8 posts tagged “tagging”
Tonight I updated the Trizzle Project yet again, this time adding a user cloud page, which shows all of the Trizzle users who have rated at least one song, album or artist in the TrizzBase, and sizes their username according to how many ratings they've done--larger equaling more, of course.
This is the kind of feature that could become problematic if people started mindlessly rating things they didn't know anything about, just to make their username get bigger, but for now I think it's a neat feature. I'd just like some of the usernames that don't belong to me to get a bit bigger.
I also cleaned up the profile page a bit, getting rid of the wonky css table in favor of just doing something really simple. Let's face it, css is not my strong point. Next thing on the agenda is to add a tag cloud, recent reviews and recent ratinggs lists to the profile page.
This morning I finally updated the production site with the new code that I've been working for the past month. As a result, the Trizzle Project now sports some new features, including:
- You can now review, rate and tag artists and albums as well as songs.
- Trizzle search has been enhanced--it's now faster, thanks to the mysql 5 view, and will handle multi-word search strings better–ie, if you search for "zep dog" Trizzle will now return Led Zeppelin's song "Black Dog" whereas before it would not.
- The recent reviews page now shows recent reivews of songs, artists and albums.
- Feeds! You're probably sick of hearing about them by now, but in case you're not, there is now a feed of the most recent reviews to be entered into Trizzle.
Now that the site has been upgraded, I felt it was time to put some more compelling content on it. This evening I finally added more featured songs to Trizzle, after many months of their being absent. Since there was such a long hiatus, I added more than usual, fifteen in all, including new songs by the Arcade Fire, Modest Mouse, the Kings of Leon, Of Montrel, Beirut and more.
Not only that, but every featured song has a high-quality un-DRMed mp3 so you can listen to the whole song (no 30 second samples on Trizzle!) and even add it to your media player of choice (but i f you do and you like the song enough to listen to it more than few times, please do buy a copy of the song from the ITMS or better yet the entire album.)
Click the link below to see what's featured on Trizzle this month:
I spent more time on feeds today. I didn't really intend to spend my whole weekend on this, but once I get really into something like this, it's hard to stop. As you can see, I solved at least two of the issues I noted in my last post: action links and better entry titles.
A few weeks ago on BART I had an epiphany about how song, album and artist metadata should be stored in the Trizale Project database (the "Trizzbase".) Since then I have been working on refactoring all of the Trizzle project code and database calls. Today while watching the Super Bowl I moved all of that code up to the Trizzle test site on fozboot.com.
Although the site doesn't look much different, major changes have occured under the hood. Previously only songs could be tagged, rated and reviewed; now albums and artists can be as well. Plus the new database structure will make it much easier to add other objects in the future like books, restaurants, concerts The revamped recent reviews page shows off the advantages of the new schema as it mixs reviews of songs, albums and artists. The ui design needs some work of course, but now that the engine is in better shape I'd like to start gussying up the interface.
I rolled out a new version of the Trizzle site today, including enhanced navigation (and by ehanced I mean now there is some) and improved view tag page.
Here's Trizzle's obligatory Web 2.0 site tag cloud
And a sample view tag page, this one for the tag hairmetal
Coming up next: navigation and additional features for the PlaylistFormatter feature.
Work has been proceeding on the Trizzle Project-quite a bit of work, actually. Most significantly, Trizzle now has a tag cloud. How does one enter tags into Trizzle, though? Right now you can only get tags in the system by tagging a playlist when you enter it in the PlaylistFormatter. When you do that, the tags applied to the playlist carry over to the songs. Obviously that's quite roundabout, and better solutions will be forthcoming. Eventually Trizzle will offer tools for easy tagging of one's music library, but that will have to wait until I can start developing the extension for Songbird.
It's really great that Comet supports tagging. It's a huge lack in Typepad currently. Right now, though, the implementation is lacking, IMHO.
The most basic problem (and many other people have pointed this out) is that tags right now are only useful for organizing stuff within one asset category in one blog. So, I can use a tag to find stuff in my own blog entries, or my own albums, or books-but not all stuff with a tag. Obviously I would like to be able to do that.
If I'm looking at someone else's site, I can use tags to find stuff, but again, only within one category.
The biggest need, though, is to be able to connect my tagbase with the tagcloud of the Comet community at large. If I tag something "v-mars" I want to be able to see if anyone else has blogged (or commented, or whatever) with that tag.
While I'm on the subject of tagging. I think tagging should apply to everything in Comet: blog entries, media assets, collections, profiles, links (if they start getting treated as assets, which I think was a feature request) everything. Even comments. With comments, I think inheriting the tags of the post the comment is on would be a good start, but you should also be able to add tags (or remove, possibly... interesting issues of ownership there) to your comments.
Once you connect the tagbases of all the users, you can then create a tagcloud like you see on flickr or del.icio.us. But maybe do something more interesting with it. Differentiate it, so Comet doesn't start to feel like "flickr for blogging" (Technorati has that space.) Show the most popular tags, but also show the most unique, the new emerging ones, ones that are becoming passe, stuff like that.
- djchall
