10 posts tagged “trizzle project”

What were you doing one year ago today?
Submitted by CassandraMorgan.

I looked at iCal while I was riding BART this morning, and a year ago apparently I was working on the Trizzle Project quite intensively. Also watching Veronica Mars and other Sunday night TV.

Also posting to Vox a lot:

http://djchall.vox.com/library/post/further-adventures-in-ajax.html
http://djchall.vox.com/library/post/what-not-to-name-your-band.html
http://djchall.vox.com/library/post/led-zeppelin-kicks-ass.html
http://djchall.vox.com/library/post/two-u2-albums.html

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.

I managed to implement this feature in one day--specced it during lunch, and implemented during the ride home on Caltrain, then while waiting for my pizza to be cooked at Applewood Pizza in Menlo Park. It shows that the Trizzle codebase is getting fairly mature that I can implement a feature like this in one day, since I have so much infrastructure code available for doing things like setting up an object cloud.

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:

Trizzle featured songs

The recent reviews feed is now on the Trizzle staging site so you can try it out if you like. You can either go to the recent reviews page:

http://trizzle.fozboot.com/beta/trizzle/musicam/recent-reviews.php

and you should see a feed icon automatically appear. Or you can go the feed directly at:

http://trizzle.fozboot.com/beta/trizzle/feeds/reviews-feed.php

I've only looked at the feed in Safari and NetNewsWire, so I would be interested to see if it works in other clients.

In other news, I figured out the mysql 5 issue, so I should be able to move all of the new code to the production site tomorrow.

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.

I solved the feed time issue this morning, and also fixed the links. So the feed is at least usable enough for an alpha release. I really want to put this on the production site so other people can try it out, but to do that I have to figure out the mysql 5.0 giznank.

The feed is by no means, done by any means. I can already see the need for the following improvements:

• Something that serves as a call to action for the user. Obviously they can click the entry link to see the review, but there should also be something that invites them to review the artist, album or song, as well.
  
• The feed entry should show the tags (linked of courses) that the user applied during that reviewing event.
• There needs, either in the feed entry title or body, more metadata given because while for artists it's pretty clear what's going on, saying  "fozboot reviewed the song Neighorhood #2 (Laika)" may not mean much to anyone who isn't an Arcade Fire fan.
  

As you can see, I imprroved the entry titles, and am now usin the actual date review instead of the hard-coded date from the example script. I'm not sure what timezone my feed thinks it's in–it seems to be about eight hours behind PST, and I don't even know if that's possible. If you go that many time zones east, you cross the international dateline, and it's then tomorrow (the 18th.)

It's not very pretty, and all of the dates say Cinco de Mayo, 2002, but it is a feed. I'm trying out a php class I downloaded tonight called RSS Writer, by Manuel Lemos. So far it's working well, but I do need to figure out what to do with the dates. I guess I should just put the date of the review in there.

I decided to devote this long, President's Day Weekend to Trizzle, but got sidestracted this morning by some interesting Movable Type product design discussion. However, I have now contributed to that and am back on track. I'm going to give regular updates on my progress, if only to give myself some discipline and clutter up people's neighborhoods.

Harold and I had a good dinner last night at the Brickhouse where we talked about MediaNugget and Trizzle Project integration. He had some really good ideas about some of the features I want to add that will serve as a "call to action" (as marketing folks like to say) encouraging users to move from passive consumption to active creation.

To do items for this weekend:

• figure out why I'm getting db selection errors on fozboot.com now that I'm using mysql 5.0.
• go through the Songbird extension tutorial and begin work on the Trizzle Project one.
• type in the handwriten notes I've been accumulating over the past year into the wiki Harold set up for us.
  
• take a look-see around the MediaNugget server and MT install.
  

And a lot of other things but now it's time for lunch.

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.