Now With More Social

I rolled out an experimental feature tonight that that allows you to create RSS feeds based on index matches to your Last.fm top artists or artists similar to your Last.fm top artists.

Nifty.

You can utilize this on the feed maker, but you need to indicate who you are first.

One thing I noticed that gave me something to think about: artist names are indexed as free text, which means it can turn up in results as a non-exact match. This means that if you do a search on "James" that "Etta James" and "James Brown" will turn up in the results.

This is good sometimes, but not when you're searching for specific artists. My solution, which I'll implement tomorrow will be to create "exact" fields for those fields that I wish to be able to perform exact searches on. This duplicates some index data, but it is the only way to get what I want.

Embedded MP3 Player

I'm using the Yahoo Media Player to stream the MP3 that the Tagfriendly crawler discovers.

The ethics of it all are probably dubious, but hey: they put the links out there, and this is the world-wide web. I'm going to consume those bits.

I tried creating an XSPF playlist so that I wouldn't have to anchor-link every MP3, but wasn't getting any love that way. Maybe I'll get it working later on.

Anyway, enjoy. r224

Version 0.1

I've accomplished the meager goals I set for myself in January with regard to Tagfriendly. Here are the main goals:

1. Tracks music blogs.
2. Full-text search.
3. Dynamic RSS feeds (turned on last night).
4. Learn python (still a work-in-progress).
   

I've added lots of features along the way, but those are the basics that I wanted. Here are some things I've been thinking about for the next iteration (roughly one month):

1. More Last.fm (social) integration. Lots of ideas here. For example:
• What if when you scanned the recent MP3s, you could know which ones your friends like?
  
• What if you could create an RSS feed that would generate entries related to your top 10 (20 or 30) songs or bands? (this was suggested by a friend.)
  
• What if you could scrobble love/hate directly from the website?
  
• Lots of cool things here, and they won't be too hard to implement.
• The problem with Last.fm is that using them has a detrimental impact on Tagfriendly site performance (their services are S-L-O-W). I've used a lot of caching (artist information mostly), but that only gets me so far.
  
2. Simple identity management. This will enable features like "show me all the new stuff since the last time I was here." I'll start with just a cookie. That has limitations, so I'll eventually push for simple email registration.
3. Flash based in-browser mp3 player to stream the songs from the blogs. The ethics of this are probably dubious, but I have noticed that many of the bloggers deep link to mp3s stored on other sites. I guess we're all in this together. Hopefully I can find something off the shelf that does this.
4. I need to clean up the back-end scripts that do the crawling and generate the static pages.
5. Better tests.
6. More blogs. I'm up to 30 and crawling+indexing get done in about 3-4 minutes. I'd like to scale up to 100 blogs for this iteration and see how things are handled.
   

That's about it for a month. I average about an hour a day of Tagfriendly development, so this is about the right amount of work for a month. (Honestly, I could probably spend an entire month on testing, but how sexy is that?)

MP3 Images

I fixed an issue last night where *NO* song images were getting generated because of a coding typo. They all errored out and I've been too busy to pay attention to the logs (r200).

Tagfriendly Updates, 14 Feb 2009

Recent updates to the Tagfriendly code:

• r195: include descriptions in RSS entries generated from blog entries.
• r193: google ads.
• r189: lots of UI changes
• r184: dynamic feeds (not public, in beta for a few days).