tabs !

As we said, we had a lot of ideas during the last 2 years, but didn’t had the time to developp them all… yet. Hopefully, we were really productive this summer (see previous updates), and today we added another filter to browse our unique archive : tabs by difficulty !

Unlinke most guitar tab websites, where the level of difficulty of a tab is selected by its author, we decided to follow a different approach, based on logic. It’s complicated to be objective when selecting a level of difficulty for a tab, because it mainly depends on your skills. A a tab easy for someone can be difficult for someone else, and in the end such a “human” information is not precise enough.

That’s why we created a script that automatically defines the level of difficulty (only works on “100% chords” scores) based on chords found in the tabs. Such a solution is also more flexible, as we can adjust the parameters of our algorythm if we need to.
Difficulty scale matches the 5 existing levels (absolute beginner, beginner, intermediate, confirmed, professional player) but we decided to limit the levels to 3 categories for now (beginner, intermediate, confirmed).

This information is available on tabs (left sidebar), and you can click on the corresponding icon to get a list of the most viewed tabs for this level. Direct access to most viewed tabs by level is also possible from the “tab” menu.

October contest is online, take your chance to win another cool aNueNue ukulele on ukulele-tabs.com !

Prize : aNueNue World Series Eagle Sorpano (value $148 USD)

How to win ? Submit a uke lesson (or more, to increase your chances of winning), winner will be the member with the most average views* per day (based upon the total of all your lessons if you add more than one lesson). Of course, participants will be members who add a new lesson between today (8 oct. 2012) and the end of the contest (8 nov. 2012) !

To make it simple, let’s say you submit 2 lessons :
- First lesson is online for 5 days, and gets 500 hits
- Second lesson is online for 10 days and gets 80 hits

Your score will be : (500/5) + (80/10) = 108.

Good luck !!

*unique views. (100 views from the same visitor = 1 view).

nb. For any question, please visit this thread.

After our tab filters by country and by genre added some months ago, here comes another cool feature : the uke tabs by year!

This new functionnality comes with a another improvement to make your search even easier : a search by album names. To keep it simple, we’ve created a little more than 5000 new pages (one per album), loaded with all the informations you may need : release date, duration, label and cover (powered by Last.fm).

Please note that some albums don’t have a correct release date yet, and that many tabs are linked to greatest hits albums instead of the one they were originally published on. As you can imagine it wil take some time before we clean this part of the database. As for the countries, we may ask for your help, we don’t know yet.

We also added a few widgets to the existing pages, like a Top albums block on our artist pages, etc.

In short, start from today you can browse our archive by year and/or search for an album name. Enjoy another cool and exclusive feature on your favorite uke tab site !